Paul has now cleared all of the ivies from the cemetery south wall and it looks much better.
The ivy would have eventually killed the Elder tree it was growing on.
With all the tumultuous world events that are going on at present, it is hard to drag ourselves away from the Alternative media and get on with the tasks in hand. Still, we do our best to keep up with it all. The main entrance to the gardens has now been fitted with the bespoke gate Paul made to fit. Having been varnished numerous times, it should last a long time even in the often atrocious weather conditions we get down here in Cornwall.
Main Gate to the walled garden area with a bespoke wooden gate fitted with heavy-duty hinges and twisted ring latch.
Topped off with an arch of metal mesh to support the clematis next year.
The compost area shed has also been varnished to stop the door from swelling in the rain and once the guttering is put on it is nearly complete. Loraine is hoping to eventually produce a couple of tons of composting here to help with feeding the earth for the plants.
The nearly completed composting area should provide us with a fair amount of homemade compost during the year.
The next part of the Main garden project is the West Wall. This will take the garden wall up to the North-West corner where the hut will be sited, there the wall will turn 45 degrees to the East and run down to the compost area as seen to the left of the photo above. That section will contain two gates to allow access to the Meadow field and the other to allow quick access to the Fruit bush area.
Paul is now busy moving the 277 remaining blocks to the area and stacking them ready for building this wall. The time it will take to do this is dependant upon the weather of course and at the moment it is not particularly helpful, to say the least. However, Paul wishes to complete this part of the garden wall by Christmas so that gives about six weeks or so. Loraine has maintained the vegetable plot pretty much on her own whilst Paul carries on with the building tasks and she has done a remarkable job too. We are reaping many vegetables for our meals and they are all divinely tasting.
The Purple Sprouting Broccoli is looking particularly good this year thanks to Loraine's hard work. This should be ready
around the end of the year into the New Year.
Most of the old fencing that divided the fields has now been taken down and all of the timber will be reused in the coming building works. As the fence posts were not particularly well set, it was fairly easy to lift them out of the ground intact and they are drying out on the ground cover mats.
The actual timbers forming the fence were harder to deconstruct as they had been screwed into the fence posts rather than nailed. This required Paul having to cut each piece with the electric saw and then pull off the timber and then stack it on the mats. The remaining screws on the fence posts had to be snapped off as they would not move even using an impact screwdriver. However, that is mostly done except for the section that is still forming the West wall until the block wall is built, then that too can be dismantled.
Here you can see the line of the trench for the West wall from the Southern corner.
The last piece of the original fence will be taken down once Paul finishes this section.
Once finished, the enclosed garden area will be large enough to grow just about any vegetables we wish to try out. We hope to grow a large amount of Corn here being one of our favorite veggies. This top corner as seen in the photo above will be the site of the new Hut.
The hut itself will be 18×24 feet, and there will be a veranda on the East and south sides to sit on and hopefully admire the view. We have already brought the cables up to the site and there are power, telephone and internet cables ready and waiting for a connection. The power cable is already in use for tasks such as mowing and other power tool usage.
This view of the South wall is from the inside of the growing area and we have placed weed suppressant down to stop
weeds from taking hold until we can get the beds ready for no-dig.
Paul has built-in returns on the inner wall, not only to give it extra strength in high winds but to section off the inside areas to make the areas easier to maintain. Once we take delivery of the next load of compost, we shall be working on these new beds to get them ready for next year.
Hope you enjoyed the update and we shall post more when we have completed more of the works.