Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

September is all but done. Our fingers are purple from plucking berries, scored by thorns, sore and satisfied. How lucky we are, and how grateful! Through the cold spring, and the soggy summer, we have worked to make this place more and more beautiful. We are charming sustenance from the soil with our toiling; using the present to craft a kinder path- a tree-lined, fruit-bearing way.  And so here we are, in autumn, a time of harvest, glut, and storage. A time to plant trees, a time of festival. Our lives are seasonal, tidal, temperate, held in repetitions that are never the same; variations of repeating patterns, a common uniqueness. How lucky we are, and how grateful! Pollinator friendly saplings added to  the firepit hedge, lower field.

It has been a while since I wrote a blog post - I have been writing books, and keeping a diary, the days and the work aren’t lost, just ticking quietly in a corner. [There’s a little dust in that corner but the shelf is made of strong oak planks, and the light is enchanting. A plant grows in a pot, it spouts leaves. A half candle stands in a china holder.] At Paddock Garden (properly titled Paddock Garden Orchards, I am a lazy typer) a tree corral has been constructed. It contains persimmons which may not have survived the recent cold blasts and heavy rain, along with some happy pepper trees, bladdernuts, and plum yews. We plan to underplant and interplant extensively in this concentrated area. Around the grounds also we have begun some windbreak hedges, mostly of elaeagnus and hazel. We have a line of sapling native oaks edging the spinney. The first of our camping bay areas is growing emerald grass that was seeded last autumn; the second has recently been seeded; the last three need ...

Frosty mornings hung on through the month of May. Spring was wintry, we couldn’t shake the grip of cold; the switch into heat has been sudden, and equally stubborn. At Paddock Garden the grass has been cut and all the stubble is biscuity-beige. If you look closely there is green underneath- the earth here is rich, though clay-thick in places, and not everything is nourished. We study the leafless plum and cherry saplings wondering what we did wrong, whether the allelopathic ash trees have told them ‘you can't grow here’ or a pest or a disease or drought overcame them? Will they resurge? We won’t know for sure till winter returns. It feels at first like a condemnation but of course it is only part of our educational gambling. All the other trees are thriving, even the ones near swallowed by brambles in the bottom hedge. There are cherries, plums, pears, and apples in miniature, swelling out of slender wood. Where the tractor couldn’t reach the grasses are eye height, tipped with...

Dear Readers, Here we are! Not lost, just busy, just tired, just taking a moment to sit with our shared flask of ginger tea, wiping our snotty noses, watching winter and spring swing around in their season-switching dance. Hard frost crackles, soft petals bloom. We had been busy with the old art of hedge laying, busy sorting and tidying the felled trunks, branches, and twigs. There are heaps and stacks and bundles - these boundaries have been untouched for decades - but birds are beginning to gather materials for nests, heralding the end of our hedgework for a while. Our thoughts have turned to The Planting Plan, so we pace around measuring canopy distances before going home to pour over the map, again, again.   Two plum trees wait in pots, they have their spots marked. Everything else is a maybe. Down along the iron fence are lines and lines of daffodils, all in bud. Only one has opened, a miniature narcissus staring bravely up at the big world. We are inspired of course, t...

‘1/1/22 Saturday Last night just before midnight, we strolled down the dark lane, wine glasses in hand; spotted constellations, watched distant fireworks. This morning Dog had done several splats of foulness on the living room carpet. HNY! Also this morning: In bed, chinking coffee cups, we say- what will this year bring? We hope it’s a track and a toilet shed.’ Well, we have a track on our land, all the way from top to bottom gate. It’s not as finely finished as we’d hoped, but it is here. We have a toilet shed, and it’s not the quality lumber we had hoped for, but it is built, and it will suffice. Everything is layering up, however slow or wonky: up! There were, too, events that we did not foresee or hope for. The van engine blew up. We can’t fix it. No one wishes to buy it, at least not yet. It will be utilised as a winter shelter on our land until a better idea/miracle arrives. A painful chunk of land fund went to buy a replacement vehicle, which is much cheaper to run so there is...

Day 8: We waited for cooler hours before loading up the van, intent on finishing the shed build. The Shed Saga finale! We were optimistically wrong, of course, though the roof felt was tacked down, and both the fascia and the perched diamond of finial were drilled in. The field grass was looking parched, it was the colour of wheat biscuits. Crickets chirped- they always sound merry. We were hot and sticky like two marinated chunks. ‘It looks like a shed,’ we observed, surprised. ‘We should get the doors hinged!’ But our stomachs were growling and we were clumsy-tired. The doors would have to be another adventure. Meanwhile, it was time for cooking burgers in the van, for getting our stable sofa bed ready for a well-earned sleep, for setting up one table and two chairs under the sweep of the ash tree, looking down across the lower field as the sun dipped behind us and the nearly-full pink-faced moon rose up from the tree line on the opposite hill. We fetched out our reclining chairs, im...

'January 1st, 2022:  In bed, chinking coffee cups, we say- what will this year bring? We hope it’s a track and a toilet shed.' Day 1: Our DIY shed kit having been scheduled for delivery on a day on which neither of us was working, we arrived at the land having barely finished our morning coffee. Mr had pre-constructed a base, 10 feet by 8 feet, which we diligently levelled. Then we waited. We had a picnic lunch. We napped in the dapples under an ash tree. We had afternoon snacks. We wandered to survey the wild blooms, discovered an unexpected tomato plant. Somewhere between 4 and 5pm the van arrived and was directed up to the shed site; the terse driver helped us unload, and then sped away to the next ‘place in the middle of nowhere.’ We stared at the heap of flimsy panels and knew that we were wrong to skimp and go for the good price and let ourselves be lulled by the internet write-up. But perhaps we let our expectations run too far? There’s one way to find out - start the ad...

Work continues on preparing the flat areas for seeding with grass and clover. We have a new routine of stopping at County Tyres to fill the van with their cast-offs, before getting to the land, unrolling one bay’s worth of weed suppressant membrane, weighing it down with one line of stinky rubber and one line of soil dug from the stony ground. By then we are overheated, feel like we’ve been dunked in vaseline, decide that will do for the day, and snort at ourselves for thinking all of this would be done in a few hours. Usually, we head home for a nap, but sometimes we have company. On this particular day, we are hosting a family picnic- the gazebo is up, some rudimentary furniture is brought from the stable, the cold box is unpacked, salad is chopped. Grandchildren 6 & 7 are here with their Mum, they are ‘helping’ which they are surprised to discover does not include rolling the tyres down the hill. Being made to attempt to recover the tyres does dampen their enthusiasm- G7 informe...

Thursday was hot like all the other days. Everyone had a warm glow like barbeque glaze. We had planned to go to the land but babysitting duties intervened. Grandchildren 6 & 7 (we have numbered our blessings) came to have garden adventures while their mother attended Grandchild 2’s Junior School Leavers’ Day Assembly. After surviving our lawn being lava, and an attack of maffive spiders (Maffive? Yeah, really big, Granma, maffive!) and this evening’s heat-hazed Tae Kwon-Do sessions (having returned Gs 6&7 to tell their tales) we, in the van, with a snoozy Dog, headed landwards, to be ready for an early start. We took a turn around the newly cut fields, soaking in the cooler evening air, serenaded by medieval music - minstrels at a nearby wedding, most likely, another celebratory moment. There were tiny bats circling a sycamore tree, there were evening primrose flowers glowing in the lowing light. Old Dog, loving the ease of the short grass, sprang into a joyful run; old limbs...