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.

New Lawnmower

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With almost nine acres to manage and no grazing animals to help, there is quite a bit of grass cutting of one sort or another to be done. I’m pretty sure we’ll be returning to this subject in the future – lots of times. But today is a ‘special’ day because I finally succumbed and bought a proper lawnmower. I’m sure a few people will wonder how we managed for the last two years, but we are quite good at just managing with what we have. Anyway when it comes to cutting the grass, we have a range of other tools to suit the variety of types of grass maintenance that happens out here: a kick ass brushcutter, which sees a lot of action; a number of Austrian scythes; a little push cylinder mower thing, that really doesn’t cut it; oh, and the tractor of course.

Yellow lawnmower that thinks it's a Testarossa

Yellow lawnmower that thinks it's a Testarossa

But today is for the new lawnmower. It’s one of those purchases we didn’t really want to make, but just had to. So we thought about how much we wanted to spend and then pretty much doubled it to get something half decent that is going to do the job (and take all the rough treatment we will no doubt give it). And we got lucky, thanks to the fab people at the local, independent lawnmower shop: http://www.ieuanevanssonlimitedllandeilo.co.uk/ They really did do us a good deal and we got a much higher spec machine than we thought we’d get for the money. It’s a Stiga 47s, galvanised and self propelled, with the ability to collect cuttings or mulch the grass up finely and put it back into the ground. All good. It’s got a nice quiet engine too, that’s supposed to be nice and efficent. So as far as petrol lawnmowers go, it looks like it scores reasonably on the environmentally friendly front. I suppose the way you use them is important in considering the overall impact of the machine though…

And so…

The mower is primarily for mowing the paths between the vegetable beds. In the Summer it needs doing every week. With the little push thing that we had, it was just impossible because the grass would soon be too long for it and usually it would be wet from the rain, which further hindered our ability to cut it. I was resorting to using the brush cutter, which really isn’t the tool for the job. Cutting the grass paths in the vegetable garden has the huge benefit of providing a fantastic mulching material for round the plants. When spread on the beds, the grass cuttings suppress weeds and retain moisture; a thoroughly fantastic use of a ‘waste’ product. If and when we get to the point of covering all the beds with clippings, we can compost them, or just use the mower’s mulching function and return them to the grass to provide a bit of fertiliser.

We’ll also use the mower round the yurt to provide us with a bit of a lawn to roll around on and for friends to camp on etc. It’s also going to come in really handy down in tipi hollow and the shrubbery. I’m sure we’re (actually, most likely I’m) going to get a lot of use out of it.

Oh and the lawnmower is yellow and looks like a Ferrari Testarossa. Ridiculous or what? Why?

The Veg Patch

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When we lived in the city we had ourselves an allotment, we loved it and we learnt so much from those around us, from books and just from trial and error (or sheer bloody mindedness). Now we have a really large allotment to play with, plus an orchard. It has taken two years of hard slog and effort to get to where we are now, however we did learn some cunning tricks along the way. We worked our guts out to get the polytunnel up and the first beds functioning, however once we got the bare minimum in order we changed tack a little. We also have a meadow to manage and that we cut late in the autumn, as we are

The Polytunnel in April

The Polytunnel in April

managing it as a flower rich meadow we cut it too late for good hay, but it does leave us with a lot of grass! We therefore decided to use it as a mulch which we then covered with a semi permeable black liner. After twelve months we ended up with  beautiful crumbly soil that is very rich and great to work with, it is also stacked full of worms, aerating the soil and giving it its wonderful texture. We are on a clay, so a fair amount of our land is bog or wet woodland, where the vegetable garden is it is protected from the worst of the elements, it used to have the muck heaps on from horses and is about the driest area, plus it was mainly grass when we arrived so we didn’t feel like we were ruining a lovely habitat. Now we have an orchard of about twenty apple, pear, cherry and plum trees and six functioning beds; I am so looking forward to this years harvest!

The Veg Patch

The Veg Patch