Spring has Sprung

This last month has brought beautifully warm and sunny weather and it feels like Spring has properly arrived in the UK.
This warm weather has been amazingly lovely but has also created a lot of work around the small-holding. Things have been growing rapidly, whether we want them to or not!

We had a couple of weeks away (terrible timing really, but it was a welcome respite from the tree-planting and mud). When we returned we found the grass in the field had grown so much, we could no longer see the trees we'd trenched...oh dear! There's a lesson somewhere there in doing things sooner rather than later.

With careful exploration we found all the trees (well, hopefully... we might find the odd tree was missed and grows in the middle of the field!) and stoically continued our mission to plant our little woodland. We've now finally, finally finished!!! All 775 trees, or thereabouts, planted successfully! Hooray!!!

Final tree to be planted! (A bit wonky, but maybe that adds character...)

We've finished our orchard, which is now full of knee high nettles again, and finished our nature woodland (also full of nettles) which we'll make into a beautiful habitat for bees, butterflies and all manner of bugs, finished our willow tree tunnel in the middle of the field and planted some trees in our small field too. Now to sit back and watch them grow!

There are so many nettles growing everywhere, I decided to find a use for them (as well as composting them). You can do all sorts of things with nettles, including making tea, eating them and making rope. I've tried the tea, which is pretty good, I'm going to try nettle soup next. I'd love to try making rope, but that does take time which I'm not sure I have, but maybe I'll be lucky and find a spare afternoon. :)

Other things which we're deliberately growing, unlike the grass and nettles, are a variety of vegetables. We have potatoes and broad beans doing very well, onions and spring onions doing nicely and radishes coming up, the first ones I think are just about ready. I decided to try covering the potatoes in mounds of grass cuttings instead of soil as we have too many cuttings for the compost, I've no idea if this will work, but it's an experiment, and I do like experiments!

Potatoes covered in mounds of grass cuttings

I'm very happy that my grape vine which I grew from a seed is also looking lovely and healthy. :)

Grape vine that will need potting on very soon!

Newly planted seeds include tomatoes, mange tout, broccoli, carrots and nasturtiums amongst others. These went in a bit later than I'd have liked as we were away, but it's not too much of a problem, fingers crossed they all grow.

When planting my seeds, I use a lot of various containers. Some are in standard seed trays, but a lot of them I plant in old food packaging to avoid waste. Egg boxes are brilliant, as they compost down as the plant grows and roots can poke through. This means you can start plants off in 'seed trays', but simply tear the sections apart when planting on which avoids disturbing roots.

Egg boxes as seed trays

In the past I used a lot of large plastic bottles to grow leafy veg and tomato vines, as I could tie them to my fence, maximising space in a small garden by growing vertically. This year I don't need to do this as we have space to spare, so I'm using plastic bottles in a different way. I found an idea online to grow plants in bottles complete with their own reservoir of water, I've tried a few to see how they go. Here's a link to the video: https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedniftyoutdoors/videos/208309989645860/
It's a shame I didn't see the video before my holiday or I could have started more of my plants by now!

Bottle planters with reservoir beneath

So a lot more planting ahead of us next month, with a lot of digging still to go, but hopefully slightly less labour intensive than the trees and hopefully with nicer weather to work in!
Happy Spring everyone!

Doris Day

Well this last month has been a bit mad! (...She says as though that's any different from the previous months...)

The solar panels have proved fantastic! We haven't had to run the generator, and the batteries have been topped up to full capacity on most days, even if it doesn't seem sunny. :) A brilliant investment Iain!

I've been steadily planting more trees (yes there are still more to go...) as well as starting on planting vegetables in the field.
We decided to split the big field in half with a line of trees, keeping one half grass, and growing things in the half nearer the house. We've kept aside the willow trees, as in the middle of this tree line we've left a nice big gap where we're starting a willow tree tunnel! At first we thought of making a willow bird hide, but I got too excited at the thought of a tree tunnel so it's become that instead. :) We can always take cuttings in the future to make more willow features, our neighbour mentioned that he'd once made a living willow chair... that might have to happen!

Start of willow tree tunnel (not much like a tunnel yet)

The weather is becoming warmer and the days are becoming longer, which is great for growing things. We've planted out broad beans, which are already sprouting (thanks for your help with that Pop), along with potatoes, onions and cabbages amongst other veg. I've also tried planting kohl rabi this year, which I've never even eaten before, let alone grown, but it looks very intriguing so I thought we could give it a go!

Potatoes in their trench, ready to be covered in a mound of soil

Sprouting broad bean

With the weather warming up, we're not needing fires as often. This is good news for our log requirements, but is making us debate how to make hot water in the summer without having to light a fire. Do we go for a boiler, solar heater, or ground source heat pump? Decisions, decisions...

As well as becoming warmer, the weather has been very windy! We've had a few storms lately, here in the UK. The worst of which has been Doris. She was fierce! I'm very glad my parents were visiting when she hit so we had extra help to baton down the hatches. We all hid inside watching as bits of the barn were bending alarmingly and random debris was flying around. We realised how strong it was when our neighbours shed was blown completely over with a smashing of glass and a big thump. The next victim of the storm were our new solar panels! Poor Iain's face as they lifted into the air like sails and landed on their face, scraping along the ground...eek! As the second set started to lift we ran outside and tried to save them, I lay across them to hold them down, but the wind just lifted me with the panels, it was so scary! As carefully as we could, considering the weather conditions, we lay them on their face too and weighed them down with breeze blocks, also weighing down the other set which had already blown over.

A post storm inspection revealed that although the solar frame had buckled a bit, thankfully the panels and connectors were all working. There were a few scratches on the surface of the panels, but considering the impact they had, that's pretty remarkable! It doesn't seem to have affected their efficiency, so I think we had a lucky escape.
The shed around the wind turbine didn't hold up very well... that's basically now in pieces on the floor, but hey, I guess that's extra firewood! Every cloud has a silver lining and all that.

Destroyed turbine shed

Other than those casualties, we only had a stack of bricks and a few pots blow over, so a bit of soil top-up and they were fine.

So a bit of a scary month, but we survived, and had luck on our side. Fingers crossed for calmer weather now, and sunshine to help the little seeds sprout and grow!

Super Solar

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! :)

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!

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...