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…
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….
All the time we were living in London we’d see stuff in auctions, junk shops and antique markets that we would fantasise about buying if we had a big enough house. Now we’re here we have to stop ourselves from going too many auctions and markets until we’re ready…
Ideally we’d love to furnish the whole house second hand and nearly every room needs an overhaul; re-decorating and furnishing. Coming from a 2 bed flat means we have very little furniture – and most of what we do have doesn’t really work. In the long term the bathrooms and kitchen will also need replacing.
But we’ve got to wait. Our budget means we’ll have to do 1 room at a time and until we have a clearer idea of what exactly we’re going to do – it’s dangerous to start buying too many things – especially big bits of furniture.
So for now we’re sticking to generic or small at the cheaper end of the market. Here are some of our bargain vintage finds to date…
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.
The view from Gracie’s bathroom window this evening (see The field across the way… Apr 9)
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.
There are large hooks on the hall walls that run from the first floor to the top of the house and we can’t work out what they’re for. We’ve considered family portraits (too low), lanterns (too many – and no hooks on the ground floor), tapestries (wrong place) and the previous owners can’t tell us either. They’ve been put in quite roughly so we don’t think they were part of the original Georgian interior. We’ve been told that the army used the house in The Second World War so maybe they were put there to string up light bulbs powered by a generator…
It’s a puzzle and everyone who comes to stay asks about them.
We’ve got 4 gooseberry bushes and they are weighed down with fruit. Our other fruit bushes (blackcurrant and redcurrant) were stripped by the birds. They had a feast one evening – and when Ed went in the next day, so many had gone he initially thought that someone had crept into the walled garden overnight and stolen them all…
Covering the fruit bushes with netting WAS on our list to avoid this happening but like many things on the list there are never enough hours. Clearly though the birds are not keen on gooseberries so we’ve had quite a harvest. Today we collected more for a crumble and the rest to freeze for gooseberry fool.
The veggie patch is now looking much more professional. The new wooden posts arrived a few days ago and Ed put them in with the help of Mr C and his digger. Mr C is also an expert on leeks – and apparently ours weren’t deep enough – so Ed replanted them. Ed ordered a huge piece of net to cover the whole thing which will keep out the birds. The carrots (in the front) have a finer net over them to stop carrot root fly – put together by our friend Dan who came up from London last weekend. Clearly we need all the help we can get!
We’ve offered the patch next to us to Mr C but as it all needs digging over he’s going to start on this next year I think he’s keen to assess our results first…
A Castle in the Sky 