With most of our focus recently on getting the site ready for building, we’ve seriously neglected the rest of the garden. It’s been looking progressively scruffier, with dead leaves everywhere, plants dying back, grass still growing, and vegetables waiting to be picked and stored. As we don’t have a confirmed build date or schedule yet (so we know the order in which the barns need to be ready), we decided to take a weekend off clearing the shippon undergrowth to try and tidy everything else up.
And we’ve actually made pretty good progress. Our job list was aspirational – the top 20 tasks we could think of that needed doing – and we’ve got through most of it, plus a couple of extra tasks along the way. We’ve managed to clear all the vegetable plants that are over, and cut back the raspberry canes. John mowed the orchard and wood to try and keep the grass under control (helpfully picking up most of the leaves too which saved us a job). We cleared most of our pumpkin patch (which feels early given it’s not quite Halloween!), leaving the cosmos and tithonia as they’re still going strong. We also cleared most of the bed next to the blackberry arch as we need to plant our autumn onions next week. We definitely should have planned ahead when planting the garden as many of the beds still have winter vegetables in, so it doesn’t give us many options when rotating the crops each year.
We lifted our first ever dahlia tubers too! It sounds daft but that’s one of those first-time jobs we dreaded a bit because we’ve never done it before – although it was much easier than it sounds. The tubers are now drying out in the greenhouse – hopefully we’ve done it properly so they grow again next year. Quite a few of our flowers are still in bloom because of the warmer weather, so we’ve left them for a bit longer as it seems a shame to pull them up. Plus it staggers the work and the rubbish a bit more – our compost bins are literally overflowing now.
The big win this weekend was putting grease on all our fruit trees. We did it when we first moved in but never got round to it last year, leaving the trees open to whatever insects decided to wander up there. It’s a pretty sticky job but worth doing if it reduces the risk of cutting open fruit and finding earwigs in it! You’re supposed to do it twice a year so we’re going to try it again in March and see if that makes a difference to the quality of the fruit.
Our main build activity this week was to start to engage heat pump installers for final quotes. It’s scary just how much costs have gone up even since we first started looking two years ago – so next week we’ll be spending a lot of time working out our budget and seeing what we can afford to do now and what we’ll need to leave till later. Our aim is to get our new house and the farmhouse completed so we can move and start to rent it out – as well as the disruptive site works (no-one wants to spend a holiday on a building site). Fingers crossed we can get that far!
Ley Farm Cottages 