We have survived our first fortnight. We have moved in, without furniture which remains in storage, and have started to find out how things work. The house is sited jnside its land and the fields are clearly going to require sheep, or some other ruminants, to help us keep them in control.
The views are better than I remembered them with good aspects over Cadair Idris.There have been a number of urgent tasks. We have started to look at our land and size up sites for a vegetable garden. We have discovered that the soil is largely clay so it will require quite a bit of work. We will need to work in a lot of organic matter into raised beds.
The first steps in this reminded me how difficult clay is to dig and prompted the thought that we might consider pottery as an alternative.
Most of the manuals suggest that, with enough work, clay soils can be fertile but they generally do suggest it is a major undertaking. We will need to look at local sources of manure.We have made the hen-house so that we can arrange the flittings of our hens. This came as a flat pack system and was remarkably easy to put up and much cheaper than the ones in the stores.
The shock of the move for the hens might be lessened when they discover that we intend them to share their new home with a cockerel.
The next major task has been to secure fire and wood. It prove very easy to set up the stoves and these have been very effective at bumping out heat. However, the collecting of wood has been much harder.
A new axe made the felling of some trees reasonably easy work but we spend two days cutting this into a third of a cord. This work was dreadfully strenuous and slow. We alternated between the bow saw and, in desparation, an axe. However, after a trip to the local store and the purchase of a new saw we discovered the importance of a sharped and clean blade. Now we were slicing through logs like butter. A bad workman may blame his tools but bad tools do make a crap workman.
