Category Archives: countryside
Dung swap (Oct 17)
Half our apples are currently being turned into cider (see Apples apples everywhere… – Aug 31). The rest were too high for picking so we collect them by the bucket-load once they’ve fallen.
In the meantime Ed’s been coveting a large heap of horse dung in a neighbouring field. Strange things happen when you have a garden…
I tracked down the owner and she’s very happy to do an exchange. Apples go in – free fertiliser comes out. Done.
The last cut (Oct 16)
Autumn is setting in and these last dry days have given us one final chance to get all the grass mowed and the lawns in order for winter.
Gracie and I collect 3 buckets of apples from the orchard and then mow the walled garden on the small wheel tractor. Yes I can now drive a tractor (Ed fixed up the mower attachment and it works brilliantly). I can also drive a tractor with Gracie sitting on my knee, singing and eating apples and grapes (there’s a tiny vine in the old green house that’s managed to produce a few small sweet clusters without any assistance). Ed takes care of the paddock and drives.
Then the lawns. Gracie and I rake leaves while Ed gets back to the never-ending scarifying (see Making Hay – Jun 9). Various attempts at scarifying have produced so much thatch that it’s an overwhelming amount of work and our many compost pens are overflowing so we’ve downsized our plan with Ed’s recent efforts focussing on the main lawn outside the house.
He’s taken to calling it the croquet lawn which is an admirable aspiration – flat, hard, no moss and well drained. The ‘croquet lawn’ has now been scarified 3 times and what’s left behind is patchy grass but thankfully no moss. After a spread of sand (to help with drainage) and some new seed the make-over of the croquet lawn is complete – but it looks a bit naked. Ed says if the grass doesn’t grow then he’ll have to cover it all in top soil and reseed again.
And as moss is catching – come the spring, we’ll need to re-start the whole cycle and get to work on the rest of the grass. Having a good looking lawn it seems requires some serious effort….
The view from my desk at dawn this morning…(Oct 16)
Winter’s on its way (Sep 30)
We’ve had the fire on most days now for the last couple of weeks and although there’s enough wood on the land to chop for logs, it’s been one job too many – so yesterday we gave in and ordered a truck load (which will last us a couple of months). They were deposited in a huge pile at the back door – Ed ferried and I stacked. It’s just taken us 2 hours. How far away life in London now seems…
Preparing for winter update (Sep 26)
The radiators arrived today. 9 out of 11 survived the pressure testing. We went for gun metal grey and they look great.
The roof insulation is all in. We have 7 different roof spaces but as half of them had no access new holes had to be created to get the insulation in and then filled back up. We now have a thick blanket of wool above our heads which has surely got to make a difference…
However the plans for the biomass installation (See Preparing for next winter – Apr 7) have been seriously delayed. The council planners said to estimate 3 months so I doubled it and crossed my fingers that it would be in before Christmas. It’s tight. The man from the council is coming next week and it’s a 5 week lead on the boiler….
Fruits of our labour…(Sep 14)
Apples apples everywhere…(Aug 31)
The old orchard in the walled garden (half a dozens trees) has produced hundreds of apples despite the fact that none of the trees have been pruned for years. They are almost ripe and we’ve been wondering what we’re going to do with them all…
I mentioned this to one of the mum’s at the local toddler group and it turns out her husband and his mate make their own cider. Happy days. They live in the village and have a hand-made apple press in their garden shed.
They’ve apparently been on the look out for a good source of local apples for years – so they’ve come up today to check out their potential new supply. They’ve brought a sugar measuring device with them and seem pretty happy with the results. 2 of the trees are dessert apples for eating and the rest are for cooking, as we suspected. Both can be used to make their cider. They’ll come back to pick them next week while we’re away.
250 kilos will make 250 bottles and they think that’s roughly what they’ll collect. So we can expect a crate or 2 in return next year.
Harvest time (Aug 25)
The view from Gracie’s bathroom window this evening (see The field across the way… Apr 9)
Club foot! (Aug 24)
We have a veggie patch disaster – club root – or club foot as I’ve been mistakenly (and embarrassingly) describing it to the neighbours…has attacked nearly ALL our brassicas.
So I’m afraid half our winter veg supply; the sprouts, cauliflower and cabbages (with all their lovingly placed collars) are not going to make it. And it was all going so well…
It’s a fungal infection that comes from something in the soil. It stunts growth in the roots and therefore the plants. There’s really not much we can do about it – apart from trying to find strains of club foot resistant brassicas in future. Ed not surprisingly is forlorn after all his hard work, especially today – as he decided to pull them all up.
However, even though we’re rookies, the rest of the patch looks really healthy and with our intermittent removal of slugs (fond of lettuce) and caterpillar eggs (prefer curly kale) it looks like the rest of our veg should be fine.
A Castle in the Sky 