Hi Greg & Mandy, Gordon and I have just looked at your ongoing project. It looks like you have a lot of work to do. Maybe in he new year we can come and see you both and all your hard work.
We've had an amazing summer working hard with a lot of help from wwoofers. For those who don't know the concept of wwoofing please see www.wwoof.org.uk. It stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. In exchange for free room and board at Ale Farm, people from all over the world have helped us on our land. One example of the many projects we've worked on this summer is the edible meadow. Last autumn we started three hugelkulture beds. They needed a lot more work. Daniel, from Germany and Cecilia, from Italy, made a start by first clearing the ragwort that had grown up. See photo above. Jean-Baptiste, from France, and Beate, from Germany carried on the work and Beate became expecially expert at building the beds. We had, and still have, plenty of prunings and clippings to build the beds. They'll be finished off with more compost and finally top soil. Natalie, from California, gave the edible mea...
We moved in on 5th March but it's been so busy I've only just found time to update this blog. We still have boxes to unpack, furniture to arrange and more things to take to charity shops. Outside is still a bit of a building site. However, we love it. It's so quiet apart from noises from wildlife. When there are no clouds at night we can see the stars clearly. The photo below is the moon behind our walnut tree. The trees in our new orchard are coming into leaf and we've planted potatoes between the trees. We hope to have a forest garden there eventually. The greenhouse is being cleared, thanks to Rachel and Adam. More on that in a future post. Our new second hand mower is wonderful. A friend gave us a trailer and it's been so useful moving things around, especially up the hill. There's so much to look forward to and now the weather is improving we can't wait to do more outside.
This will be our first Christmas at Ale Farm! We've managed to get some lights up outside, even if they don't cover the whole house. Inside we've decorated but we haven't bothered to put up our 40 year old plastic tree as we're still looking for the box of baubles! We certainly have a lot of greenery on the farm that can be used for decorations. We have a lot of wild rose hips too for that touch of red. This is one of our fields with our lovely big walnut tree overhanging in the foreground. We plan to turn this into a wildflower meadow. As it's chalk downland it should eventually have some interesting plants. First we need to remove some of the grass. We planted some yellow rattle to help with that. Here's our new orchard, planted in March this year. So far all the trees have survived and we've even had some tiny, tiny apples on the gala and discovery trees. The orginal cooking apple tree is doing well and has supplied us wi...
Hi Greg & Mandy, Gordon and I have just looked at your ongoing project. It looks like you have a lot of work to do. Maybe in he new year we can come and see you both and all your hard work.
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