We’ve made the most of the good weather this week to try and catch up with some outdoor jobs. In the orchard, we weeded the vegetable beds along the edge and started harvesting the potatoes and onions. It’s almost embarrassing how many weeds have grown – and slightly annoying that the weeds are stronger and bigger than all the vegetables we planted!! We applied the second nematodes spray on Saturday evening which John helped with this week – it’s never the best job but the fact we can see the difference in the quality of fruit we pick certainly helps.
The jasmine on the shed has really taken off though – when we moved in it had recently been planted and we struggled to stretch across the wall in any shape. In the past four years though it seems to have gone crazy! It’s completely covered the window and one of the sparrow hotels we installed in 2022, so it needed cutting back. It took a lot longer than we expected and we still need to get up onto the roof and clear that, but we’ve made a start at least.
We also started clearing the kitchen garden – in most cases more failed attempts at growing seedlings we never planted out, or hadn’t cut back sufficiently, or didn’t pick before the birds or mice got stuck in. We managed to rescue some spring onions – otherwise Saturday morning was spent cutting back gooseberry overgrowth and pulling out more weeds. It’s a bit depressing throwing out plants that never grew but we’ve just not had time to look after them properly this year. There’s always next year though!
We trimmed back the pyracantha bush and then moved along the brick path from the farmhouse to the orchard to tidy this up ahead of our third set of guests arriving. John spent a good few hours tidying up beneath the apple trees in the farmhouse front garden and then cleaning the outside of the windows so our guests could enjoy the views across the valley. They arrived on Friday – these were the first people to book the Farmhouse so we were really excited for them to arrive and get settled in. Hopefully everything is up to scratch for them and they enjoy their stay here!
We had grand plans to get lots more done this weekend – having had coat hooks and shelves delivered this week – but as always we ran out of time. The shutters for our bedroom window arrived on Thursday after waiting three months, so installing these was a priority job for us, especially with the dark mornings and nights drawing in. With cardboard only covering the bottom of the window, it’s been getting harder to maintain privacy as and when we’ve had guests staying. It also looks so much better having shutters across the window instead of having a huge sheet of cardboard there! We still need to get something up on the walls but it makes the room feel a little more complete.
One of the other priority jobs we picked up this week was to write to the council about how we plan to screen the air source heat pumps at the front of the property. We haven’t been able to do what was proposed initially because the yard concrete covered the area we’d originally planned to plant with bushes (this is after they rejected our proposal to install planters with trellis and jasmine as this is ‘too suburban’ for their liking). John’s had to create drawings to show the latest thinking – it does feel a little over the top to us to recreate a farm atmosphere given farms have all sorts of equipment in their yards, but there’s not much we can do really…
A crazy job list means it’s been hard keeping on top of the orchard fruit, even though we’ve had no plums this year. When we lived in the farmhouse it was easier to manage – we had a large fridge and a cool back room we used as a larder. Now we’ve moved into the smaller cow shed we’ve got less space so we’ve invested in a large fridge for our fruit and veg before we turn it into produce to sell. We’re already storing apples and crabapples – it’s great that this will give us a little longer to keep the fruit instead of wasting it. Although adding another item into the garage just highlights how much we need to tidy it up!!
John did see one of our shier garden residents this week – we’ve always wanted to make our garden accessible for wildlife so are very excited that our hedgehog is still living here (we’ve only spotted it a couple of times over the last year). I really want to turn some of our pallets into hedgehog boxes as a winter project – once we’ve cleared the garage and reclaimed our workbench that is!
Ley Farm Cottages 