Author Archives: Lyndsey

We’ve got that planning feeling

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We have now entered the hibernation months again, with shorter days, windy wet weather (this week the yurt got lifted slightly by 65 mph gusty winds) or glorious, bright cold days and another winter in the yurt. However now we can return to a sense of planning and optimism. After 18 months of uncertainty we got planning permission to rebuild 30 ft2 of wall, which fell down. We have moved, in the last 18 months, from …you’ve lost your planning permission, all of it and you will never be able to build your home; rendering your land virtually worthless, you up to your eyeballs in debt and your life up the proverbial.. to …oh it’s only a small area of wall, there’s your planning…

If only it had been that easy or cheap.

Anyhow, not dwelling on the negative.. we have a project again and, it is with relief, we can return to the building. Plus, in the meantime, we have managed to: work on the land, plant our vegetable gardens and orchard, clear huge amounts of invasive Himalayan balsam (or as we call it – therapy), plant about 400 trees, bring a flower meadow back into good working order, dig a pond, rediscover the farm’s old gardens, build a polytunnel – now providing us with an endless supply of food, survive in a yurt (it’s actually lovely and mostly easy, until you come to winter), make our lives a little more easy in general, set up a business, continue working for the local Wildlife Trust, inherit another cat..actually – thank goodness we didn’t have to build, when would we have had the time?

Last year we largely slept through the winter, this one I think we will be wide awake till the wee hours talking about; solar water heating, how to keep a pantry as cold as possibly, whether to have a wind turbine or water power, whether to go for underfloor heating or whole house ventilation system with a big log burner, where is the kitchen sink going?

An update for the summer

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Well time has just flown by and now it’s almost the end of the summer. We’ve had an incredibly dry one, though the last month has seen a bit of rain. The place is looking great though with the vegetable beds really coming into their own and there is a ridiculous amount of food coming out of them. The squash have been very good this year, we tried a sunshine squash, which is a lovely yellow and has a really sweet flavour, also we tried something different with the butternut squash this year and put them at the front of the polytunnel, they are the best looking ones we’ve ever had! This year we have also had a real success with the tomatoes, we really suffered from blight the last couple of years, but not so this time round and we… well I am really enjoying sweet juicy tomatoes with olive oil.

Our system of piling cut grass on the beds seems to be an effective way of mulching the beds, we have found that the soil has managed to retain some of its moisture at least.

Our orchard is doing ok, though the pesky crows and magpies are ripping the fruit to shreds, I think we will have to net it next year. The blackbirds have also discovered the delights of our rasberries, however we had so many it really has not been a problem. For one glorious month we couldn’t keep up with our strawberries, even though the deer had eaten the leaves back to the ground, they recovered astonishingly well and produced a fantastic crop. What was a lovely surprise was the old apple trees, which we assumed were dying gracefully, have produced a huge amount of fruit this year. We have laid the hedges around them and clearly they had just been struggling for a bit of light.

Theknapweed in the meadow meadow has really come into its own this year, the whole field is humming with life, about 50 goldfinches are living off it at the moment, they hang from the knapweeds like little jewels, a fantastic sight. As you walk through clouds of insects such as bees and hoverflies are humming away whilst the grasshoppers sing in the undergrowth.

We also have a new kitten, he turned up in the log pile a few weeks back, with oil on his face and looking pretty sorry for himself, he’s currently playing round my feet and trying to climb up my top. Looks like he’s staying, though our other cat is not entirely sure about the whole thing.

And finally James has had time to sort out his website for his work www.seren-it.co.uk – the poor thing has been working ridiculous hours.

The Pond

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Probably one of the best things anyone can do for wildlife is to put in a pond; a bit of water attracts a lot of life. We dug our pond in the Autumn of 2008 and within days of a small pool forming, creatures started moving in.
We didn’t go for a little pond, there seemed no point as we have the space, plus the larger the pond the more stuff you are going to attract. We have also planted it up with native species such as; starwort, water plantain, flowering rush, bog cotton, yellow flag iris, native water lily. The consequence has been a buzzing and bustling habitat. A huge amount has descended on the pond, under the water there are; newts, frogs, toads, water beetles, larvae of all sorts, water snails, water boatmen and unidentifiables. On top of the water; water skaters, whirly gigs, damselflies, dragonflies, broad bodied chasers. All around the pond bird life thrives, with a pied fly catcher bringing on its brood in a nest box just near the pond, swallows and house martins swooping in scooping up insects, a (very shy) heron who often is spotted flying away from the pond and we know the red deer come to drink there as we regularly see their footprints in the mud.