A Kind of Inheritance

My previous post describes the unearthing of a tractor-mounted fertilizer spinner / spreader from the bank at the west end of the (now) Pond Garden and way back I have spoken of a horse drawn hay rake found in the same bank and hedge. These are all part of the charm and interest we have obtained by buying this place, an abandoned farmhouse and surrounding fields. It is our inheritance, if you like, and we have both been very struck by the fact that we have taken custody of a piece of history. We both feel very strongly that we must treat the house and land with respect, keeping it and improving it till we eventually hand it on ourselves to the next custodian(s).

The house, particularly, feels in a way which is hard to define, as if it has a soul or a spirit which we must try to make feel secure and to please. We hope that we have completely gutted the place and renovated in a sensitive way, somehow bringing it new life and warmth. This might all sound a bit weird and spiritual compared to my normal shallow, superficial warblings and I may not be describing it very well, but as we lit the first fires and sent our first warmth and smoke up the chimneys and started to see the rooms and walls dry out, we were both saying things like 'There! That's better, isn't it, house?' and we always wished it well as we went off for the weekends during the build and tried to re-assure it that we were not abandoning it again.

Too weird? Ah well. The previous owner and dweller we have called TK Min in this blog, TK being his initials; 'Min' for him being the son. This farm has been owned and run by the K family going back generations; they were definitely here in the 1901 census, and Dad (TK Max) and Grand-dad, along with Mum and Grandma are all buried in the fine family grave along in the local village cemetery. Grand-dad and Grandma died 1955 and 1963 respectively, TK Max in 1987 and his wife in 1962. 'Our man', TK min died just over 3 years ago on the 18th Feb 2010 although he had moved out of the farm around 10 years ago and the farm has been out of use and not lived in since then.

We never met any of these people. We know a bit about them from talking to local folk and have read the exciting newspaper stories of their instant fame when having their car hi-jacked by the robbers in a local bank raid in which 2 policemen were shot and killed. Our dealings have been with TK Min's sister, our 'Vendor Anna' who was involved with selling us the place on behalf of the estate following TK's passing. We have since become firm friends. There are two other sisters, hence the 'Three Sisters' described in this blog during the conveyancing, but we have yet to meet them also.

So, it was in this way that we came to 'inherit' our beautiful house and the wonderful grounds - the fields, walls, trees, the yard, the 'Secret Garden', the cattle race, the Tígín and milking/calf sheds that we love so much. In terms of physical contents, naturally most of it had been cleared away for the sale, but we also inherited a few bits and pieces and tools - a kitchen knife and an enamel, cream-coloured roasting dish, a couple of pitch forks and the hay rake. A rather nice plate and some personal papers including TK Max's "An Garda Síochána" (The Irish Police Force) membership card and newspaper cuttings, we have passed to Vendor Anna.

Until last week, that was about it. Then we were talking to Anna's Paul about the fact that I had fried my chain saw engine and needed a new one. Paul very generously volunteered the machine in his shed, a nearly new Stihl which originally belonged to none other than our own TK Min! The little we know of TK Min does have him as rather a nervous guy and no-one can actually imagine him using a chain saw. Paul is also not a great fan of these tools, so he has not used it either; nor did he intend to start, so this one is probably about 6 years old (says our man at Stihl Main Dealer, East Brothers of Boyle) and will not have turned a crank for most of those 6 years.

We are delighted of course and very grateful to Anna and Paul as it saves me buying a new one for €370+. I have whizzed it straight round to our chainsaw genius, Felix-the-Fix to check it over, service it and (mainly) re-assure me that it is safe to use. It even came with the instruction book. I have used some of the saved money to treat myself to a pair of those kevlar, chain-saw safety trousers as, in general, I prefer life with both legs.

There you have it then; our inheritance and our plans for its custody and enjoyment.

In Planning Mode

We have always meant to create a garden on this site alongside the productive, small-holder bits but had only vaguely formed fluffy notions that it might be here and it might contain this or that plant. We have started last year with a nice flower bed 'out front' using seed salvaged from the Kent garden - hollyhocks, Erigeron (Spanish daisy), love-in-a-mist, Welsh poppy and Californian poppy and Granny's Bonnets - and we'd started to accumulate bits and pieces in pots in the yard, but it was all very late by the time we finished builder-ing and things did not really get cracking.

Not a bother. Gardening, to us, is always a long term project, never an instant-gratification, weekend make-over fix. We tend to happily plant things 'this year' knowing they will look good 'next spring' or even a decade or more away. In Faversham we had been gardening for 19 years and had the 100' by 24' strip crammed with perennials, shrubs, the (very crowded) orchard with the 'woodland garden' under it. I took a separate allotment to give me some veg' growing space but we were, by the time we'd 'finished' lost for space and unable to buy any plants because of not having anywhere to plant them. What we did buy had to be small and stay small. Here, on our 2.5 acres, we have the opposite problem. Small plants would be lost in the space, so we need to be talking 'drifts' of colour and bigger shrubs and trees.

Both Liz and I are keen and (if I can say this modestly enough!) quite knowledgeable gardeners by now but as spring starts to move and give us parachutist's "ground-rush" we were still dithering even as to which bit of the site to do the gardening in. I have started digging a pond in the space between the hay barn and the orchard, so one candidate was the (as yet only gleam-in-the-eye) "Pond Garden" but most of the decisions had been up to now, NOT to garden in places. We like the front lawn as an expanse of green so this is only likely to get drive edges of ox-eye daisy and Gypsophilia. Up the left hand side of the barn has the ex-Steak-Lady offerings in it but is probably just a holding area.

Things were given a boost by local Aladdin's Cave shop Wispy's who suddenly launched their garden centre display stocked with an amazing rage of plants at silly prices - 3 for €5, €1.99 and so on. Liz and I fell upon the display and filled a bag, climbing rose, mock orange, Convallaria, Echinops, red hot poker, Echinacia, almost-black hollyhocks..... Driving home we got to talking that NOW we'd need to start the garden to have somewhere to house this bounty.

We love this stage and have a good team method. I go striding about in the frost with my gloves on and my biro sputtering in the freezing air to create a rough plan. Liz converts this into a sensible scale map with 1 m squares with the software package 'MS-Visio'. It is a joy to watch her. She borrows Visio's pre-prepared cloud shapes and squishes them long and thin to represent hedges. She draws lines and pulls them out of shape to make bits of pond shore-line, re-sizes stuff and colours in boxes for 'the'allotment' or adds circles to represent trees in the orchard.

The Visio map we can then print several copies of to allow for some quick 'concept' scratchings as we dream up a path here or a gentle bank there, a trellis to hide the caravan or a willow 'igloo' over there. Things get rubbed out as many times as they get created. The many gardening books come out as we start to home in on what might go into the space - Monty Don, Geoff Hamilton, Bob Flowerdew, Penelope Hobhouse, Hessayon's 'expert' series all get gleaned for bits on damp gardens, damp shade, structure, colour. The umpteenth version will be the one that gets kept. Liz jokes that she will preserve that so that in ten years time we can look back and say "Well, that is what we were going to do, but we never did ANY of that!". That is the way of gardening.

Things evolve and move on. Some of the plants we plan, we never actually find for sale so other things slot in. Some bits work and others don't. Some plants take off like mad things. You get given donations by generous gardener friends. We like that here because space is what we have for the moment, so "invasive", "rampant" and "thug" can be good words. Well, I wake up this morning to find that Liz was at it well into the wee small hours and the 'umpteenth' map is well peopled with Achillea, Regal Lilies, Rudbeckia, Hostas, lavender, foxgloves, lilac and Potentilla  and Crocosmia.

Now we just have to go out there and 'do' it. The pond itself needs finishing so that the spoil can be shaped into the landscaping and the stones can become the edges of mini raised-beds for the less wet-tolerant species. The bank on the west side needs clearing of its fallen elder, grown-up-through nettles and stoloniferous grasses and , it turns out, we need to unearth the buried 'treasure', in this case a tractor mounted fertilizer spreader; we could only see the rim sticking up and had thought it might be an oil drum. Thank you Mr Farmer for that nice surprise!

All the fine-tuning, digging, raking, preparing seed beds and planting holes is a bit of a way away, but the future beckons and we have 'The Vision Thing'. We can see ourselves sitting in our Darby and Joan chairs watching the sun go down over the pond as the geese splash about in the evening light. The leafless winter dogwood stems glow crimson and the happy perennials sleep beneath their mulch of compost. We'll get there.

Was She Listening?

Perhaps St Brigid was listening yesterday and looked down on our rather beginner-ish making of the crosses and approved. For what ever the reason we finally got a beautiful spring-like day today, on the 2nd Feb. The sun shone and was warm, quickly burning off any frost on the grass and melting the thin ice on the water in the wheel barrows. The sky was clear blue and the birds sang. There was barely a breath of wind. All encouraged, I nipped a load of laundry into the machine and hung it on the line outside to dry. Some of it even dried! That seems like the first time we've been able to do that since early December. My younger brother has just flown off to the Algarve in search of the sun. He could have stayed here. OK, maybe we are not THAT warm, but spring is definitely round the corner.

The lack of wind and rain mean that I can move my goose-house making operation out of doors, which is handy as the finished house will be 3' by 4' by 3' and would not fit through the Tígín doors once built. Yesterday, cowering from the icy blast and lashing rain, I had started off but concentrated on completing single panels to build myself effectively a 'flat pack'. Today I would have a chance to put it all together and so finish the roof, hinged door flap and bolt.

It was so warm that I was able to work in a polo short and sweatshirt, even rolling up the sleeves at one stage. I did, though, put on my garden knee-pads; the concrete was a bit cold and damp for too much kneeling. We have now put this house in the orchard so that the geese can get to know it, get used to it and, who knows, even learn to love it and use it. They are currently over-nighting in the calf house and we have a little routine where I release them in the morning and they waddle off up the cattle race to the 'pond garden' and orchard. Then about 5 p.m. I go out and find them and they happily waddle back into the yard and into their calf house where I shut the door and give them their supper of sprouted wheat (this has proved to be very palatable and the geese love it, hoovering it up).

On the dog walk today, which took me down to Feigh Bridge, I took a camera. Today may be dry and warm, but the recent heavy rain has filled our little local lough, Lough Feigh to what seems to be an unprecedented level, at least in local memory. Lough Feigh seems to spend most of its life as little more than a water filled raggedy ditch surrounded by tall bull-rushes and other reeds, so that what open water there is can not easily be seen from our lane. Suddenly it is a decent sized, expanse of shining water with swans a-swimming and geese honking. When the nieces were up in August we went down through John Deere Bob's fields to look and had to walk miles across wet boggy grass to get to the lake's edge.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to get good photos from our lane as we run along the top of a round-backed ridge. I will have to consult my local maps and see if there is a road or path which runs closer to the edge before all this watery magnificence drains away. Lough Feigh is unusual in having no river draining into it and only a tiny, convoluted ditch draining out. It seems to get its water just from our ridge and the River Lung runs in a neighbouring valley just to its south. The twisty turny 'ditch' joins the two only when the lough is at its fullest. Perhaps this is the start of spring and the lough can return to 'raggedy ditch' once again.

No snow here but..

No snow here but plenty of rain. On this particular piece of ground at the end of this very wet year (last year, actually, I guess) any decent amount of overnight rain means we know we will wake up to some impressive puddles. My two pictures are of the pond garden; only the first is not meant to be actual pond. What we have, though, a-top our 75 m ridge between the valleys (and boggy land) of the Lough Feigh to the south and the River Lung to the north, are a good depth of lovely soil lying over clay. We are not convinced that the clay allows much downward drainage but we know that the soil layer allows good sideways drainage down the slopes either way so that when it stops raining, our puddles are generally gone by 12 hours later, certainly within 24 hours

The problem has been that in the very unusual year of 2012 (all the locals say "We've never known anything like it!") the puddles have barely drained away and the water table is still fairly high, before the next rains come and re-fill the puddles. Even in the summer, and the month of August when we had the Silverwoods up to stay for a week it did not really ever dry out to depth. They were able to camp and there was plenty of dry ground to play badminton on the front lawn etc, but nobody was kicking up any dust.

It can happen. I have seen video of the turf 'harvesting' machines down on the peat bogs in summer kicking up clouds of dust as they move about so we are hopeful that 2013 might give us some proper summer heat. In 2012 I never had to water any plants. Having taken a bit of a ribbing from some quarters for "moving to a bog" we were relieved that the wet also included the UK, where those taking the mick 'enjoyed' conditions as wet as we were. Mercifully the whole winter where we were caravan-based and building the house, was mild and dry enough that we were never prevented from working. The week we chose to do the plastering was exceptionally mild and the guys were all working in polo-shirts and short sleeves. Messing with plaster and cement is not a lot of joy when there's a frost.

As to the pond, when I get a chance to complete the digging of it, the plan is to dig down the 2 spade depths of soil to expose the clay, and then puddle and draw up a clay layer from this to form a bowl. We hope this will save us using a liner. Even if the pond does not become waterproof, if it rains in 2013 like it did this year
we should have no problem keeping it full. I will just divert the car-port run off into it via the sheep drinker. In the next few posts you will learn that we are soon getting some geese. I am hoping that these guys, puddle-ducking in the unfinished pond, might be able to help with the "puddling" of the clay.

The existing animals, of course, will always find somewhere out of the rain, even when, as sometimes happens with the cats, they are outside the house as we lock up to go shopping. The picture is of Blue on his hay bale in the chicken house, keeping an eye on any local rodent incursions.

Funny Old Season

We are coming at last to the end of this very unusual, frustrating season in the garden. Everyone round here (and further a-field) has had the same cold and wet as we have done and have commented that it has been the worst year ever. We, though, have also had to live with the fact that we did not finish building the house till the end of April so that (with the exception of a few spuds from the 'Secret Garden') nothing even got sown till May and in the Kitchen Garden 3 of the raised beds did not exist till June. Dad says he would not normally have the nerve to be publishing this stuff. We are only now, in September, able to pick our first few sweet peas and harvest our first chard and "Summer" squashes.

Roses here seem to come from the Garden Centres forced into flower outside of their normal season so that you buy them and plant them and the shop flush of flowers dies off. The rose then sorts itself out and consolidates its root system before eventually, producing a proper flush of flowers. In our case this is now, in September as for the Joseph's Coat climber above. In the garden we are more concerned with getting ready for Winter than 'first flushes' of bloom.

On that score we have had another result akin to the discovery of buried coal and anthracite in that heap in the Pond Garden (formerly the 'bit we don't talk about'). That is the discovery by the side of the drive of piles of buried and overgrown gravel for the drive. The drive as we bought the house was graveled with very nice round small pebbles, all be it well buried under 15 years of spruce needles and now bearing a fine layer of turf. The gravel seems to be of a type now described as 'decorative stone' and therefore commanding a premium. Whenever we have bought gravel since it is called "804" grade and is crushed, sharp-edged pieces of stone which bare feet do not enjoy walking on. These piles have presumably been scraped off the drive at some stage or were delivered and never spread a round but we have decided to use them to do the paths around the kitchen garden. Some of these were starting to muddy up as we head into winter and we don't want to be puddling around when picking veg, so some nice free draining gravel is the perfect solution (more shoveling for Dad, though!).

We have two more good results to report, as well, of gift plants. First the tiny lupin self-seeds donated by Vendor Anna have finally got into flower, just in time, hopefully, to set some seed which we can use in 2013. As we come into the end of the season we are already, like good gardeners, thinking and planning about Spring and how we'll do things differently given a proper 12 month long year to go at.

And the fig tree below which has pulled through a time of great trauma and is looking good going into winter. This is a 'Brown Turkey' fig tree obtained as a cutting from Pud Lady a couple of years back and grown successfully in a half barrel (also a gift) on the back terrace  in our old house in Faversham. When we came to start packing to move we knew we had to root wash it as you are not allowed to import soil, so it was brutally decapitated, uprooted and root-washed and then taken to Hastings, where Dad and us dogs lived for a few weeks. It spent the time sitting in a bucket of water till it could be moved over in a car with us on 10th Dec 2011. From there is was heeled into the front terrace here, but it showed no sign of growing. Only the thumb-nail dent showing green sap-wood saved it from the scrap heap.

Then one weekend while we were not about the JCB came to dig out the trenches for our drains and his chosen way in was across the terrace and then to bulldoze through the end of the terrace, the hedge and the bottom of what became known as the Primrose Path. I suppose it all looked like a rough old building site and the driver will not have even seen the 12 inch naked 'trunk' in among the stones and herbage. Poor old Brown Turkey, bulldozed, we thought and gone for ever. We looked around in the piles of spoil but to no avail.Then Mum decided to look at pictures Dad had taken of the area and including the planting site and worked out that the JCB must have missed the fig and it might just be 'here' under these waste boulders. A scrabbled dig and removal of 'over-burden' proved that this was true and the poor buried flattened fig trunk was persuaded back up to 45 degrees from horizontal and now protected with a ring of big boulders making the site obvious. Slowly slowly a couple of tiny buds started to expand and now, a month later, we have 2 short side branches and a couple of true leaves! One tough fig tree! May it go on to great things at the end of our terrace!

Deefs