The Wilderness Years

Hello blog. I missed you. How have you been, it's been ages. You look good, have you lost weight?

Ahem.

So it's been a couple of months. Busy months. Cram everything we really need but not necessarily everything we own into a van & head north kind of busy.
So operation Get Out Of Dodge has been a success, and we're now settled in a modest pile of bricks somewhere left of the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields, fields, more fields and the occasional tree. The last month has mostly involved getting the new place (home of the Crazy Scheme*) hauled into the 21st Century (simple things, you know. Hot water, a phone line, a toilet that flushes, a damp course, furniture, a cooker. That sort of thing. And finally internet. Yay!), and working on the garden.

Ah, yes. The Garden. We had a large-for-a-city-garden in Sheffield, but here we have something 4 or 5 times the size (more info will be forthcoming), mostly made of weeds with islands of rubble** at the far end. The place had been empty for a year before we moved in, but the previous owners only had lawn (Grass! Bloody grass! You're in Lincolnshire, with the most gorgeous soil a person could wish for, and you go for a bleedin' patio-and-grass garden!). So the turf is being taken up & put into piles & covered with old blankets. In a year they should hopefully have turned into some good potting compost. Less foolish people would probably employ machinery to do this, but I'm favouring the spade & ibuprofen gel approach. It's a lot slower, but lets me get contact with the soil, and all the beasties within (snails, slugs, beetles & the occasional, rather surprised, toad).
That leaves the question of what to do with it all once it's cleared. MikeyFox has (rather unhelpfully) pointed out that we have room for 24 apple trees (after some negotiations, this became a compromise of 6 or 7 fruit trees, no less than 3 apples. As there are over 7,000 varieties of apple out there, it may take a while to, um, decide on which 3 apple trees), or 14 apple trees & a Really Big Polytunnel. So we're currently flicking through The Polytunnel handbook by Andy McKee & have made a garden plan out of fuzzy felt.

Ours is the one on the left.

*Lets Leave The City & Steady Jobs To Live In The North Lincolnshire Countryside, Start A Brewery & Be Self-Sufficient-Ish

**Oh how we marvelled at the bathroom extension on the house when we viewed the place, little did we know that the old bathroom was in a pile at the end of the garden under the nettles...