It’s been a long two weeks since my last update.
The first week not much happened. I succeeded in day to day care of our animals, the geese (April, May and June) and the cockerel (Casey). We discovered our limitations as a weekend went by without much progress due to Sam having a sore foot and Chi being very clingy with teething. We did however get our first egg from May (which made a very yolky scrambled egg), realised that June is in fact a boy who is now renamed Jules, got the hen house a bit more set up and saw the first seedlings peeking through the soil (radishes). I also made some progress with the geese, no longer having them try to bite me every time I go anywhere near them.
This past weekend we really buckled down though. There were two main priorities, 1) move a builders bag of soil into the polytunnel and 2) prep the hen house for the girls. We did a pretty good job at meeting both of those. On Saturday we had the wonderful Lis over and made short work of the soil. The second veg bed in the polytunnel isn’t quite a no-dig as I forked the surface a little just to break up the crust. I’m much happier with this soil than the last batch though, we didn’t find a single bit of glass in there. It’s now all levelled out and waiting to be planted in. I also cleared some more of the chicken wire from the sheep field, getting ready for the arrival of sheep.
Sunday was all hands on deck. We had another volunteer friend over, Kay, as well as her parents in the afternoon. Together we stripped the old roof off the hen house, treated some rotten bits and got a new roof on. We also got the feeder and drinker hanging, sanded the perches to give a bit of a rounded edge and installed a nest box. Thanks to the help of Kay’s dad we also got some more fence posts hammered into the sheep field.
As if that all wasn’t enough, over the course of this week we’ve installed a pop hole in the hen house, made a makeshift shelter for the geese in the sheep field (there’s a shed on the way for them), had two more eggs, planted some fruit bushes, started making the outside veg beds and marked out an area (our mini orchard) for the geese to move into this weekend. Oh and we’ve arranged to buy some sheep at the end of the month. It really does feel like all things go at the moment, unsurprisingly we’ve been in bed quite a bit before midnight this week!
Hopefully I’ll be able to update a bit more often than once every two or three weeks.
Dans
