It's all about trees

This next month has gone by quickly, but it now feels like we've lived here for ages!
We've been busy with a number of things, as well as all the every day jobs. One of the biggest things has been ordering some new trees for our land.

We wanted trees for a number of reasons;

1. Firewood
2. Windbreak for our future vegetables (it's very flat and windy here)
3. Habitat and food for birds and insects
4. Produce for us to turn into jams and cordials

We contacted the Woodland Trust and they were excited about putting trees here, so instead of a few trees we've somehow ended up with 800! (Well 600 trees and 200 shrubs, but still, that's a lot!)

We've got a good mixture of native species, some fast growing which we can coppice for firewood and some slow growing, such as oak which will benefit future generations. We also have crab apples and elder trees which will be nice when they start producing fruit. :)

The Woodland Trust do a scheme where they subsidise the cost of the trees, so we only had to pay 30% of the cost which is very nice. Lets hope they all grow now!

We have a lot of lovely friends, and we arranged for some of them to come and help plant our trees, with my parents coming afterwards. Being quite close to Christmas, this was especially lovely of everyone, we do feel so lucky to know such nice people. :)

Getting our trees wasn't as straightforward as we first assumed. When our delivery date came round, they turned up on a very big lorry and decided it was too big to come down our track. We were waiting in all day for the trees, not knowing they'd arrived and gone away again! Frustratingly, no-body was answering when we rang, we later found out they were all out at a Christmas dinner. This was also a Friday, so we couldn't find out until Monday where our trees had got to.

We let everybody know we had no trees yet, very kindly, 2 of our friends came anyway and helped us with other jobs, and my parents still came up too, so we got a lot done, even if it wasn't planting trees!

Ella, Iain and Jenny clearing weeds from what will be the orchard

We finally heard from the tree people and found out about the big lorry problem, so we re-arranged delivery for the Tuesday with the trees coming on a smaller truck. They then rang on Monday to say they were on their way...luckily we were in, otherwise that would have been a wasted journey for them.

The smaller lorry arrived...but didn't quite make it... He decided to take the short cut to the track from the road and promptly got stuck in the mud! We brought some planks of wood up the track to help him out, but he was well and truly stuck so he called for help. An hour later help came and he was pulled free, hooray!

I walked down the track ahead of him to show him where to go, but he stopped halfway and started reversing. At first I thought he was skirting an overhanging branch, but he just kept going and then disappeared back onto the road...I couldn't believe it! We're still not entirely sure why he left, it was very random, and to add insult to injury, he also took our planks of wood with him! No trees, no wood and no clue why. :(

So Christmas came and went, New year came and went (Happy 2017 everyone!), and we busied ourselves with other jobs.

We chopped down more trees (these ones were in danger of falling during high winds, but we'll make good use of the wood), we built a 3 bin compost heap and I also built a sort of log store out of breeze blocks and a plank of wood, with long branches stuck into the breeze blocks to keep the logs in place.

Messy looking meshing, but hopefully will be a functional compost heap

New log store filled up, with a second about to be started

We've now also upgraded our single pane window to double glazed, and fixed a couple of misted windows, and we've installed lovely radiators to keep us warm. They are connected to the kitchen stove, so we light a fire in there and, using a low powered pump, it heats the whole house, very neat. :)

Lovely new radiators, it's almost like a normal house!

Finally, just after New Year, our trees came! This driver was lovely and had no trouble bringing them to us, a bit of milder weather was forecast too, so the timing worked out pretty well. :)
After checking them off, it turns out they forgot 25 field maples! Oh dear...not the most organised of companies we're sensing! We told them we have enough trees if they want to refund the difference, so that's what they did, only 775 trees to plant then!
Iain and I planted 10 token trees to mark the delivery, and to see how easy it is getting them in the ground. We're pretty lucky here and the ground is nice and soft, so digging wasn't a problem on the whole. I then felt confident to plant more on my own and my parents also visited and helped plant more, we've now planted 137 trees. :) My Mum helped me trench the rest, as cold weather was forecast (and has now arrived!), and we'll plant them as and when there are good weather days through the rest of Winter.

My parents planting cherry trees

Stanley the dog wanted to help too!

So a busy month is ahead of us with many other jobs as well as just a few more trees to plant...a mere 638 more! You can almost watch the muscles grow!

The adventure Begins

We're Abi and Iain. We've just begun an adventure. Not our usual sort of adventure where we traipse around the world with no clue what we're doing. This time we're moving house, going off-grid and attempting self-sufficiency. The similarity in these adventures is that we still have no idea what we're doing!

Our new little house currently has no central heating and is powered largely by solar panels, topped up with a little wind turbine. We also have a gas cylinder for our cooker. We have almost 2 acres of land which we're hoping to use to help us achieve our goal of reducing our imprint on the planet.

Our first week was a bit of a learning curve, but we quickly established a routine of sorts. Our day starts with clearing the ash from the fires, putting the kettle on the gas stove to heat, and then lighting the kitchen fire whilst the kettle boils. Once we did think we'd treat ourselves to a quick cup of tea from the electric kettle as we had a fair amount of electricity, but that idea was squashed before the kettle even had a chance to begin, it saps the energy way too much! I knew they were one of the worst appliances for using electricity, but this new life is hammering it home in real figures, I don't think we'll be trying that again.

Once our morning cup of tea is ready we eat, dress and get on with 'dirty' jobs, intermittently tending the fire, until about lunchtime. We then fuel our bodies with some nice food and wash using the water that's been nicely heated by the kitchen wood-burning stove. The stove has a back boiler which is connected to both a radiator in the bathroom, and also a water tank. I quite like the way you can see how everything works in this house... no fire, no hot water!
The shower in our new house isn't quite normal. The pressure of the hot water isn't that great, so something is needed to overcome this problem. Most homes would have a pump, but we don't have the electrical capacity to power a pump so instead we have this...

Watering Can Shower

It's quite quirky but we love it! We were dubious at first, but it actually works pretty well, the water builds up in the watering can to provide a reservoir. This then applies pressure to the water which comes out of the head, giving a decent shower. :) We've also decided we quite like the copper pipes and slightly industrial style, so we'll probably continue the copper pipe theme when we eventually do up the bathroom. (Lots of other jobs to do first!)

After an afternoon of lighter jobs we then light the living room stove to warm up the other half of the house, then we can relax in front of a nice fire which also spreads warmth to our bedroom, making it bearable for bedtime!

Living room stove

Some of the lighter jobs we do include; collecting wood (a daily job and very important or we'd soon get cold!), cleaning (the house was filthy so we're gradually bringing it up to standard), cooking (we need to sort that oven out!) and washing. Washing is another job which is a little quirky. Now, in my last house I imagine I did the washing the same way most people do, you lob your clothes into the machine, add some washing liquid or powder, turn it on, leave it to do its thing and then remove the clean clothes later on. This is...different.

So first of all, you need hot water, so you need to have lit the fire and kept it going a little while. Then when the water tank has warmed up you fill 2 buckets with hot/warm water and carry them outside to the shed where the washing machine is. It's an old machine which is a twin-tub. You put the warm water along with the clothes into the left side and add detergent. You then turn a knob to decide the number of minutes to wash it for. I'll vary this depending on how dirty the things are. This part is fairly normal and you can walk away and leave it to do its thing. After the designated number of minutes you come back and put the hose from the washing machine over a bucket. Holding it in place, you turn the knob to drain and water comes pouring out. You get to see just how dirty your clothes were at this point! A delicate maneuver of switching buckets and emptying them, and once it's finished you move onto the next stage. This is the spin and rinse stage. Now, annoyingly, the right side of the twin-tub is smaller than the left, so usually this next stage is done in 2 stages (just to be confusing). You move the clothes over to the right section and put a plastic cover on top of the clothes before closing the lid. You spin whilst holding the hose over a bucket, you then pour water over the clothes to rinse the suds off, spin again whilst also holding the hose over the bucket (again, switching buckets and emptying as needed) and then, and only then are your clothes ready (unless of course you need to do a second stage of this stage..).

Twin tub washing machine

It's oddly fun, I guess because it's just so different, but I fully expect that to be a short term feeling. I can imagine in the depths of Winter and being in a hurry it'll soon get annoying!

Time seems to move differently in this new life, it's lending itself to fitting in with the days, rather than making things fit around you. We wake early with the sun and get sleepy at sunset...which unfortunately is pretty early at this time of year. A few days ago after sunset, I had a lovely hot shower and changed into my Pjs and settled down in my chair with a hot drink, thinking 'I'll just watch a little programme before bed'... It was 6:20pm! Hmm, maybe a little early! ;)
The sunrises are beautiful though, so worth waking up for. The sunsets are lovely too. It's a definite advantage to flat land with wide horizons, lovely skies!

Lovely sunrise on a frosty morning

One reason we wanted to move here, as well as all the opportunities it brings, was the beautiful nature and all the wildlife. We have numerous birds visiting us every day, blackbirds, jays, woodpeckers, blue tits, coal tits, wrens, robins, crows and chaffinches just to name a few. There are also a lot of water birds which I don't know, but I have recognised herons, terns, swans and a cormorant. My favourite bird of all though lives in our barn and we've named him Barnie. He's a beautiful barn owl! One day a wren decided to pay a closer visit and flew in through the window, it startled us, but I think it was startled more and unfortunately pooed on my pillow... hmm, I opened a big window for him though so he wasn't distressed for very long at all luckily.

Other nature sightings we weren't entirely expecting were a lot of tortoiseshell butterflies hibernating all over our house! Some have been waking up as the house has warmed (sorry butterflies) but we still have 6 hibernating that I'm aware of. A less welcome resident is a mouse in one of our sheds. I actually quite like mice, but this mouse decided to chew something we would have liked left intact, so he gets a grumpy face from me. When we first moved in we put a lot of our stuff in the shed whilst we sorted the house a bit more (we actually still have some things in there). One of the things was a box of shoes. Now, inside this box was a bag with Iain's smart work shoes. Navigating past all other shoes and ignoring them, the mouse honed in on these nice shoes and ate though the bag and decimated the lining of the shoes! Any other shoes and he might just have been forgiven...sigh. Needless to say, the shoes are now all inside.

One of our resident butterflies disturbed from hibernation

We've gained a new hobby since living here, rummaging in all our sheds and barns and discovering lots of interesting things! Some of the things we've found so far include;

• church style windows
• lots of other windows
• lots of old tyres
• a boat
• animal feeders 
• water tanks
• fishing rods
• an old license plate
• a lobster trap
• a supermarket shopping basket
• loads of tins of unopened paint (and some opened ones)
• a box of old tiles
• a chassis from a go-cart or something
• an old cement mixer
• a cute, little, old wooden trailer/animal transporter

Iain also found a beautiful cast iron log holder which we've put by our fire in the living room, I can't imagine why anyone would put that outside, it's so lovely!

Newly found log holder

We've made a few improvements to the house over the first weeks, mostly cosmetic, but we've just had our gas sorted out and made safe which has also meant the cooker now works, hooray! Now we can boil the kettle and cook simultaneously! We've also chopped a few trees down for next years firewood, Iain was very good at using the chainsaw after a quick lesson from my Dad on his visit, I stuck to being the wielder of the loppers. That's keeping us busy!

Iain and my Dad chopping down a silver birch

So that's one month into our adventure, it seems to have flown by but we've also done so much! Lets see what next month brings...