Land Week 14th - 18th September

Woody and I have been slowly chipping away at all our land projects making progress, developing and improving ideas and plans as we go (in between work, (a lot of...) pony shows, family duties and the occasional weekend in London!)

 

Every so often we have a splurge on money, kit, time, energy and brainstorming of future plans.  Some ideas lead to constructive ways forwards....other ideas hit us like a bad hangover leaving us wondering why we ever thought that would be a good idea!  As I often say we are learning as we go and we hope this will be our practice run before buying a bigger smallholding in the future.

It's been six months since our last concerted effort of "Land Week" where much was done to establish the fencing and tidy the tree line on the driveway.  With the trees now getting ready for winter and while the ground was still firm we organised for another push.  

This time jobs included; getting the enormous gate posts in, clear more gorse, raising the height of the tree canopy in the far corner (willow corner) up to the pond and address any weak areas of hedge that need fencing. 

The vital planning stage

Day one; experts arrive to carry out chainsaw work along the bottom boundary, tidying up hedging and taking down a lot of dangerous low beech limbs (Beech trees are renowned for "dropping" without warning...branches or whole trees!  Sadly I have a friend who lost a horse this way).  Once the low limbs were felled and cleared the digger could get in to remove the sheep dip that has been causing me sleepless nights since we put the horses on the land.

While the boys were armed with chainsaws and diggers, I just hauled the branches and debris into piles for sorting and burning.  Important for everyone's safety but also a morale builder seeing how much had been cleared.

Wood-dogs in his element! (mud!)

The Beech trees after their haircut, the dangerously low branches removed and the crowns raised gives space and lets in light so that the digger can get in to level the area, filling in the death trap that was the sheep dip.

The area leveled exposing the old concrete pad where an old pole barn stood. handy for storing this winters haylage.  The bare areas will need to be reseeded with grass seed, I am hoping the bluebells that were abundant in this shady area come back unharmed next April.

Before: in the distance Willow Corner

After: lifting the crowns means we can get machinery right up to the boundary to repair the fence/hedge.

For some time we have had the two 12ft main entrance gates tied to posts via their hinges with "farmers friend" (baler twine!).  Every now and then one "hinge" would wear out and snap, usually when we were in a rush, in the pouring rain or my favorite...in the dark!

A small tantrum was had and the installation of proper gate posts was moved to the top of the priority list.

A couple of months ago Woody had purchased 6 very large telegraph poles at auction for about £80 so we had all the kit, the problem was that the bed rock was only 6-12" down but a hole of about 3ft deep was required.  Hence we needed a serious digger.

A tonne of rock and a water main strike later the holes were dug and the posts were leveled into position.  Woody will back-fill with concrete later on.  

Then there was the small matter of repairing the water main, done fairly quickly at the time but it raised a few questions over where our supply was coming from as this was not where we thought it would be.

Another 50m trench had to be dug to the old stop-cock and a spiders web of dead pipe taken out.  New pipe had to be laid with spurs and the stop-cock moved to the driveway for easy access. This resulted in a rather late night session on the digger as it was the last day we had it on site. 

All the hard work, early starts and late finishes are paying off. Woody is a legend taking time off work to project manage and get stuck in with the big land jobs.  He goes out of his way to help with the horses and goes off to get haylage for the ponios...ok my truck wasn't best pleased about it but I was :)

A lot of gorse was removed by the digger this week so there is more open land/grazing available, we just need to get the Calci-Lime added to give it a boost.  Not everything was finished this week as problems crop up and take up valuable time but it is another push into the Autumn stint of work to give us some focus on what needs doing next.

• Gates on (nudge, nudge)
• Winter corrals fenced with a water supply - we want to focus the ponies on clearing a specific patch of gorse next.
• Log processing
• Weed control 
• Fill old cesspit/clear stable corral
• Plant blubs