The barn dance

This last month we've been living in a building site. Thinking about it, that's been the case for a large part of our time here! This, however, is on another scale...

Our 'yard' has gone from looking like this...

to looking like this!

It's not completely down yet, but an awful lot has gone as you can see. It's good timing too as we had another scary storm where bits went flying everywhere and large tree branches fell down! It started with what I thought was a fire on the horizon, but it turned out that what looked like a plume of smoke was a whirlwind of dust moving scarily fast towards us, it was like living in Kansas! We were very lucky again and, apart from a house full of leaves and broken trees, we came out ok. :)

I'll miss the large area under the barn for working when its wet, and there are fewer places for birds to nest, but it's a lot lighter and more importantly, a lot safer! We'd had enough flying bits of barn during storms to decide it was time it came down and to build something sturdier to replace it. We still have our 2 smaller pole barns, so the birds and bats can find homes around and about. I think they were mostly in the others anyway as we made too much noise under this one! :) We did get yet another wren in the house though, maybe it lost it's home!

Making the most of the barn's safety fencing as a temporary washing line!

After all the tree casualties in the storm, Iain made use of the cherry picker (which we had here to enable barn destruction), and used it in the evenings to remove damaged branches and bring the trees down to a safe height. We now have more firewood than we have space to store it! At least we should have plenty for the Winter and the next year or so too... we hope!

Iain trimming trees

The crops have been doing very well, we're getting a lot of red tomatoes now, plenty of courgettes and beans and more cucumbers than we know what to do with! It turns out they make pretty good teethers though...

Nice cool cucumber to soothe those painful gums!

I'm in the middle of writing the re-usable nappy post so keep an eye out if that's something you're interested in, otherwise have a good month!