Goodness me, a lot happened in 2018. I've found myself quite overwhelmed with the thought of looking back. However, I've done summaries of the year on my blogs for several years now, and I didn't want to have a missing year, so here goes. I started 2018 on my old blog, with a look back at 2017 - a year of DIY and bureaucracy as we finished decorating, sold our old house, and waited for the paperwork wheels to turn. I went for a nice snowy walk in the woods, and visited some local nature reserves. I made my own lip balm (which I'm still using, that stuff lasts a long time), contemplated learning how to identify trees in winter (something I've still not done), and started running again (for probably the 100th time). February was exciting, although it mostly didn't feel like it at the time. I started a series of trail races with my sister, and took her for a walk past our new house (which we still didn't own at that point, and which I was starting to feel quite daunted by). I cocked up and then rescued a knitting project (no change there then), and pondered what I'd been reading lately (I'd forgotten I used to do that). Finally, in the middle of the month, we exchanged contracts on the new house, and celebrated with an almond croissant in our favourite cafe (which has since closed down, sob). We finally moved on Monday 26th Feb, and by Tuesday 27th we were snowed in for several days. March was a flurry of snow and moving boxes, and also moving blogs. I started this blog off by rambling about how we'd got here, then did a tour of our (rather soggy) fields, and our dilapidated outbuildings. It snowed again, and we got stuck in the city for a couple of days. I fell into a pattern of getting up early, and started trying to fix some of our tumbling down old dry stone walls. And we sneaked off and got married without telling anyone. April started with yet more snow (yawn), a little bit more running, and some rather soggy cycling. I built a plastic greenhouse, which then blew down, so I rebuilt it in a different place. I had a surprisingly crafty episode, knitting dishcloths and making my own shampoo bars. I went on a dry stone walling course, and finally the sun came out and it started to feel a little bit like spring (we also started our mouse-eviction-programme) which lasted most of the month, fortunately with no casualties. In May, the sun shone again (on a bank holiday no less!) and I acquired a push-along lawnmower and spent quite a bit of time lying on the newly mown grass. We got a good view of a hare, and I bought a scythe and started making space in a field for growing squash. Big excitement at the end of the month as the neighbouring cows arrived to hang out in our fields for a few months. June was a month of flowers. I could barely keep up with the growth in one greenhouse, and started to build another. I had a minor celebration as the second greenhouse went up, and I finally finished fixing one of the walls that had fallen down. I went on a very flowery bike ride, and the garden was abundant and beautiful. I ignored my blog for the first couple of weeks of July while we had visitors, day trips, and started demolishing walls. I started running again and entered an ultra marathon. We had a lizard in the living room, and visited a local fair. July in the garden was super hot, and we let the cows into our final field as they were running out of grass elsewhere. In August, we picked bilberries in the local lanes, and went for a day out to our nearest Wildlife Trust reserve. I recapped half a year of living in our new house, and took a fortnight off work, during which it rained rather a lot. The garden was lush and abundant. In September, the chickens arrived! So very exciting. A cow got into the runner bean patch, we harvested a lot of courgettes, and nearly finished the outdoor chicken run. As usual, I went through a phase of getting out of the routine of posting here. In October, I visited Biddulph Grange, pondered what on earth we were doing out here, and pottered around in the autumn sunshine. The chickens marauded round the garden as I laid compost ready for an edible windbreak. Work got rather busy, and I spent two weeks here on my own while Peter jetted off to the other side of the world, although I don't seem to have mentioned that here. In November, I waffled a lot about chickens. I met a friend for lunch in the botanical gardens, and had a little trip to the seaside. I spent quite a lot of time outside, some of it in my pyjamas. It felt like it was foggy a lot. In December, I lost track of time again, and caught up with myself by waffling on about the chickens (again). I finally finished a crocheted blanket I'd started in the summer, and we had an exciting day of freezing rain. I ended the year feeling rather poorly, but festive. What an eventful year! It feels like it's flown past in a flash, and yet I also feel like we've lived here forever. So many things have happened that I haven't written about here too, and I've got a stack of photographs I've not shared.
There's no chance of me catching up now - here we are more than half of the way through January, I've not posted here at all, and the Christmas tree is still up. Oh well. I'm planning a rather less eventful and more settled 2019. Right now the snow is falling, and I'm settling down to a bit of knitting (which I hope to finish before the summer). A friend is due to arrive tomorrow, but given the snow she might not make it. We'll see.
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Suddenly my head is starting to clear. For weeks now I've been focused and barely felt like I've had time to draw breath. This has been a particularly busy period at work, and unusually I've had to be in the office pretty much every working day since October, which has meant a lot of driving. For the last couple of months it's meant leaving in the dark, usually around 6am, and getting home in the dark. I know millions of people do this every day, and I'm not claiming any special status, but goodness me it's nice to have stopped for a while. I've been ill this last week, just a cold and a bit of a bug, which stopped me in my tracks for a couple of days and left me walking round like a wraith with a head full of cotton wool for several more. I went to work most days, but I shouldn't have - sometimes I just found myself staring at a simple email without a clue what to do about it. Yesterday I was starting to feel a little better, and popped out to two local market towns to finish my Christmas shopping. Well, I say 'finish' - in truth, there are still some presents to buy... but I've got all the ones that are needed for Christmas day itself. The weather was mostly good yesterday, and finally I started to feel a little festive. Earlier in the year I joined a local wind orchestra, and last night we had our Christmas concert, which was most jolly indeed and reinforced the festive mood nicely.
Today I've had a lovely leisurely morning, the chickens are bimbling around in the garden, and I have the house to myself for a couple of hours. My head feels clear enough to think about what needs to be done - and I can't tell you how thankful I am for a fully working brain. I completely take it for granted most of the time and I shouldn't. So this afternoon I'll be tidying, making a small gift for the neighbours, doing a bit of wrapping, cleaning out the chicken house, and maybe, if the rain lets up for a bit, bringing in a bit of greenery to make some kind of a wreath. Already I'm starting to plot what I'd like to do next year. I love this time of year for doing that. I'm just going to get these last few preparations out of the way and then find myself a nice new notebook and a set of pens and start doodling. How is it nearly the middle of December already? The weeks are running away with me. I often say that, but this autumn has been a whirlwind, mostly of work. My schedule usually allows for a fair bit of time working at home, but the last two or three months I've had to head into the city every single day. Not ideal. There has still been a bit of time at weekends to potter around in the garden with the chickens. The weather has taken a decided turn for the worse in the last couple of weeks. Cold and rainy and windy, and the chickens are not impressed. We've fortified their coop as best we can and it looks ridiculous. The chickens themselves look quite ridiculous too, as they're currently moulting and soggy rather a lot of the time which makes them look pretty bedraggled. They seem happy enough (when it's not raining), and have plenty of shelter in their run, so I'm sure they'll be ok. They do like to join in with whatever we're doing in the garden - this is Hermione 'helping' to rake some leaves. They're still not much good at dry stone walling though. The sun finally came out this morning, but I confess it was still quite cold and I've been watching the cheerful weather from the sofa. I really must clean the windows... I did take a little trip out briefly this morning, and the stream was up and running over the bridge again - there's been a lot of rain lately. The rain is set to start again this afternoon. I want to clean the chicken house out before then, and by the look of the sky I've not got much time. I also need to do some washing, order some Christmas presents, and we might even put the tree up. Then I think crochet and a nice film is in order.
I still spend a lot of my time in the city. There's not much I can do about that in the short term (although it will be a bit different next year at least). Mostly I drive in, stay in the office, then drive home again, but occasionally I meet a friend for lunch and remember to go somewhere cheery. Last week a friend and I met in the botanical gardens. We both live rurally, and don't see each other very often these days, so it was lovely to have a catch up. We had lunch in the cafe and it was warm enough to sit outside in just a t shirt (I can't imagine ever being that warm again at the minute). The gardens were splendid in the autumn colours. I really should make an effort to get out of the office more often. The temptation is always to finish my work as quickly as possible and head home, but I need to remember how beautiful the city can be sometimes too.
Oh dear, I'm not doing very well at keeping up with these monthly garden posts, am I? Never mind, here we are at the end of October (I'm still not quite sure how we got this far through the year so quickly). We've been here eight months now, and the garden is winding down for the winter. I've pulled up the courgette plants, and the beans have now finished so last weekend I pulled them out too. I'm making plans for either a small forest garden here, or an edible windbreak. I need to sit down with a scale map of the whole garden (which I made a few weeks ago) and test what each will look like. In the meantime, I've removed the wood from round the beds (which were only ever temporary) and am laying cardboard and covering it with compost. The compost has been a real success. I made the bins quite soon after we moved in (although they've since been partially dismantled to pilfer materials for the chicken run), and I've had plenty of good compost from them already. I'm currently emptying the bin on the right to use as mulch for the forest garden/windbreak area, and I'll turn the middle bin into the right one. It's filling up even faster now I've got the chicken bedding going in it too. The chickens are extremely nosy and like to stick their beaks in whatever is going on, especially if it involves soil or compost being turned over. It can make gardening rather difficult at times, and I've been known to shut them back in their run when they're being a bit too pesky. Elsewhere in the garden, when my mum was here last weekend we collected a load of leaves to make leaf mould. I also had a minor, but expected, garden disaster when my plastic greenhouse blew down in the wind. It happened before when I first built it, but after digging it into the ground, the foundations were much firmer and it's lasted the summer nicely. However, it was no match for Storm Callum a couple of weeks ago, and while the foundation remained in the ground, the rest ended up in an untidy heap, scattering plastic pots around the field. Surprisingly most of the poles aren't damaged, so I've stored it in the garage in case I decide to rebuild it in the spring. Fingers crossed the glass greenhouse doesn't go the same way. My other project this month has been rebuilding this wall which collapsed behind the garage. It's just a small gap, and hasn't taken long, but I've not had much time so I've still not finished. There are a couple of gaps that have appeared in the walls between our fields, but this one is next to the footpath so I thought I'd sort it out first for the sake of neatness. Fortunately none of ours that have collapsed are holding animals in - although these two wonderfully cute sheep did appear on our driveway a couple of weeks ago. After herding them up and down our drive a few times, I confess I abandoned them when they ran off into a nearby field (not the one they came out of, but I was running late for work and they were nowhere near a proper road so I figured they wouldn't get too far). I'm glad to see they're now back where they belong. It tried to snow for the first time yesterday. There wasn't much, fortunately, but the biting wind has taken me right back to when we moved in here. I'd got complacent over the summer, forgetting just how icy cold it was. We've been on the phone to the plumber trying to sort out putting radiators in our three rooms that bizarrely don't have them. The autumn weather is giving us spectacular scenery though. The valley fills with mist sometimes in the early morning, and sometimes I'm even up early enough to see it (although I confess I'm usually outside in my dressing gown letting the chickens out - thank goodness we don't live on a main road). It's such a pleasure to watch the garden change through the seasons. I wonder what this winter will bring?
I've been spending a lot of time in this chair, drinking tea, reading, staring out of the window. It's turned pretty nippy here now, and rather than spending all of my free time outside, I've been spending more of it inside, plotting and scheming and hatching plans. I love the way the light moves around this room now the leaves have fallen from the elm tree by the back door. We've had visitors this weekend (they brought the delightful chicken mug in the first picture, and many other cheerful gifts). They've not been before, and it spurred us on to tidy up a bit, and to spend today doing not-very-much other than sitting around. I also made some bread, for what I think is the first time since we moved. It felt nice to do something relatively normal and weekendy. After they left, I spent an hour or two outside with the chickens, pottering around in the garden. I'll do a separate post about the garden, which is slowly evolving as I make plans for next year. It was cold today, and it felt quite autumnal. Definitely a day for warm scarves and woolly hats. It's been sunny though, in amongst the hailstones. I so much love watching how the landscape changes through the seasons. But now I'm back inside again, eating some of that soda bread and a friend's home made jam, drinking tea and making more plans. I was going to say this is the best place to be on a day like today, but the sun's come out again now and now the clocks have changed I won't get home before nightfall most evenings during the week so I feel I need to make the most of the daylight...
The local lanes are lined with bilberries. We've been watching them ripen over the last few weeks and in early July we finally got round to picking some. Bilberries are tiny, and they don't really taste very nice raw. It takes a long time to pick a worthwhile crop. But it's a pleasant evening's work pottering up and down the lanes in the sunshine, and it gave us a chance to inspect some of our dry stone walls. Eventually we picked a couple of tubs full and headed home. This lot went into the freezer, and then into a couple of batches of scones, which I seem to have neglected to take photos of.
Next up is blackberries, and I've already spotted a few ripe ones while out running, so I must pop down the field and check ours at the weekend. There's something cheery about eating food that just grows without being planted. Is it the end of the month again already? July has whizzed past in a sunshiney haze, which has been delightful to laze around in, distressing for farmers, and tiring for those of us who didn't manage to install water butts before the rain stopped. Our local farmer (who these cows in our fields belong to) has been round and cut some of the grass, in the hope that it will stimulate it to grow again. We've offered to let the cows into our final field, and in return he's offered to remove our chimney (which we are delighted about). The cows seem pretty pleased too at having an entire new field to explore. We have had to take some precautionary measures though. This is the field closest to the house, and the one I originally planned to grow my veg in, back in March when we seemed to have bought a swamp and this was the highest and driest place. You can see the start of the beds in this post from May. Cows aren't well known for eating courgettes, but I reckon they'd have a go given half the chance, so the farmer has had to set up an electric fence around the edge of the field (probably all the while cursing the fool who planted courgettes in the far corner of a hay meadow). It does make watering a bit of a palaver (don't worry, there's a handle to disconnect the fence, I don't have to limbo under it each time thank goodness). But these plants are pretty well established now so I wasn't watering them every day anyway, and this weekend we've finally had a good downpour so they should be ok. The yellow courgettes are coming along nicely. Ignore the weeds. I don't lean towards the neat and tidy garden look. The hay mulch kept the weeds down for long enough for the plants to get established and that's the most important thing in my book. It won't be long until we can start harvesting these now, which I'm very excited about. I'm also quite excited to see what other squashes turn up - I planted round green courgettes, patty pans, pumpkins and butternut squash, but sadly the labels washed off so I don't know which plant is which until the fruits appear. The raspberries are up here too, fenced off from the cows (well known raspberry thieves). We had a few handfuls from them but they appear to have come to an end now sadly. I love raspberries, and will be moving these closer to the house and increasing production next year. In the other part of the garden, the greenhouse is doing well, and I can't believe the change since my June post. We've been eating home grown lettuce all month (and some of it has gone to seed now as we haven't got to it quickly enough). I can't quite believe the amount of purple basil - I really must get that into the freezer soon as it's starting to flower. The tomatoes have finally started setting fruit. I feel like there's a mysterious art form to tomatoes that I haven't quite grasped yet. These are the plants a friend gave us - my own are still pretty small, although one of them now has a few flowers on. The real stars of the greenhouse are the cucumbers. I've never grown them before, and didn't expect them to germinate, so planted quite a few, and ended up with nine large plants in the greenhouse. It's been quite a battle to keep them watered, and as you can see in this picture, I haven't always managed it. They've had lots of flowers on though, and have started fruiting, which is very exciting. At least it was exciting, until I picked my first one today and my goodness it's bitter! It was ok near the tip, but towards the end it became inedible. I've been reading up, and apparently this can be due to 'stress' - often by not having enough water. It seems my daily trekking up and down with the watering cans wasn't quite enough... Oh well. I've stepped up my watering regime (no idea if it will make a difference at this stage) and we'll hope for the best. It has been pretty good to eat our own salads though. Outside, some cheery visitors helped me dig more beds and we now have two types of beans, kale and rocket in the ground. This picture is from about two weeks ago when the beans just started forming - they now look like proper French beans so I hope we'll be harvesting them soon too. I've turned the compost again, and got another bucket of lovely compost out of it, which has gone into the veg beds. It's been so dry though that a lot of the grass had just turned to hay in the heap, and it's been quite a chore to keep up with the watering. We don't have an outside tap near the veg, and it's barely rained since I installed my water butts, so I've been back and forth to the tap in the utility room, two watering cans at a time. This week I finally thought about it properly and started saving my shower water. It's no more effort (our bathroom is on the ground floor), and saves perfectly drinkable treated water from going to the plants while grey water washes out into the field (we're not on mains drainage here and the bath water doesn't go into the septic tank). I'm extremely glad there has been some rain this weekend - finally I can go back to just watering the plants in the greenhouse for a few days, and hopefully by then everything else will be a little stronger and able to fend for itself.
So there we are - a whizz round our garden in July. I wonder what August will bring? (Apart from too many courgettes, that is...) Where did the last two weeks go? It feels like forever since I've posted here. As always, I can see what I've been up to by scrolling through my photographs... Hmm. But it hasn't all been entertaining visitors and eating. There's been plenty of pottering in the garden (although I'm saving all that for one post at the end of the month). I've also been creating us some footpath signs. We don't get a lot of walkers here, maybe four or five lots in total over a sunny weekend. Most of them can read a map, and it's pretty obvious that the main footpath runs straight down our driveway. The side footpath isn't so obvious though until you're right on top of it, and a couple of groups of young people have gone wandering off into the wrong field (from which there isn't an exit), or stood around looking puzzled. So I've added a couple of yellow arrows and hopefully that will clear things up (I always appreciate clear footpath signs when I'm out walking - I hate standing in someone else's yard not knowing where I'm going!) We've been making some progress inside the house too - although I use the term 'we' loosely as my involvement has mainly been providing the occasional cup of tea. We're still struggling to find a builder who will remove that wall, so in the meantime Peter has removed everything else, including a false wall, the door frames, built in cupboards and old wiring. We can't use these rooms until this work is done so the rest of the house is full of boxes of stuff that should be up here. You can see how wonky the floor is. All this sorting (and the sunshine) has at least given us a chance to air a few clothes that have been in boxes for a couple of years. In slightly less alarming news, I've been on a few local outings. First off to a quarrying trade show - not my usual nice-trip-into-the-countryside but fascinating nevertheless. The giant machines looked like toys inside the quarry. The main attraction for me though was this. This is The Man Engine, and it was both extremely impressive and extremely beautiful. The tour has finished now, but if you do ever get a chance to see it I'd highly recommend it. We've been to a couple of other localish events too - a school fair, and a Tudor fair, which I visited right at the end of the day, so was lucky enough to be given some home made butter to take home, wrapped in a butterbur leaf. It was National Meadows Day recently so we also visited a farm with a hay meadow, and had a tour from the local Wildlife Trust to show us how to identify various grasses and flowers. Quite a lot of the flowers had gone to seed because we've had such hot weather lately and so little rain. Everywhere here is dry (like much of the rest of the country) and we've had several moorland grass fires, which is very unusual round here. It's not often I find myself longing for rain, but lately I have been. So that's where I've been - wandering about the countryside, drinking tea and looking at the view. And digging and planting and being at work of course, and various other things that I'll save for another post. In the mean time, I'll go back to hoping for a bit of rain soon.
The sun has come out, and the grass has started growing. We have eleven acres of grassland, and no grazing animals. Matters were starting to get out of hand, so last week I bought a scythe. Gosh, it is such fun. We're both very taken with it, and have been lopping grass with enthusiasm. We won't be scything all eleven acres (thank goodness) as our neighbours at the dairy farm have lent us a few cows, who arrived yesterday (this is extremely exciting, and will get a post of its own). What we have been doing though is clearing a space to lay out some beds for growing veg. I'm trying to learn a bit about some of the grasses and wild flowers as I go along. These, I believe, are cuckoo flower, or lady's smock, and we have them in abundance. There will be plenty left after I've finished, as I'm only clearing the growing space, not the whole field. I dug out one small bed to plant my raspberry canes in - and decided instantly to use the no-dig method for the rest of the garden. There are plenty of ways of doing this, but we have an abundance of cardboard boxes, having just moved house, so that's what I'm starting with, followed by compost, and finally a mulch of grass cuttings, as we have an abundance of those too. I'm not sure I'll leave this on once I get plants in, as it's far too tempting for slugs, but for now it's rotting down in place and keeping the ground cosy (we did only get rid of the last of our snow three or four weeks ago, after all). Some of the grass is going into to make compost, so I don't have to buy any in next year. I always made compost at our old house, in one of those dalek-style bins towards the end, but here we have far more space, and far more garden waste, so I've created three bins, and can already see I might need more. The one in the middle is filled with dry hay, moved from the floor of one of the outbuildings. The one on the right is food waste from the kitchen, and each time I add some I throw in a handful of hay too. The one on the right I'm layering freshly cut grass and hay, and as it's now full, I'm covering it over and leaving it to rot down. My auntie bought me this book for my birthday, and it's (obviously) very enthusiastic about compost, and has many good tips. I confess I'm not sure I'll be making the special activator powder advocated by Maye Bruce, but I've already come across some of the herbs she uses in the fields so I might leave them to rot down in a bucket and pour it on. Can't do any harm.
Since the arrival of the lighter evenings, I've found myself heading outside for two or three hours after work, and then wondering why I'm collapsing into bed exhausted. It's not surprising really, two or three hours of wheelbarrowing, scything, walling, digging, on top of a nine hour day at work and two hours of driving would wear anyone out. Fortunately, I get to work at home several days a week, and at the weekends I don't work at all, so there's plenty of sitting about too, especially now the sun has started shining.... |
Hello!Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm Jenni, and I write here about our new foray into country living, which includes growing food, knitting, baking, wandering around the fields, and seeing which local cafe serves the best cake. Categories
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