Tree Induction

Our day started with a call from the neighbour, sheep were in the front garden eating the lawn. Shortly after we had another neighbour, the owner of the sheep, call round to collect them.

Sheep in the garden

 After that we had a call with the designers of our heating system who are trying to help us tweak and optimise our system. This all left us late for the arrival of Malcolm from the Woodland Trust who was due first thing to help us mark-out ready for planting trees. After watching us scoff down a hearty breakfast of porridge and a mug of tea we set off to mark the three planting zones.

Zone 1: Major Trees - Oak (200), Sweet Chesnut (150), Ash (550), Alder (250)

Zone 2: Minor Trees - Crab Apple (50), Silver Birch (250), Rowan (150), Wild Cherry (100)

Zone 3: Woody Shrubs - Hazel (300), Willow (50), Blackthorne (50), Hawthorne (75), Spindle (75), Holly (25), Elder (25).

After marking planting zones a lorry timely arrived with four pallets containing guards, stakes, spirals, canes and trees.

 Malcolm took us down into the field with a pack of guards, some stakes and a handful of Oak trees to show us how best to plant the trees.

Initially we expect the trees to roughly double in size every year.

Sally with our first tree, an Oak

Safely guarded, planted using Grandad Virgin's old spade.

Our first cluster of Oak Trees

After an hour or so the woodland starts to form.

PARLOUR BARN TREE PLANTING :o)

As you may know we've been talking about planting a woodland for some time and, having got ourselves organised, we'll be doing it from Friday 10th to Sunday 19th February.

With the help of the Woodland Trust we have lots of trees (2400), canes, stakes and guards being delivered on Friday 10th.  Before this, our friend from the Woodland Trust, Malcolm, will help us mark out our woodland planting areas across the bottom half of the field and up the far side, leaving us with the task of planting and maintaining the trees.

We'll be at it all week, starting with hedge planting on 11th and 12th, the first weekend, before moving into the main field area from Tuesday 14th. 

… we think this week may unintentionally coincide with half term!?!?!? …
And so we wonder, and would really appreciate it, if anyone is free to help?  We want to make it as fun and as interesting as possible and so will be trying to give out as much info as possible, feed and water you of course.

If you are free over any of the period and would like to come down to help and learn how to plant trees, the different varieties, their uses, and have your own tree in the woodland then let us know and come down.  Kids, friends etc are all welcome… lots of things for the kids to do.   The tractor will no doubt be assisting us too  :o)

We'll be planting from 10-12.30pm, breaking for lunch, planting from 2-4.30pm, then tea and cake. 

We have space here at the house, in the caravan (toasty with wood burner and heater) and at the flat if you'd like to stay (obviously the accommodation will be on a first come first served basis but we'll have to prioritise those lending a hand)


TREE PLANTING PARTY

We'd love to see as many of our friends as possible and celebrate the tree planting amongst other things so will finish the week with a party on Saturday 18th February.

If you fancy having lunch and cake between planting a few trees, and a fire and beer afterwards then let us know. 

It will all be a little weather dependent… if it's pouring down or the ground is frozen it will make planting let alone a fire a bit difficult so we'll keep you posted.

So lar la la la laaaaa

It's January and the solar thermal pump started working! Woohoo, that's free energy folks...

I've been burning wood at a rate that is causing me distress. We've nearly used up one load of wood this winter and we'll soon be eating into the second load... but on a sunny day we can hold fire on lighting the err, fire until well into the afternoon when the sun is close to setting. Morning sun streaming through the windows makes the house pretty warm. OK you need sunglasses to avoid being blinded but that's fine as long as I can take time off from lighting the sodding fire. It is a pain in the backside to be honest but we are much more in tune with our surroundings, the season and our energy usage so overall we're still happy with our decisions (I think).

The solar thermal turning on today was a real bonus though. Are we on the way to spring already? Unlike photovoltaics (PV) our collector panel needs direct sunlight to heat it up and when it reaches a certain temperature the pumps turn on and the heat is collected in the thermal storage tank. I've not noticed it working since October last year so to have it work so early this year is great. While south is the most efficient direction for a solar panel to face ours faces south west, it only sees the sun in the afternoon and with it being winter the suns trajectory is so low that it barely heats up. As the year progresses the sun sits higher in the sky and we get lots more free hot water.

Flighty little things

Passive Solar Gain

I'm loving the mornings as we move through autumn into winter, sunshine floods straight in to the barn giving a delicious natural warmth. The sun combined with heat from the wood burner soon creates the perfect temperature. We're yet to get our underfloor heating system working so fingers crossed this will add some extra heat when the the nights draw-in further and the icy conditions set in.

More Trees Please

We're in the process of applying to be part of the MOREwoods tree planting scheme run by the Woodland Trust. The idea behind the scheme is to encourage people to plant native woodland tree species. We've had a site visit by the Woodland Trust and while we're close to the sea the number and variety of species already growing in our hedgerows indicate that we can plant numerous native species on our land and within 10 to 15 years we'll have something that looks like a woodland. There are 2.5 acres to the hectare, we plan to plant out around 1.5 hectares (you need a minimum of 1 hectare to be part of the scheme) so we'll be planting roughly half of the field with trees.

How the trees will look

So why are we planting all these trees? Hmm, I'm not entirely sure of the definitive answer to that. We're aware of peak-oil so without a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion the costs of all fuels are likely to keep going up. As oil and gas prices go up so will the cost of wood to burn. I think going off grid for the sake of it is perhaps a bit extreme but having greater control of our energy supplies for the future is probably fairly sensible. A woodland that is large enough to sustainably heat our property seems to be a good idea. It's a bit like an insurance policy just in case the worst case scenario happens...

'As Peak Oil bites and energy becomes scarce the effects are likely to include steeply rising energy prices leading to the end of growth and beginning of century long economic decline, stock market and financial meltdown, bankruptcies and pension collapses, much reduced public services incl the NHS due to collapsing government income, breakdown of transportation and supply chains, shortages of food and other basic commodities and perhaps even breakdown of law and order. In short, Peak Oil has the potential to destroy our current civilisation.' (from Transisiton Group Cornwall website)

Phew!! Well if it turns out that the people of the transition movement have been getting all fidgety for no reason then we'll have created a beautiful woodland and helped species diversity, it will be great to see squirrels, deer, badgers, foxes, birds and rabbits not to mention seeing the plant life change as the pasture slowly turns to woodland. We'll also be able to chop stuff and build things which is always cool.

The great outdoors

We've pretty much finished the build. After giving the blog a bit of consideration we've decided not to bother boring anyone with our choice of haberdashery etc. If you want to see where we're at with the finishing touches then you'll have to come and visit. I should caveat that by explaining that we're fairly relaxed with our progress on the finishing touches. We're still sitting at the caravan dining table, there's still painting to be done and we don't have a single curtain or blind throughout the house. With all that said check out our new sofa ha ha.

So what's next? Onwards with the land... We have a loads of veggies still popping up and we're getting round to thinking about tree planting. We've been making a few bars of soap too

Marrows and squash

Soap in the curing area

If you want some amazing hand-made soap using essential oils and no nasty preservatives then you know where to come.