Starting another ‘major 2025 job’

We started another one of our ‘major 2025 jobs’ this weekend, although annoyingly a drizzly Saturday meant we had to wait until Sunday and so didn’t make the progress we were hoping to make. After the storms this winter blew down our trial pea & bean frames at the top of the orchard, we decided to take the plunge and build a proper raised bed for them. Last year we’d put up the frames on a bank of soil as an experiment to see if the plants grew well enough for it to be a more permanent location (they’re under a pine tree and we were concerned about the amount of light and nutrients available). The plants that weren’t eaten by wildlife seemed to do fairly well, so we added it to our list of jobs to do properly this year, including coming up with some sort of animal proofing (which we’re not quite decided on but have some ideas at least).

So this Sunday we set about digging out the bank so we could create a raised bed and connect it to the squash and potato bed. It didn’t take as long as we were expecting it to – although the stony soil and tree roots made it that bit more challenging. The site of the bed is also on a slight slope, which makes it harder to build without lots of gaps between the sleepers (the ‘rustic look’!). We’d initially planned to make it a standalone vegetable bed but as it’s right next to the squash bed we changed our design to attach the new bed directly onto the end of the existing one and save a bit of space and wood (we don’t need the end that would have butted up against the existing one). We cut the sleepers to the right lengths and laid the base row before it started to get too dark. We’d hoped to get the whole bed built this weekend so it’s a bit frustrating to have got this far and not finished, but at least we’ve made a bit of progress and can focus on building the bed and filling it next week.

Our second wood delivery arrived on Saturday – this is the first time we’ve had two wood deliveries in one season as we don’t have the aga to keep our new house warm! Our current guests – who arrived on Friday night – very kindly helped us move the wood inside before it got too wet – it was such a lovely gesture and we very much appreciated their help!

We then spent the rest of the day planting out a few more vegetable seeds to go into the propagator  and feeding the fruit trees around the site with the first feed of the season – we didn’t get a chance to do this last year at all and we had a pretty terrible harvest so this was at the top of our 2025 priority list. It’s actually quite a lot of effort looking after the trees – this time we had to feed each one with potash, calcium nitrate and superphosphate, and different types of fruit tree require different amounts of each. It’s a difficult job working out how a measurement in g/m2 correlates to how many spoonfuls of fertiliser to put into a watering can, let alone changing the amount for an apple tree vs a plum tree etc – while we didn’t get it entirely accurate hopefully we’ve managed to do enough to stave off another season of problems like bitter pit (lack of calcium in apples) or potassium deficiency. It took two of us a good few hours to finish this and we managed to empty the entire water butt!

We also finished off a few jobs this week. The company who made our aluminium doors and windows came back to fit door restrictors on the games room doors to stop them blowing open and crashing against the wall in windy weather, which means we can get rid of the random bit of wood that was on the stairs as a door stop/trip hazard! And we extended the picket fence at the front of the farmhouse garden – previously we only had the fence along the stretch of wall where the lawn met the edge of the wall. Since we dug the new flower bed the length of the wall last week, it looked a bit odd to have the fence finish partway along.

And we added two more walking routes into our Farmhouse information folder and on our website – shorter routes that go up the hills either side of us and give great views across the valley. We have a few more plans to build out the website with more information for visitors when we have time – that just seems in short supply at present!