Well this has been another busy month, and I thought Winter would be quiet here, no chance!
Despite being cold a lot of the time, it's nice to see the days getting longer, it's making me eager to get out there and start planting vegetables. For the moment I'll have to make do with planting trees, as we still have just over half of them to plant...eek, we're running out of time! I have had help from my parents and Iain's mum, which has been invaluable. We've now completed the perimeter of the main field with Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Elder, Dog rose and Hazel and almost finished the orchard which has Wild Cherry and Crab apple with a few Oak, Alder and Field Maple. The birds should be happy with all the berries and nice places to build nests!
As a side project to trees this month, we've been looking a lot at solar panels and talking to various people about upgrading our system. We started with a 1Kw system when we moved in, but this is living very much on the edge, just about OK if you have some decent sunshine, but having to revert to a back-up generator on the grey days. Iain's been self-teaching himself and very bravely ordered and installed another 8 solar panels to bring our system up to 3Kw. It took a lot of fiddling about, cursing and re-connecting, but we now have a system which means we can actually run almost entirely off solar power, hooray!! Well done Iain. :)
It does make us wonder why more people don't install solar panels, as if everyone covered their roof, most energy needs would be supplied and there certainly wouldn't be any need for dirty power plants. It's all mostly heading in the right direction at least.
 |
| New solar panels |
We need to find a clever way of raising the panels onto the barn roof now, for the moment they're sat on the ground, but they're still producing a lot of power considering they're hardly ever in direct sunlight. Last week there was a very, very bright moon at night, so bright that I thought a car was shining it's headlights into our house. Amazingly, this seemed to be causing the panels to produce power! I had no idea that moonlight was strong enough for this, but our wind turbine was switched off, so it must have been the panels producing, fantastic!
To fund the solar panels we've been selling off a lot of random items we've found in our barn. There have been some enormous and hefty pieces of machinery which to my naive eye looked like rusty junk, but it's amazing what people seem to find a use for. Moving some of them has been a challenge, but with winches, hydraulic jacks and pure man power so far they've all proved possible, and certainly muscle making! My favourite sale so far was a giant, riveted, metal water trough which a couple were planning on turning into a table by cutting into the sides. I think that will look amazing, I hope they send photos!
We seem to have gained regular animal visitors to our house, as well as our barn owl and butterflies, we have a lot of birds and also a fox. A few days ago I'd accidentally let the bird feeder become empty, the blackbirds were unimpressed and around 5 of them came to the door and kitchen window to ask me to top it back up, I had no idea they realised it was me putting the food there! Clever things. :)
The fox was a bit of a surprise. He was standing staring at me for ages and I didn't dare move in-case I scared him away. After about a minute I stood up and said hello, to my surprise he carried on staring at me, I went to tell Iain and he followed me into the barn! He was running around smelling everything, just like a dog, so cute! Lucky we don't have any chickens yet... better get a very fox-proof coop, especially as he's so unafraid.
 |
| Blurry picture of a visiting woodpecker |
Things I'm learning;
- Use power hungry things (like vacuum cleaners and washing machines) in the middle of the day when it's sunny
- Fluffy white dressing gowns and farmhouses don't mix...
- When you have a full stomach and are warm, everything else is a lot easier to deal with
- Don't climb on log piles when very tired
- Glossy magazines are rubbish at starting fires, newspapers are where its at :)
- Always cut more wood then you need, as it's not fun chopping wood late at night, in the dark when it's freezing cold
So it looks like the next month will be mostly tree planting again, fingers crossed we can get them all in before the Spring!
