As promised, here is a further update to give you all more info about what we are up to at present with our project down here in Cornwall.
Over the last week or so Paul has built a camera house that actually holds 4 cameras inside of the building. It has been mounted on a sturdy pole and sited down at our northern boundary. One camera looks West along the boundary wall and another looks East along the boundary wall.
Inside of the house, Paul has built two birds nests facing in the same directions as the external cameras and we are hoping that next year we get some guests taking up residence whilst they have their families. Each of these nests has cameras set inside and will hopefully give us a good view of their nesting should we be lucky to have one or both of these nests taken up, we may be able to post videos from it.
Our new camera house holds four cameras, 2 external and two internal for the inbuilt bird boxes.
Paul found a huge piece of marble rock whilst he was digging out the hole for the camera house which was right where he had decided to place it. Rather than choose a new hole to either side of the original site, he decided to dig it out which took quite an effort. But it seems like it was worth it because the piece of pink marble has a lovely flat side to it which has now been sited to provide a seat by the camera house.
Beautiful piece of pink marble which now doubles as a natural seat. What do you think?
Before the cameras can be used, Paul has to run the cabling down the field to the house and then connected up to provide us with another four cameras.
The hut, although up and running and housing many of our gardening tools, is not quite finished yet. Paul has put on the guttering to the back of the hut which will provide water for the water butts we are going to site by the hut on the Southside, and also can be diverted to our new pond when we get around to building that. At the rear of the hut where the downpipe comes down to the ground, a pipe has been run under the grass which will take excess water from the roof to the future pond. For now, the water will just drain into the long grass but can be extended to the pond area.
Front aspect of our hut.
Paul hopes that this coming week will be great weather-wise to do some work on the wall foundations and get those in so the building of the wall can commence. You can see the fall of the field which although a gentle slope, makes building a challenge when putting up any kind of structure.
Starting at the hut end, the North wall will extend East to join up by the composting area which when finished will keep out smaller animals such as Hedgehogs and rabbits! We do not have a rabbit problem at present but there are some in the Cemetary area to the South and East, so they are in the area.
We do not need to tell anyone how much damage rabbits can do to a garden area in a short space of time so we shall breathe a little easier once the garden walls are complete. We have spotted a few deer just a short distance away from us, but there has been no sign at all of them getting into our area, so fingers crossed.
As we walked up past our fruit field we noticed that the CCTV cables to the newly built Camera house had been moved a little. Paul checked the recordings and guess what turned up? 3, yes three foxes! Seems like a family out on their rounds and playing around our fruit field.
They eventually found the CCTV cables running along the field and did not know what they were. It would appear that they thought it may be a snake? What do you think?
They certainly were very hesitant about getting near it until one brave fox started to pull the cable :), luckily, they caused no damage and they did alert us to the fact we have a family of foxes in the area.
Loraine is a very happy bunny! She has a new toy…… NO! Not toy-boy, I mean a machine of her own.
She now can do the lawn mowing in comfort and much quicker than it used to take with the manual mower. Her new toy is a Mountfield Ride-on mower, and she is very good at it too.
Not as shiny as this one but in great condition. And it cuts the grass we have much faster than the manual mower. It used to take us something like 10 hours of work just to do the Orchard. Now she can do it in 30-40 minutes and she gets to sit down whilst she does it
All of you take care and we’ll post soon!