Good Job....

On Thursday night we set about reclaiming the area behind the house from a scrub bank to a lovely space for the sweetcorn. Some hope I thought, but Rhys remained optimistic and with the help of every boys toy imaginable he hacked away until you could actually see it was bank. This is halfway through! ...



By Friday evening we had pulled up the resident bramble roots and started rotivating the area, and by Saturday evening, ably assisted by Nina, all the sweetcorn plants were happily settled, if a little hot, in their new site.



And there'e even room for a raised bed or two next to them ... anyone got some spare topsoil?!

Pesky Frost...

Oh dear, last night we had a bit of an unexpected and hard frost. Our courgettes didn't like it at all - not even in the polytunnel. I fear some of them may have had it, I've brought them in for a bit of tlc, but I think some of them may be past that.

The straggly tomatoes of a couple of weeks ago are really bad! Have planted a shed load more seeds, but these haven't started coming up yet - hope they make an appearance soon or their care routine might be a bit too demanding for our house-sitters!

On a brighter note, the chillis and some runner beans are coming along nicely, and the bean and strawberry bed looks ace, Tom's special compost doing the trick nicely! Dad stuck some potatoes out in the field last week - I'm wondering what we will come home to in a few weeks though!

The 6 tonne problem

The polytunnel is starting to look interesting again. I say starting because we started work on the raised beds a couple of weeks ago. Using old pallets we have cobbled them together into something that that we think looks pretty good, and even more importantly will work pretty well too.

Being quite large and sitting on a double layer of weedproof membrane meant we needed a pretty large amount of stuff to fill them with. Not being short of manure thanks to Tom and his four legged friends down the road was a good start but sourcing topsoil proved difficult - the internet was throwing up suppliers charging £100 a tonne!

Luckily the company we have been using for skips, Greenacres Skip Hire, had a load so we had 6 tonnes delivered...

The story so far...

I really couldn't say where the last 10 months have gone - other than in a blur! So to bring you up to speed here is a quick resume of our life at Clun so far:

In May we moved in and quickly got to work ripping out the kitchen - what we hadn't thought about is how hard it is to live without one, even in the short term! By August we had laid a new slate floor and installed all the units, for a fully functioning and lovely kitchen!

Needless to say with a project of this magnitude, we couldn't just focus on one thing so at the same time we juggled work in the garden; copious amounts of weeding, our first attempts at growing our own veg and enormous amounts of grass cutting! Dad's moving in present to us was a number of tomato and runner bean plants and grow bags which quickly made progress in the poly tunnel - keeping us stocked rights through the summer.

Rhys made a start on the compost bays, and we began harvesting the currants and raspberries from the field, and stocking the freezer. Delicious!

Then we got visited by a barn owl with a bust wing, after several hours trying to catch it our very helpful neighbour got a hand to him and the next day he went off to a local bird of prey sanctuary to try an fix his dislocated elbow joint.

Back in the house for Autumn, the bedrooms got a full remodel with new walls, wiring, plastering, decorating and carpets. We just have a few little finishing bits to do up there before we get drawn outside once more, hopefully to enjoy a glorious summer! And that's where we are now, written down it doesn't look like we've got very far but for those of you in the know its been eventful...