Onward and upward
Well, this will be our third night in the house and I must say the novelty still hasn’t worn off. It still feels fantastic to wake up in our new bed and gaze out over the garden. Jackie’s favourite activity is to have a shower – as she designed the bathroom and loves the fact that the water is solar heated and despite the cool nights is still hot first thing in the morning.
Many people have asked us,”Now the house is finished, what are you going to do?”. Well, as well as our two podcasting sites and looking after the veggie patch there is plenty still to do on the house.
The big things like the barn, patio and the area in front of the french windows can wait for now. Our immediate priorities are more basic – like cleaning the floors – I think this will be a continuous chore as dust accumulates daily and simply won’t go away. We also actually need to unpack. It has been great to discover things from almost a year ago like all our carpets and knick knacks. But we need to find and create space for them. i.e. build shelves and find places for all our stuff. As we asked the builders to paint everything white we have also selected a few walls for a splash of colour which we will do ourselves. Anyway, there is plenty to do so no time for idle chit chat.
As you can see from the photos below, the place is transformed (again) but still needs lots of work..
And all seems to be well in the redstart nest in the old postbox. Unfortunately for the second brood only one chick hatched but here he/she is almost ready for take off.
PS For those interested in the garden goings on. The courgettes are still in full flow but now the squashes/pumpkins are coming on and we had our first tonight – delicious. And the cucumbers are starting to take over as well – not your boring green ones (although we do have those as well) our main crop are cricket ball sized and yellow and delicious. Oh and the tomatoes and onions are also with us – so we are pretty much self sufficient in veggies now.
I hope the weather is better there than here because we have come back to winter time! We had a few scorching days in May and I thought oh-oh, it’s going to get really uncomfortable. But then June came – with the rain. Lots of it, and then some more. When that went we returned to the sunny days (with a cooling north wind) and the bbq was dusted off (or rather dried off). But today I went to check up on the veg patch and wore my fleece – it was misty and quite cool! And alas this weather has affected the crops. Some of the toms have got buckeye rot (well, I hope it’s that and not the dreaded blight) and the dwarf peas are covered in powdery mildew:
