Springtime; a time to smell of the earth

Step away from your laptop, put down your phone, get out there, get your hands dirty, no garden? Then fill your windowsills with pots of chili seeds, roll in the grass, hug a tree (or at least give it a pat) go and witness nature at its most exciting! (rain or shine!).

The weather has been beautiful and spring is in full swing.  I heard my first Cuckoo of the year this evening as I was poo picking the horses field.  Yes I am poo picking.  Many who have the opportunity to "chuck their horses out" do so to get out of doing any work whatsoever.  

note the newly connected water trough in the background.

However tempting it would be to do nothing and let the horses eat themselves silly, poo-ing as they go, we would soon be left with nothing but dust.  Lets face it, the land would be pretty horrible to look at too.  I still have that pink, hazy image from last July in my head when the meadow was untouched, full of butterflies...and you half expected a unicorn to trot into the frame!  So we are very conscious that we have "disturbed" that with all the work we have done so far and want to keep our negative impact to a minimum.

Our grazing it pretty poor at the moment, thin with weak roots with a lot of moss and dead matter stopping the light and water getting to the soil.  It needs grazing, harrowing, muck spreading and possibly re-seeding.  Woody says it would be easier to plough it and start again!  Maybe!  But that could mean we loose some of these beauties;

Wood Anemone - largely infertile this pretty plant slowly spreads by its roots.

Dog Violet

Young bluebells and leaves on the birch trees at last.

Dandelions - high in Iron and the horses LOVE them!

Red Dead-Nettle

We could do without these popping up!

For more information on wild flowers; The Wildlife Trust - wildflowers

Infrastructure - water

Along with the fencing we need to supply water to the land.  Short term we are connected to the neighbors but we need to equip the land for the long term.  We plan to make use of any well/springs and/or put in a borehole for livestock or domestic use.  We have been in touch with a local water agency who plan to send out there diviner who will check out all possibilities - more on this in a later post.

For the moment we needed to get the alcathene pipework in.  A small digger was hired for the weekend, delivered on Friday afternoon, the excitement of a new toy...er...bit of kit, was too much to bear so the work was soon underway!

Family business - David, Woody and nephew Morgan

 The trench runs nearly the full length of the 2ac pony field, with junctions off for where two main water troughs will be sited.  It had to be deep, 4ft down to avoid pipes the freezing in winter and being disturbed with any work/fencing that might be carried out in the future. 

Much thought went into the location and depth of the pipe and junctions.

Infilling and leveling.

Checking for moles!

The furthest water trough was sited, leveled, and connected to water on the Saturday afternoon, however it took much longer than expected to dig/refill and level the rest of the trench, only finishing late Sunday evening.  We had hoped to have some spare time with the digger to move some of the massive rocks on site but that will have to wait for another day (and perhaps a bigger digger!)

Happy Easter!

...and Jen, and the pony pals!

The Fencing is DONE! 

Thank you and well done everyone!  The perimeter fencing is in.  Woodys curved gate is hanging, and painted.  All four horses have their heads down grazing happily.  Phew!  That was a long six months of hard graft.  Perfect timing too, horses in and gates locked on Easter Saturday ready for us to have a quiet Easter Sunday.  

All for these horrors!

We estimated a couple of months but the weather, available man hours, alongside other factors meant the time scales slipped.  Hey ho, we've learnt allot!

Not ideal!  This run was fixed the following day.

There were trials...

You have no idea how good it feels to see this!

...and tribulations...

The gate Woody lovingly restored.

...and technical bits (that we may go into later; welding lessons 101!)

Was it all worth it?  Yes I think so :)

The next couple of projects are; "where does water come from?" and "graduating from Doing what the Bears do"....

Best laid plans...and all that

Back in January I forwarded Woody an email, a scheduled of works that I thought were a workable and achievable plan of action;

At this point we had been working and clearing for a couple of months already so I (and perhaps Woody) thought this was do-able if we kept up the momentum even factoring in our busy work schedules often requiring overseas travel, finances and general life stuff.

It is now early April and the innocent little list is underway, but not complete.  There are seriously not enough hours in the day or days in the week!

• Most of the major tree chopping has been done, with the resulting materials stacked in log and brash piles...we will sort those at a later date, there's no rush as and the wood can season while stood in the field.  We may sell or use the wood ourselves if we get a wood burner.

• The fence is nearing completion, hopefully over the Easter weekend, but I think we have learnt not to push or overestimate this as it is more complicated than stabbing some posts in and stringing some wire up.

• Woody has repaired one of the old curved ended gates, with its first coat of white paint it is ready for hanging over Easter, I will give it another coat or two when we have a good warm spell of weather.

• Materials wise, we have most of the posts although may need another run of stock netting.  We thought we would be railing the fence but now that we decided not to (post and rail works out to about £20pm...work that out over 500m of fencing!) so the rails we did buy can be used to patch some of the gaps in the hedge along the woodland boundary.

• Water:  still a bit of a snag with our water supply, so we are looking into finding out where the rumored Well is alongside future plans of drilling a borehole.  For the mo our lovely neighbors are happy to let us remain connected to their supply (Thank you!).

• We have acquired the pony company for my horse, times three!  This has overloaded the situation and put the pressure on.  I fully realise this and put my hands up, but we are now where we are and we can only push on for a bit of a sprint finish.  

Lessons have been learned, and really I guess that is what this project is all about, its a good test of teamwork!  I will be back to stripping more barbed wire out of the hedge this weekend and fingers crossed all four horses will be on the land with the last bit of fencing going up.

Anything is possible!!