More Garden and Field Pics

Over the past few months, as I mentioned before, there have been a few changes. I acquired some more chickens and I now have 5 girls. Harriet, Bluebell, Marigold, Lobelia and Poppy.

Marigold is the cream one and Poppy is the speckly one

Marigold and Bluebell, the ginger one.

Lobelia on the day we got her and her sister Marigold

They lay the beautiful pale blue eggs in the pictures 

above and Poppy lays the dark brown ones.

We built them a cute new chicken run to keep them warm and cosy in the winter when they aren't running around the garden. I like for them to be out and free-ranging as much as possible but when I'm at work I like to know they're safe so they have a secure run. They have little shelves to hop up onto, a massive perch thing with different height roosting bars which they love and they have various things to play with, one of which is their sweetcorn on a string. They totally love it. I've tried to upload a video but I'm not sure if it will work ..... fingers crossed. 

We have also been building an identical structure in the field as a hay store. My husband has pretty much been building stuff non-stop for months now and he's made all the raised beds, the chicken run, the hay store and the log store. Personally I think it's just been one massive ploy to buy more power tools but hey, I'm not complaining, he's getting kinda good at it :-)

This is how far we got this weekend. Actually we did get the back and the two sides clad in ship-lap cladding but by the time we had finished, it was too dark to see let alone take pictures so I will nip out and snap some tomorrow. We only have the front and the door to clad and then some little fiddly bits to fill in and then it's done and I can start filling it with hay for the llamas to keep them happy through the winter months. 

AND ......... tomorrow is a really, really, really special and amazing day. Tomorrow something fabulous is happening. Tomorrow, my new poly tunnel will be arriving. I am beyond thrilled. It's huge. It's 30 feet by 15 feet and I will be able to plant so much stuff. I just can't wait. Watch this space :-)

Garden Progress

This summer, there has been a lot of changes to the garden. A few months ago, a new garden design was planned and although at times it seemed that we would never get anything done, we have slowly but surely made great strides in our hope of becoming a bit more self sufficient. This is only a quick post, to show you a few pictures of the garden so far. I will go into more detail tomorrow when I have a day off work and the time to write a bit more about what we have been up to (if there is anyone out there who still reads my posts lol). Please bear in mind that it's still very much a work in progress and some of it still looks kind of like a building site but we are definitely getting there.

This is how my garden looked when I first started my blog. A rectangle of uninspiring, scruffy looking grass.

It's changed a bit over the years. First the patio was fenced off and a flower bed dug.

Then a few raised beds were added, very in-expertly by me, I might add, to enable me to grow some of my own veg.

 My first chickens arrived.

And started laying me some eggs.

And then my veg growing started to take off.

However, earlier this year, after a bit of a long talk, we decided to change the garden radically to make it more much more productive and a bit more beautiful.

So here is what my husband designed.

It's still a bit of a building site but we're getting there slowly. 

I will post a few more pics tomorrow after I find them from the hundreds I have taken over the last few months. 

My Guilty Pleasure

I know I shouldn't ....... I realise that we haven't even got Christmas out of the way yet but I just can't help myself! In between all the planning and preparations for the festive season, my mind keeps wandering ............ to all the wonderful seed catalogues for 2013 that I have been sneaking at peek at online!!!!!!

Over the last couple of years, I have started growing my own veg. It's been a very steep learning curve. I famously asked my wonderful friend (Andy !!) if the chitted potatoes I had planted would try and grow upside down if I had planted them the wrong way up. I'm fairly sure this caused a huge amount of hooting, snorting and riotous laughter on his part and I was very sceptical when he told me to just bung them in the ground and wait for them to grow. I mean ..... if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it! 

Over the last couple of years though, I have come to realise that basically, seeds just want to grow. As long as you give them the right conditions, water, light, heat and compost, they just get on and do it. It's fabulous and very rewarding although I have also realised that I have actually very little to do with it and that things will basically grow anywhere. I found that If you chuck a potato on the compost heap and leave it ...... it grows..... who'd have thought it :-)

Anyway, while the days are grim and grey, I'm planning what I'm going to plant next year. I dug a fabulous border in front of the fence I built earlier this year and I'm going to plant it with a variety of bee and butterfly friendly cottage garden plants.

The border I created this year when I put my fence up

I will be filling my raised beds with a delicious array of veg and I'm hoping to finally get hold of a greenhouse, possibly from an online auction site and, if possible, for a bargain price, so I can increase my tomato and cucumber crops .

The Raised bed I made last year

The raised beds I made this year.

I will also be putting down a million slug traps, the kind with beer in them. I don't use chemicals in my garden and the only other option, picking them off the plants and disposing of them, is a non-starter because I can't actually bring myself to pick the slimy little buggers up! It makes me feel quite queasy, so, slug traps it is and I particularly like this one ..... just for the novelty value :-)

Necessity is the Mother of Invention .........

For the last couple of weeks my mum has really been getting into planting her seeds. She has even started getting into the whole biodynamics thing, in fact she is now almost as much of a geek on the subject as I am which is saying something :-) and as a result, I'm now itching to plant something myself. A distinct lack of funds at the moment means I can't afford a greenhouse just yet and it's really not warm enough to plant things straight outside, so today it was time to put Plan B into action. When I made my raised beds a couple of weeks ago, I bought some pointy stake things that you hammer into the corners of the beds but unfortunately I bought the wrong length and no matter how hard I hit them with the hammer they just wouldn't go any deeper. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that I came up with a cunning plan to turn my raised beds into temporary mini polytunnels. I managed to get some nice thick plastic sheeting for the bargain price of 55p per metre and after adding a couple more stakes halfway down the beds and stapling the plastic down one of the long edges I pulled the plastic sheeting taught and weighing it down with bricks and .......Voila ...... instant polytunnel.

I would just like to say a quick thank you to my mum who knitted these amazing gloves for me and sent me these wonderful Aquilegia seeds which I will be scattering on my flower beds after I have finished weeding them :-)

Raised Beds and Chain Saws

Well now that the ground has thawed out I have managed to turn the large pile of timber in my hallway into three raised beds. Having given up on the drilling and screwing of the beds after the disaster with the first one, I set too with a hammer and some really really long nails. I actually find it very satisfying whacking nails into large planks of wood with a massive hammer, it seems get rid of my tension. The result was three sturdy raised beds which are now waiting for weed membrane and compost to be added. I also bought some heavy duty clear plastic so I can turn the raised beds into mini greenhouses until the weather improves. it was a total bargain from my local discount shop Trago Mills and it's 2 metres wide. I bought 8 metres and it cost .......... £4.40 ...55p per metre which I think is a total bargain.

I also got around to sorting out a tree branch that had broken during the high winds a few weeks ago. As it's not considered sensible to let me loose with a chain saw, I spoke to a friend of mine who agreed to come along and take down the branch which was dangling at an alarming angle and was only just hanging on by a thin sliver of bark. Unfortunately, when we had a closer look at the tree, it was covered in ivy and was dead and rotting. This sadly meant that the tree had to come down. We also found that the tree next to it was dead and we decided that it had to come down too. I don't like chopping down trees but they were making an awful creaking noise when the wind blew down the valley and were dangerous and had to come down. I now have a huge pile of branches and some massive lumps of wood in the field and it's opened up that area of the field and has made things so much lighter. Definitely a job well done.

Bad Weather Stops Play ..........

Well, the weather has been so awful this week that it totally scuppered my plans to make 3 raised beds for my veg. Having bought galactic quantities of excellent sturdy timber planks, cut into manageable lengths by the very helpful chap at my local wood yard, (they even had the pointy spikey things to hammer into the corners) I duly came home and set about making the first of the raised beds in my living room (it was cold outside lol). The first problem was that the wood was damp and 2 inches thick which made it really difficult to drill through it. After 20 minutes of swearing, drill bits coming loose, splinters and blood, sweat and tears, finally the holes were drilled. Not being a natural carpenter, although I do love power tools, I unfortunately used a bigger drill bit than I should have and although I used really really long screw to join the whole thing together, as I was carrying my pride and joy outside to it's position on the garden, the whole thing fell apart. After careful assessment of the situation, I did the only thing I could ........ I got some really really long nails and attacked it with a large hammer ........ problem solved :-)

Raised Beds

Last year, with little help from a friend, I turned a mound of soil, which was dumped onto my lawn by the so called landscaper that gravelled my driveway, into a raised bed so I could plant some veg. By the time I got around to doing this, the earth mound had been there for well over a year and was covered in grass and weeds. Having no spare cash to buy wood to make the raised beds, I decided to make use of some large lumps of slate that I had rescued from a nearby bank that had been demolished, and after much weeding and digging and spreading it looked quite good. In October of 2011, I picked up a few trays of cheap veg plants, at 29p for 12 plants, I just couldn't resist and bought trays of cauliflower, cabbage, leeks, carrots, sprouts and kale and I planted them into the bed to see what happened.