Uncovering snowdrops

Another weekend, another day of clearing the weeds from the Farmhouse flower beds. This time we cleared the weeds from the snowdrop bank and under the twisted hazel by the conservatory. We’ve planted the snowdrop bank with over 300 snowdrops over the last few years but only a few seem to have taken. Although we did find a few snowdrops starting to poke their way through the weeds – it would be lovely to see the bed come to life now they have more space. We did find a few moth larvae buried beneath the soil too, which we put back, and we also moved some of the primroses from last week’s bed across to give the ground more cover. The soil isn’t great (we think there’s a wall buried underneath all the plants) so they may have a better chance of growing than other plants.

We took an hour out to take part in the RSPB Birdwatch – the first one at our new house. While we didn’t get all of our usual visitors, we managed to see a very wide range of species, including two long-tailed tits who appeared towards the end of the hour. The feeders are a bit further away than the farmhouse so we ended up using a binocular to count them all, and the camera zoom doesn’t quite get as good photos as we used to. We love to see the birds enjoying the food we put out though – especially as we never saw birds at home before we moved.

With the storm coming through on Sunday we’d planned for some indoor jobs – including cooking the remaining pumpkins that we grew last year, and putting the first shelf up in our service cupboard. We don’t have much storage space in our house so we’re trying to make the most of every space we have – this shelf has gone above the fuse board to house the iron and hoover attachments, and will soon have a rail added so we can hang washing to dry. Next thing – a shoe rack!

We ended up spending about an hour trying to keep the drains clear after a sudden deluge of rain and hail caused havoc. We have two drain covers that typically block – the one in our yard tends to block with vegetation from the bank between our house and our neighbour’s, and anything that comes down from the farm above. Our builders created an overflow that goes down through our gate to take the water away from the house – this is the one that also carries away our driveway though so we’re looking at concreting it and adding another channel to take the water further away. The drain itself takes the water underneath our air source heat pumps and then down a channel running along the front of our house to get to the second drain, all of which technically belongs to the Highways. It blocks really easily with stones and debris from the channel and ends up pouring water down the road. We maintain both as the roads are so easily damaged by water – today though we couldn’t clear the debris quickly enough and we had water pouring down our courtyard as well as out through the drive. Luckily we have another drain defence in the form of an aco drain that runs along the front of the Shippon to take any excess water and runoff from the yard. Plus as part of the building work our builders shaped the courtyard to slope down from the Shippon to the aco drain, so even if that gets blocked (which it did in parts today) it would take a lot to reach the house.

We lost more of our driveway and found out too late that the long rubber gloves we were using to clear the water runoff from the farmyard had holes in (that was nice experience!!) but we were much luckier than many around here. Chard (our closest town) has real flooding issues as it’s located just outside the Blackdown Hills and gets a lot of hill water runoff, so it could have been a lot worse. We’ve ordered new gloves and got to see a beautiful rainbow as the storm cleared – we do get the most amazing rainbows stretching across the valley.

It was a week of other odd jobs too. With our neighbouring farmer’s permission, John cut back the tree outside our front window so we get a better view across the valley. It turns out that it’s actually a group of trees that seeded and grew together, which makes it hard to get a decent shape. Still he’s done a pretty good job. He also did a full check of the inventory in the Farmhouse to ensure we have everything there that our guests might need. We try to check the inventory every quarter to make sure nothing’s gone missing or been broken that we haven’t replaced – we’ve been on holiday to too many places that were clearly great to start with but haven’t been maintained and we’re very keen to make sure that doesn’t happen here!