Author: Adrian Doyle

Last year, extended our veggie patch to give us plenty of room to grow our favourite vegetables.  This year, we had the greenhouse ready and also, over the winter I had laid power to it and installed a heater.  This was more a frost guard than anything, but it kept the greenhouse a bit warmer than the outside.

Outside, the veggie patch was fully mulched and ready.  It looks really god covered in mulch, no weeds (for now).

We were all set and in March we started planting.  Everything that had indoor/March on the label was planted and put in the greenhouse.  This worked, sort of.  The tomatoes decided it was still too cold and never showed.  It was the same for the basil.  In fact, only really the carrots and brussel sprouts got going.

Outdoors, we planted onion sets.  Then the heavy rains came and flooded that area covering all the onion sets in water.  Disaster, though in the end, about half grew.

Not to worry, we did a second planting and bit by bit, built up some small vegetable plants.  The spring was relatively mild and so we started to plant out some of the hardier crops.

Now, we fed the birds all winter so how did they repay us?  By digging up the mulch to look for worms and in so doing, scattering said vegetables everywhere!  Most annoying.  Luckily, I had a length of blue pipe tucked away behind a shed and we bought some netting.  We put back all the uprooted plants and installed said netting.  This helped, a bit.  It included butterfly proof netting for the brassicas and turnips (last year we had to pick off multitudes of caterpillars on a daily basis).

By now, I’d planted a third set of onions as all the ones grown from seed had simply vanished.  Thankfully, the look good and strong.

But still, our veggies were still under attack.  We laid out some organic slug pellets.  No change.  In fact we have lost almost all the brassicas, three quarters of the turnips, half the spinach, all the direct seeded carrots and most of the beetroot.  Emergency second and third seedlings are planted and awaiting their turn.  The plan is to pot them up and make sure they are strong before planting them out.

Next year, we’ll do what we should have done this year.  We’ll put hens in the veggie patch and give them access to unplanted beds.  That should take care of the slug population we suspect of causing the damage.  At least, we hope so.

I think I have mentioned before that we have quite a lot of stone dykes here and in areas, they are bit run down.  With all the other jobs (firewood, sheep handling area, veggies etc), there hasn’t been much time to do any repairs.  However, over the winter I was actually paid to fix someone’s wall.  It was a neighbour of one of Nicole’s clients and a few metres of wall in their garden had collapsed in a storm.  We had a similar collapse here, as it happens.

Anyway, while it’s not really part of my plans to become a professional stone dyker, I said OK and took on the job.  It was a bit tricky as the front of the wall was an ornamental flower bed, so I couldn’t stomp about in my size 10 boots.  But the wall was built on a slope and most of the stones were on the other side so I worked mainly from there.

It wasn’t too bad a job as most of the stones were small, so you can work quite quickly.  It was all done in a couple of mornings and I was quite pleased with the result.  The client was too – always a good thing.

Having done that, there was the collapsed wall bordering our hen run to look at.  Again, this was built on a slope and it looked like the wall had been gradually tipping over over the years.  Also, all the stones were piled all over the wall and took a few hours to move out of the way.  It was a right mess.

These stones were a bit bigger, so it took a couple of days to rebuild this section.  It just takes a bit longer to get the bigger stones all to fit together within the lines of the wall.  And believe me, you only want to lift them once, so you spend a lot of time figuring out what will go where.  Nevertheless, I got there in the end and am quite pleased with the result.  I did have a few stones left over which was a bit of a worry.  That said, the same thing happened on the course and the instructors just shrugged that off saying that it happens.

My current project is a slightly bigger challenge.  There is a gap in the wall at the top of our largest field.  It’s the border between our patch and forestry land.  In the past, there has been a livestock handling area the other side and we suspect a previous owner of our patch knocked through the wall so they could “annex” this.  Not sure why, it’s full of bracken (poisonous to livestock), hard to get to and far from any power source.  That said, it looks like it hasn’t been used for years, decades even, as it’s all a bit run down.

Anyway, there is a small stock fence across this gap and it is about to fall down.  So we decided it would be better to restore the wall.  It will look better and be safer for the sheep.  It should also slow the spread of bracken into our field.

The main problem is that the original stones have largely vanished.  There were a few in our field and so I retrieved those.  We also have a pile accumulated from the gate opening we put into another wall a while back.  I have been bringing those up in a trailer.  Unfortunately, the terrain is too dodgy for the tractor – the front loader would have been very helpful for moving and lifting the larger ones.  So I have to use the quad bike and muscle power.  All the shifting is done by hand, lifting them into the trailer one end and then out again the other end.

The remaining stones I am sourcing from the surrounding area.  There are quite a few lying around on the ground.  The main problem is that they are, on average, a good 50m away.  So it’s a lot of carrying which takes up a lot of time and effort.  They are also all quite big (it’s hard to tell from the picture).  The larger ones get rolled.  Luckily, I am rolling them downhill.

The other problem is the midges – it’s perfect terrain for them.  As a rule, they don’t bother me too much (got used to them as a kid), but when you are working in one area, they get into your ears and eyes and are really annoying.  So it was midge nets on.  Luckily, the wind generally picks up during the day and they hate the wind.

All in all it took 5 days.  Most of the time was spent locating and carrying stones.  My back is complaining a bit now.  Day 4 had its dramas.  I had my first wasp sting since I was a kid.  I was picking up a stone and something flew straight at my face and stung me.  I’d only just taken my midgie net off!  It came back for further attempts but I kept knocking it away – the repeat attacks suggest wasp (didn’t actually see it).  Having dealt with that, I then contrived to slip while carrying a large rock.  As I flew sideways like a falling tree, the rock landed on my knee, painful but thankfully no real damage done.  At that point I took a break and put some ice on it and had a cup of tea.

Anyway, on the fifth day the weather was a bit kinder. Dry, windy enough to blow the midgies away and sunny.  The gap is filled and the sheep are much safer.  And I’m off to run a bath.

Our heating runs mainly on wood.  We do have an oil boiler as backup, but we prefer to use the wood burner which also acts as a central heating boiler.  However, it has taken me a couple of years to work out how much wood we need and more importantly, when to have it cut by.  Too late and it hasn’t dried out properly.  Burning wet wood is not a good idea!  So, basically, we need next winter’s wood in the sheds by the end of May!

With that in mind, I have been out gathering wood for what seems like months now.  The winter storms had taken down a few trees which was one source.  One of Nicole’s gardening client kindly offered us the remnants of a fallen ash tree.  It was by the side of the road on a blind corner which made recovery a wee bit tricky, but we handled that by being out at dawn on a Sunday morning when few people were about.

Also, a neighbour wanted his woodland coppiced, so myself and our neighbours have been sorting that out (we share the wood as payment).  That was quite a lot of work as it’s one thing bringing a tree down and another extracting the wood.  We more or less carried the wood out by hand.

I also coppiced our willow woodland.  Like Hazel, willow really benefits from coppicing and we are expecting an explosion of new growth now.  Many trees had fallen and so I took out all the fallen trees and dodgy branches.  Those too were all carried out by hand.

The final source of firewood is a lorry load of tree trunks (larch) that we and two neighbours bought together a while back.  We have a sort of community scheme for sawing that up which kind of works, and sometimes kind of doesn’t.

Anyway, the net result of all this activity is a huge pile of tree trunks awaiting processing plus what seemed like a huge pile of logs waiting to be chopped to size and stored for firewood.  Thankfully, we (neighbours) also share a log splitter and the above picture is the pile after most had been split and some stored.  I still use an axe from time to time, especially with the hardwood – I quite like chopping wood the old fashioned way.  But, it’s a lot of wood to chop!  It is one of those things, a huge pile of logs on the ground seems to melt into a tiny space in the shed, yet when burnt they disappear so quickly.

Nevertheless, I think we now have enough wood stored for next winter.  So, now on with sourcing the following winter’s wood – it’s never ending….

 

It has been a much better winter, so far, than last year.Our neighbour did remind me that we had not had the beast from the east by this time last year, but we had had plenty of snow.  This year, in contrast, it has almost been spring like on occasions.

For us, this means we can get on with various outdoor tasks.  Nicole has been busy making felted rugs (read more here), as well as getting the garden ready for the spring.  Not to mention mucking out the sheep shelter.

My tasks tend to be more on the structural side.  One of the things we get through a lot of here is wood.  Our heating runs on it.  Our predecessors bought lorry loads of wood along with our two neighbours and cut it up together, something we have carried on with since we moved here.  But with all this land, I thought we should grow our own.  We have plenty willow, but it’s quite hard to access.  I will be trimming some of that next week.  But, in the meantime, I have started a 5 year plan to plant hazel.  50 trees a year.  The first 50 went in last week (you can see them in the top picture).  In 5 or 6 years, they should be ready to harvest.

Hazel actually benefits from being cut back, it’s a classic “copse” tree.  It grows back really quickly.  So, with 50 a year, we should be able to harvest enough wood for the winter while , at the same time, remaining carbon neutral.

Continuing with the wood theme, in the winter storms, a willow tree did blow down near the front of the house.  We were lucky in that it do no damage to anything.

I finally got round to chopping it up in January.  A useful supply of logs for next winter.  Many thanks to Nicole’s uncle Kurt (visiting from Switzerland) who helped me stack them.

I am also continuing my background task of repairing stone dykes.  We have a lot of stone dykes here and a few need attention.  This is particularly true of those near the road.  My goal is to repair them so far as I can.  Sadly, on one corner, the previous owners allowed the walls to be trashed by a tree felling company and I can’t get at the stones as they are buried under branches.

Nevertheless, I shall plug away.  Those same storms cause a part of the stone dyke bordering our hen run to collapse.  I hadn’t heard of storms taking down walls before, but it also happened to a friend of one of Nicole’s gardening clients.  I know this because she commissioned me to repair it, my first real stone dyke job for which I got paid.

Anyway, our chicken run wall was tilting a bit so took a bit of careful rebuilding. I am quite pleased with the result.  This is especially so because the stones are quite large and it can be hard to get them to align properly.  On the course, it was mostly small stones – dead easy.

I reckon I spend 4 times as long pondering which stone to use next as I do actually putting them in place.

Anyway, it’s quite satisfying work, especially on a nice, spring like winter day.

 

Compared to last year, this winter has been a lot easier. And much of that is down to the weather. This time last year we were up to our knees in snow. And when it wasn’t freezing or snowing, we were up to our knees in mud.

This winter has been almost balmy by comparison. Some days even felt like spring. Still a bit of mud, can’t really avoid it in winter, but not as bad as we’ve known. But it is so much easier walking around on frozen rather then muddy ground.

Still, this week the snow finally arrived. Not much, but enough to make a fine coating everywhere. Not quite winter wonderland, but quite scenic nonetheless. We get some quite spectacular mornings.

It reminds me of the old rhyme

red sky at night, shepherd’s delight;
red sky in morning, shepherd’s warning

However, sunrises such as the one in the photo don’t seem to be the harbinger of bad weather here, thankfully.

The dogs love the cold weather, except when they’re having their photo taken. But walking round, they are playful and have a great time rolling in the snow.

The sheep, well I think they just put up with it. That said, they are still out and about foraging even when the snow is pouring out of the sky.

And, this morning apparently, they got into quite a playful mood when Nicole was over photographing them. She took the picture below which is pretty good I must say.