The Pastoral Dream

We have begun to build the polytunnel behind the yurt. It was up in a yonder hay field for two years, but in what turned out to be the least sunny corner. Every day by noon a nearby row of trees cast their shadow across the tunnel- bad planning (or lack thereof) on our part. Anyway, there are fewer trees around this field, thus we get a good deal of sunshine on bright days. Hopefully this translates directly into more tomatoes!

In the foreground of the photo is one of our allotments and Simon’s handcrafted chicken coop. The chickens have spent several weeks now scratching and clearing the weeds, thus saving the future allotmenteers a good bit of labour. Yesterday evening Simon moved the coop beside the polytunnel for the same reason- once the plastic goes up we will let the chickens do their work on the inside. When we put the polytunnel up two years ago we used the JCB for that purpose, but we wanted a cleaner method this time around.

This is our lovely outhouse and humanure bin. We have a rustic compost toilet in that 6×4 shed- we dump wood chips on top between each use, and when the bin is full we move it outside to… brew. This eventually gets dumped on the heap inside of the pallet bin. In the past year we have only filled it up once. Last November we emptied it into the hugel bed that I was standing on to take the above photo. The humanure had no smell at all and had broken down beautifully. We planted loads of kale on it, so eventually we’ll be closing the loop. 😉

One last photo to show how far we’ve come in a year compared to my last post. The gardens are overrun with weeds at the moment, but spring is officially upon us, so it won’t be long before colour returns to the scene.