Get Orf My Laaand

We've noticed evidence of a few fishermen coming into our woods night fishing recently. This wouldn't be so bad in itself but a) they make a mess (there are no loos nearby, if you get my meaning - yes, eugh!) and b) the local gamekeeper is also on the committee of the angling club and told me the other day that they don't allow night fishing on the Swale at all. The picture on the left is of the bit they want to fish, the pool in the foreground, it's the first calm water for a good half mile so it's a haven for the fish, it's also where we go to relax when it's sunny.
Since they seem to be coming in from the field next door, where they're allowed to fish from, we've started putting up a barrier to try and stop them, eventually all our felled and fallen trees along with a good selection of prickly and spiny stuff will be laid along the fence. This is the start of it, we hope to make it bigger and denser over time. It might not stop them, but they'll have to be pretty determined to get through;

It's the best we can do without putting up expensive fencing, since trip wires, spikes in the ground and just taking potshots at them violates their human rights or something, bless 'em.
In other news, the first shoots of garlic are coming through and the tomatos and whatever the other thing we planted in the propagator (I can't remember, we'll call it 'surprise veg') have germinated and should be ready to plant out soon, weather permitting. Stuff is actually growing, how great is that?
We have also made plans for the paddock, we have 2 options, sheep from my brother in law (along with his continual 'advice' about how we should do everything) on loan, or buy some rare-breed Wiltshire Horn sheep that don't need shearing or dipping (no, they're not bald, their wool falls off supposedly) from a local breeder, I must ring them and have a chat.
We also got our electric fencing delivered. Well, delivered to the top of the village, the driver came in a 12 ton truck and couldn't get to us. Kate's away in the Subaru at the moment, so I had to go up in the Lotus to collect the boxes. The man laughed when he saw me. Needless to say the boxes were huge, so I drove down through the abbey with boxes sticking out of the window, the boot/engine cover open and a load of metal posts sticking out, and a big box on my lap I could hardly see over. The tourists I passed seemed amused, even when I nearly ran them over.
The fence is great though, it's got a hugely powerful energiser - any fox that comes after our chickens is going to get a big surprise. Or cooked alive. It's powerful enough to power 8km of wire and it's a shame we're not allowed to electrify the fence the fishermen are coming over - that'd put you off, climbing over a fence in the dead of night and 8000 volts through your wedding vegetables.
Anyway, the upshot is we're ready for pigs and chickens now, hopefully both will arrive in the next month or so.
That is, they will if they have somewhere to live. As promised last update, here are the pictures of the chicken house in progress - I'm actually surprised how well it's gone so far - I still have all my fingers, the workbench only has a few battle scars and the bits appear to fit together reasonably well. I'll leave the self-congratulation until it's actually providing useful chicken accommodation, but I'm surprised at how I haven't thrown all the bits on the bonfire in disgust yet. So much so, Kate's trusing me to make the pig ark too - I'd better get my finger out if we're going to get some animals in the next few weeks.

Feeling Like We're Getting Started Now

Finally, we got some seeds in the ground this weekend and it feels great, we've stopped talking about doing this, we've started it proper.
After a couple of weeks of digging, this weekend we got down to raking a seed bed and planting some seeds. Sunday was forecast to be a bright and sunny day, so we decided that we would sow our first veg once the ground had warmed up a little (and when I could drag Kate away from her new washing line, she's very pleased with the washing line - don't ask....).
I left Kate to do some more raking while I went off to do something vitally important (honestly dear), when I got back, she was 'resting' again. You might notice the water trough in the field behind her, this was the pre-requisite for putting the seeds in - a working water supply - so earlier in the week I emptied the stinking, rotten leaf infested water out of the trough (mostly over my feet) and removed the trough itself from it's concrete block housing by disconnecting the pipe. Simple enough job now I thought - go to farm store, buy correct fittings and a tap, connect to existing supply and hey presto, all the water the plants could desire. Wrong. As you can see from the picture, after 2 days of going back and forth, several gallons of leaked water, 3 miles of PTFE tape and a lot of swearing, the tap now looks like this;

It should be said that water does come out now, there are no leaks and we can water the seeds, but at full pressure the jet will have your eye out.

Anyway, with the addition of a chicken wire 'roof' to keep the birds off, we now have stage one of 'Project Love Lane House' underway, which is a good feeling - there are seed potatoes 'chitting' and some seeds in the propagator too, hopefully in a few months we'll be reporting our first harvest. Rabbit, deer, cabbage white, pigeon, pheasant, carrot fly, potato blight and other assorted pests and diseases permitting.

In other news, the chicken house is underway, just an hour or so a night after work, which is short enough to stop me getting over confident and mucking it up or slicing a finger off - although the workbench has a few new holes and cutouts already - pictures (of the progress on the chicken house, not the cock-ups) next time.

We have a period of both being very busy for the next couple of weeks, one or other of us is away for extended periods of time so progress might be a bit slow - forgive us if the updates are a bit thin on the ground - April may well be livestock month however!

Busy, Busy, Busy.

Long time since the last update, so lots to tell.
We finally finished fencing the veggy garden, it looks so easy when you see professional contractors doing it, by hand it's nowhere near as easy as it looks, but we're there. The wire is buried, the gate is on and one of the beds is dug over ready to start planting as soon as the weather improves.
We ordered loads of seeds in a fit of enthusiasm, now we have to find room to plant them all and I have a feeling 2 beds aren't going to be enough, especially as we need one as a seedbed, so more digging is in the pipeline. Speaking of pipes, the water trough has to come out and a tap put in it's place, this should be a simple job, but we've already had a mini-flood in the annexe when the washing machine plumbing ('expertly' fitted by me) decided to leak all over the place, so we're not going to take it lightly, especially as the water supply comes from George's farm next door, and he's lambing at the moment so a major water leak at our end might not go down too well....
Anyway, as you can see, the garden looks like it's getting there;


In other news, Kate bought plans for a DIY chicken house which arrived the other day, so we went out to buy the wood for me to make it, I haven't done much more than simple DIY since school, but hopefully 'Luggy' Proud, my woodwork teacher instilled the basics into me between throwing chisels around the woodwork room at school so that I'll be able to make something the chickens will be proud of. Or at least unfussy enough to live in and not get squashed by as it collapses around them.
We also decided to do a bit of work in the big wood this week. Although we don't plan to use it for pigs for a year or two, it runs along the banks of the river, and seeing as we have river frontage we thought we ought to make somewhere for us to go and get away from our livestock responsibilities every once in a while.
The problem is that the wood is chock-a-block with gorse and bramble, and the best bit of the river access is (naturally) at the end of the wood, so we've set to work with the brush cutter (now officially Kate's favourite purchase since the last pair of shoes), a lethal petrol strimmer with what appears to be a 3 bladed ninja star at one end that tears through the undergrowth like a knife through butter. We set to work and shortly after we had the beginnings of a path. If you look at the gorse on the left, that's what it looked like before we set to work, half an hour later there was a path there. Kate loves using this thing and likes to pretend she's Darth Vader, humming his theme tune from Star Wars as ahe hacks away at the undergrowth - I can lose her for hours with this thing, no plant is safe.

We also cleared an area to sit by the river, again covered in bramble and gorse, again dispatched in minutes by 'Darth' Page and her new toy. It overlooks what we have begun to call our 'beach' at the corner of the river where sandy deposits have been left. After sliding down the bank on our backsides all too often, I got a few rocks from the river and made some steps down to the water so now parents and old people (ie. me) can get down to the bank of the river safely.
As usual, click on the small images to make them bigger;