Another dry Saturday meant we could get on with clearing more of our site ready for building – after all, the more we can do, the less we need to pay someone else to do. We’ve had three huge dumpy bags of woodchip stacked next to the shippon for a few months now, but they’re exactly where our extension is going to be and so need to be moved. A target spring start date is spurring us on to get everything ready asap and so we’re trying not to waste decent days with indoor jobs, especially when we have limited daylight hours.
We’d already moved half of the woodchip a couple of weeks ago, putting it under the lilac tree in the back garden where the grass struggles to grow. This second patch we’d identified a while ago – someone had previously put gravel beneath the apple trees in the front garden (presumably for the same reason), but it means that the windfall apples get damaged by the small stones and ruin. We also wanted to top up the gravel paths in the kitchen garden as it’s getting low and the weeds are insane during the summer. It took us a few hours and what seemed like countless wheelbarrow trips to clear all the gravel out – it was hard to know when to stop as there was so much soil amongst the bottom layer of stones. We moved as much as we could, and then realised we’d forgotten to get weed membrane and so had to make do with the strip we had left – hopefully it won’t be too much of a problem. Moving the woodchip was a much quicker job, despite it being frozen solid in the bags and needing to be broken apart with a pickaxe! The area already looks much better and neater though. We also rebuilt the stone edge of the area, some of which had disappeared over time.
We then shifted the remnants of the old compost area also next to the shippon – large sheets of metal on a wooden frame that we think used to be the shippon barn door, and are now bent and rusted beyond use. That area is now completely clear for the first time since we moved in, and looks totally different with the jasmine also gone from the wall. John’s been able to mark out where the extension will go, mainly to check where our window will be in relation to the yellow cable stabilising the telephone pole. Typically it’ll cut straight across our view, so we’re going to explore options with BT – hopefully it won’t cost too much to move it.
That just leaves two jobs to finish before we’re ready to start – emptying the barn of the final boxes we’ve been storing in there, and then moving the compost bins to the top of the orchard. The latter is one job we’re definitely not looking forward to, seeing as though the bins are full of partly-decomposing garden waste!
Before we lost daylight, we managed to get the winter tree covers on the peach and nectarine trees in the kitchen garden. The plastic (repurposed from a bed delivery a couple of years ago) is starting to get brittle and kept tearing, so it looks like we’ll need to replace it next year. We didn’t get the covers in place early enough last year and one of our trees appeared to have a touch of peach leaf curl (which is spread by rain), so we’re keeping our fingers crossed it’s gone this year.
The rest of the weekend seems to have been spent making soup! We still have a lot of vegetables in the ground but the recent frost didn’t do them much good, so we’re batch-cooking it in soup instead and freezing it to last us through the rest of winter. It takes so long to clean and chop everything but it’s satisfying knowing we grew most of the ingredients ourselves.
Ley Farm Cottages 