Composting

This weekend, between the rain, we started moving into our brand new compost bin Christmas present. We need to move our existing compost bins from our to-be back garden up to the top of the orchard, but they’re already completely full, so we asked for a new one so we had an extra one to help with the moving process. 

Needless to say, it’s not the nicest job moving half-decomposing fruit and rotting plants from one end of the garden to the other, but it’s certainly pretty satisfying when you get past the top section and see the mostly-composted part at the bottom. We’d hoped to have moved at least two of the bins this weekend, but the recent wet weather and short sharp cloudbursts has left the grass very soggy and we’d have done too much damage traipsing up through the orchard with heavy wheelbarrows. We managed to do half a bin each day before we gave up – at least we’ve made a start though. 

Instead, we started using up our remaining celery and celeriac from the garden. The recent frosts and wet weather haven’t done any favours to them, and everything is looking a bit sorry for itself. So once the rain came, we spent the afternoon gathering it up and chopping it, cooking it into soup to freeze. We’re also pretty late in leaving the beds to rest before starting this year’s planting, so the quicker we can get all this done, the better. 

At the end of the week we also had a catch-up with our architect and her new employee who’ll be working on our project. It was helpful to run through some of the plans and check we’re all aligned on certain aspects (including some design points that had changed based on what physically can be built). We’ve arranged a site visit next Friday with both of them to go through everything so we’re completely clear on what we’re getting. Hopefully our latest target start date of 6^th Feb is still feasible, but we need to wait for our builder’s programme and costings to check this – hopefully also coming on Friday. The uncertainty is definitely getting harder to manage…