A Very Small Holding

The Elliffs journey into the good life

Oct
28

By

A very encouraging visit

Category: Compost, Pigs, The Allotment, The Field, The Workshop, Trees Leave a Comment

Our family car returned with a new computer to control the electrics, which on a Rover 75 were constantly failing. We had lived with partial central locking for more than a year.

Katie and I went for a drive around the local area the next afternoon to send our daughter to sleep. On the journey we discovered a local abattoir that we could use when we eventually acquired pigs. We also visited a supplier of topsoil and turf. The soil was organic and screened for use on allotments and gardens. They also produced bark suitable for the base of our play area in the back garden. Our final stop was at an agricultural merchants who sold a variety of timber products, animal housing, fencing and tools. Each supplier was within a few miles of our smallholding and would prove very useful.

The base of our new shed lying on breeze blocks and the existing paving

The base of our new shed lying on breeze blocks and the existing paving

A smallholder that we had befriended last month arrived to position the base for our new outbuilding beside the allotment. The large shed would be raised on to concrete blocks to avoid damp rising and vermin entering the building. The floor consisted of six eight foot plywood sheets. He would return the following week to construct the shed on-site with the assistance of two local handymen.

With my first two compost bins complete I began harvesting the nettles that grew in the grass verges beside the croft. Nettles were an ideal raw material for compost heaps, containing the perfect ingredients to produce quality compost. Incidentally they are also a pigs favourite food.

The first compost bin was now half full with green and brown waste. The second bin I decided to fill with wood pulp that the stump grinder had produced when the trees had been felled. I was not yet sure how this material would be used, perhaps as a fire-starter when it had dried out or as tree mulch. Every waste product had its uses and avoided an unnecessary trip to a recycling centre or landfill.

To create more space in the allotment we moved the logs from our felled trees to the back of the workshop. The workshop, which had originally been designed to house greyhounds, had an external enclosure for them to exercise. This was being converted into a log store. It had the correct attributes; wire mesh walls to protect the wood axes from our children, a wooden frame to hold up a roof and air flow to dry out the logs.

Autumn was well underway and the abundance of trees had covered our gardens in a patchwork of leaves. Not wanting to waste another free resource I made a small leaf bin using fence wire wrapped in a cyclinder and staked to the ground. We began collecting leaves and filling the simple container. In a year or more the leaves would root down and become a leaf mulch, to suppress weeds and heat the soil, helping the bacteria to create nutrients.

Oct
21

By

A very dangerous taxi

Category: Compost, Maintenance, The Allotment, The Village, Trees Leave a Comment

The arrival of our second child was on the horizon. Katie was unable to drive and relied on me to provide transport to her regular appointments. This was the downside of our move to the countryside. There are no shops, no newsagent, no bank, no library, no dentist and no medical centre. When Matilda was born Katie was able to walk into the town at her convenience. Unless she wished to buy a pint, a Sunday roast or a curry she would have to travel three miles to the nearest high street.

Within a month we would need to make the necessary visit to North Staffordshire hospital. It was therefore the perfect time for our car to request a trip to the mechanic. The engine cut out when we were on our way to the local church play group. We were fortunate to be only a few hundred yards from the village, and had a short walk back to our home.

That evening the news we received from our car mechanic was not good. Although the vehicle could be repaired and the problem simple, it would require a new part to be delivered and cost hundreds of pounds. With a week to wait for the car to be fixed we needed to make provision should Katie need to visit the hospital at short notice.

The next day Katie was forced to book a taxi for one of her many hospital appointments at the maternity unit. The taxi driver was unaccustomed to rural life and his car was almost flattened by a horse, which he had shown little respect for and had driven far too close behind. When Katie returned home safely, I left to hire a small car to avoid another journey in an overconfident taxi.

Katie’s father delivered several wooden pallets that he had liberated from his factory. I had requested them to enable us to build a collection of compost bins. There were not enough pallets to complete my original plan, but enough to get us started.

I used the pallets to create the four walls of the compost bins. In the end there would be four compartments to allow the bins to be used in rotation. While one bin was being filled with fresh green waste, another was rotting down and a third ready to use on the allotment.

Compost bins constructed from wooden pallets and cardboard

Compost bins constructed from wooden pallets and cardboard

To begin construction I bound the pallets together with cable ties and insulated each bin with flat-packed cardboard boxes. I recovered two large wooden boards from the workshop, previously used as the base for greyhound bedding. These acted as lids for each metre wide bin. Two large plastic sheets, that a new mattress had been delivered in this week, were placed over the bins to protect them from the rain.

I started filling the first compost bin with waste collected in our old plastic silo. I added soiled straw bedding from the chicken enclosure and ash we had been saving from the wood burning stoves. On top of this mixture I placed a sheet of weed suppressor and an old carpet to provide additional insulation. As the waste built up bacteria would begin to break down the organic material and produce some fresh compost within a year. That was our expectation.

Although we had started removing trees from our land we did not wish them all to disappear. We both appreciated trees and wanted to protect the traditional trees we had acquired while removing the intruders; such as the Leylandii. Following the removal of the sixty foot Leylandii at the front of our house the Sycamore beyond it was now in full view. I had noticed it was wrapped in ivy from the roots up to the crown. To prevent the ivy strangling the life from the tree I removing it, certain that I heard the tree breathe an audible sigh of relief.

Oct
14

By

A very productive dad

Category: The Allotment, The Garden, The House, The Workshop, Trees Leave a Comment

My parents made another visit to our home while I was away on my bi-annual golf weekend. We had invited them to stay to provide transport for Katie should her pregnancy end prematurely. Her due date was only a month away and she was unable to drive due to the size of her bump.

My father enjoying himself with a large axe making firewood for our log burner

My father enjoying himself with a large axe making firewood for our log burner

During my weekend vacation to Cheshire my father made productive use of his time without me. He began by constructing a workbench in the workshop, using wood we had acquired at a farm auction and four metres of new hardboard from a DIY store.

We had also purchased an axe, and so my father began chopping the numerous logs we had inherited into firewood. There were several small DIY tasks around the house that I had neglected and my wife made good use of his services while I was away.

We hired the services of local man with a stump grinder to remove the remains of two trees that were felled the previous week. We had been given his details by the tree surgeons after they had completed their work. The large grinding machine pummelled the tree stumps into small pieces of soft bark. We wanted the large tree stumps removed to make way for a new garden fence and a new bed in the allotment.

While we were at the allotment digging out the mound of bark one of our neighbours asked if I would be interested in possessing a few dozen paving slabs. She had replaced her small patio with a parking space for her car and had no need for them. My father and I happily collected the heavy concrete slabs from her front yard, aware that any free materials or equipment may be of use in the future. In the spirit of goodwill I exchanged the paving with a number of freshly cut logs we had accumulated awaiting storage.

Oct
7

By

A very nostalgic journey

Category: Maintenance, The Allotment, The Garden, The Village, Trees Leave a Comment

We began searching for a trailer after we had the tow-bar fitted the previous week. A trailer would allow us to collect equipment, livestock and resources more easily. We saw the trailer as an investment. It would retain most of its value and it will save money on delivery charges and fuel.

Our car was able to tow up to a tonne in weight which restricted our search to smaller livestock trailers. A new trailer would be beyond our budget. Ifor Williams are the Rolls-Royce of agricultural trailers, but even a second-hand Ifor Williams trailer would be more than a thousand pounds.

We were lucky to find an alternative six foot livestock trailer for sale on the Internet. It had a detachable canopy, enough space to carry two large pigs and had been used infrequently. We arranged to collect the trailer from the owner whom lived just across the border in Wales.

It would take ninety minutes to drive from our home in Staffordshire, across Cheshire and into Wales. We did not realise it at the time, but the route we had chosen passed by numerous locations from our recent past.

We discovered that our destination was situated a mile from a house we had viewed the previous year. It had ten acres of land included in the sale, but the elderly vendors had sold the farmyard and an adjacent nine acres to a developer. This required an entrance to be added that cut across the remaining stretch of grass connecting the crumbling farmhouse with the two five acre fields. It was a despairing, but an often repeated situation for smallholdings or farms without heirs. The prime land would be sold to developers or consumed by neighbouring farms, leaving the old farmhouse isolated and uneconomic as a smallholding.

On the journey into Wales we also passed three other properties that we had viewed during our search for a suitable home. Each we had rejected for various reasons including their condition, size and locality. It made us realise how lucky we were to have stumbled upon our new house.

The livestock trailer safely collected from Wales and delivered to our home

The livestock trailer safely collected from Wales and delivered to our home

We collected the trailer from a fellow smallholder, paying in cash, and tentatively made our way home. We made a brief pit-stop to purchase a substantial motorbike lock and secured the trailer to the chestnut tree on the allotment.

During the first few months living in the village we had meet a majority of the residents and gleaned a lot of information about its history. One small question remained unanswered during all these conversations that was pertinent to our allotment. There was a small section of land that cut into the middle of our triangular plot, that no-one appeared to own. It measured only a handful of metres square, but it was an irritation and needed to be maintained.

The scrap of land had been neglected for over twenty years, so I made further enquiries to determine if any of the neighbouring residents would mind if I took ownership of this eyesore. I received no objections and therefore we removed our bounding fence and connected the perimeter fences that had previously navigated around the obstruction.

In August we had hired a tree surgeon to remove the sixty foot tree that loomed over the entrance to our house, and to extract the dead eucalyptus tree from the allotment. Two months later two men arrived equipped to fell the trees and then shred the evidence.

A tree surgeon removing the last few branches of the leylandii

A tree surgeon removing the last few branches of the leylandii

We had requested that they leave us with all the logs and large branches for use as firewood on our log burners. The eucalyptus had died a year earlier and so the timber had already dried to a point where it was safe to burn the wood this winter.

The tree surgeons made light work of both trees. Climbing up, removing the branches as they went, before descending, chopping the trunk into manageable slices.

They had completed the work by the afternoon and we had a large pile of unprepared firewood that would last us more than a year. I took note of their branded equipment and bid them farewell.