Spring 2013

The early spring 2013 at Grove Farm,  can be neatly summed up by this photo...

Occasionally it dried up enough to progress the treehouse , but it was slow, sporadic going. I will write a separate 'treehouse'  blogpost when its all done (its not quite done yet!) so will keep details in this post brief.

In March it stopped raining and snowed instead!  A year earlier it had been 24 degrees Celcius  and local kids had been swimming in the river ! The digger stopped digging and started snow-ploughing instead, much to the childrens amusment on the way to school !

Towing the car up the hill on school run.

It all looked very scenic...

Looking towards the ruin in lower field

...but made outside work almost impossible at times

Well I may have done a bit today, it looks so lovely !

When the spring warmth arrived the treehouse responded by shooting up rapidly- somewhat larger than I'd initially expected, like some unknown plant from a garden centre sale !

The main reason for this was the high calibre plans I was using (or was I drawing them as I built it, I cant quite remember !). Spot the deliberate mistake on these, the only, 'plans'....

I never could be that bothered with accurate plans.

 Correct - they dont have any measurements on them ! Since most of the materials are  reclaimed I just used everything I had available - which turned out to be quite a bit ! I'm quite pleased with how it looks - more a tree 'mansion' than tree 'house' !

Or, as a friend on the Grove Farm Facebook page put it,  "Make Awesome as they say!""

"Make Awesome!"

The treehouse has progressed considerably from there - but more in next post.

Other things that have been happening - regular archery by local students - shooting accurately at up to 100 yards !

THUD ! Bullseye !

 Possible ideas for future eco-grass management were looked into. aaaaaah !

"Alpaca my warm clothes"

A different perspective on the farm was gained from the view of a remote controlled R10 Quadrotor  courtesy of cousin Henry Fletcher.  The ongoing turning area and treehouse can be seen on the left. There is a video of the flight on YouTube . The lane I have dug out runs along behind the wall behind the two static caravans in yard.

The farm viewed towards Lothianbridge viaduct/ Newtongrange

By Easter the sun had just about returned, at least long enough for family visits and Easter egg hunting in the woods. Such a difference from two years ago where  the woods were almost inaccessible due to rhododendron.

If you go down to the woods today....

The Easter bunny is GOLD !

Vistors even got to enjoy 'hands-on' digger experience.

 Henry -  "Any digger jobs?"
Me -        "How about digging a hundred meters of  trench ?"
Henry -   "Great !"

More visitors like that please.

The digger novelty has rather worn off for me after several hundred hours at the controls !

Henry, flying the digger

Ah, the excitement of all that power !

Are women allowed in diggers?  Sammi proving otherwise ! :)

I had my own 'holiday travels'. All the way from the yard to the walled field via the newly cleared track. It took about five hours and was one of the more stressful holiday travels I've had , although I do seem to be whistling a happy tune in this photo...

Maybe I have Romany blood? ;)

The old metal and timber wall was opened up to gain access to the field. Originally this was a heated brick wall with multiple horizontal flues which is why it had long since collapsed. Luckily most of the remaining walls are in better condition and are solid construction.

Right tool for the job !

Eventually the static caravan got to its 'holiday destination'. 

The pleasure of having lots of space !

About a week later the strong winds finished off the remainder of the old collapsed wall and the metal wall that stood on it. Only the small trees stopped it being blown completely flat.

More work....

Rotten wood, rotten stone, rotten weather!

In the blink of an eye (or two weeks real time) the majority of the fallen wall was cleared up and a new 'palisade' clad with the original metal roofing sheets was  hastily erected to keep out invading hordes (and members of public on the churned up footpath).

This photo is viewed from near the bottom end of Grove farm looking towards the river.

Keep out !

Its all looking a bit ravaged as a combination of dreary weather, delayed Spring time and lots of clearance work with the digger and chainsaw but I'm sure that Nature will return as soon as we are on to another job.

Incredible as it might seem, two years earlier the area (above)... looked like this (below)...

The view to 'broom corner' at base of Grove Farm

Looking the opposite way (from a slightly different spot) can be seen all the bricks that we have reclaimed

Several thousand !

Most are cleaned ready for re-use in future rebuilding work., although most of the large, coursed wall stones are rotten from lying in the mud for decades. There is still a big pile of mixed stone and brick to sort as well (any volunteers ?!). I'm keen to keep every brick thats re-usable, the handmade ones in particular would be nearly impossible to recreate- each one a little piece of history !

A mix of 'Arniston' machine made and unknown but beautiful ,handmade bricks

The nearest ,more 'modern', bricks came from the shed that used to be  where the red patch is in this next photo.

The back of the yard

This area has changed quite a bit in the last two years , slowly returning to what it would probably have originally looked like. Most of it is North/ East facing so its not an ideal growing spot although there were some patches of exquisite soil buried under the new big piles of soil. These will be returned to the yard in due course when all the concrete has been lifted.

Two years ago it looked like this...

That really is the same place !

To help finish off the track and restore the footpath the local Council saw the wisdom in providing some lorry loads of tarmac road 'planings' . Now  the public could once more promenade on a Sunday through the countryside without sinking into the mud  (in their un-sensible shoes.)

Thank you Midlothian Council

You get all sorts of people  going along that track - and not all of them are fully prepared for the great outdoors !

Lundy learning to ride (and crash)

Elsewhere the enormous parking area has at last been (almost) finished .

About 400 square meters of parking. Ooops!

I'm not quite sure why it ended up that size either, might have had something to do with not measuring it or drawing a plan first. You would have thought I would have learned by now !

The hill made from the spoil from the track clearance has been finished with topsoil on one side, awaiting some trees and grass.

Although I was tempted just to keep building it higher and higher !

It will be good to draw a few of these mini-projects to a close. They seem to have taken up six months of my life in the blink of an eye. However its not every year of your life you get to build  a tree 'mansion', a  car park, a road, dig up a small hill and build it again somewhere else !

The summer may yet arrive , we've already had one really nice day this year (OK, it was half a day!)

Midlothian seems to be covered in dandelions this year !

Plans for the summer include . Finishing touches to treehouse over next few weeks; Ripping out most of the concrete in yard; Importing lots of soil into yard for a garden.

After that I will rip out our bedroom so that next year, when its freezing and wet outside again  I could just stay in bed in the warm !

Although  I doubt that will happen !

reuben

Winter 2012

At the end of the last blogpost in November was a picture of a digger.  I posted it to encourage me to commit to buying a decent sized machine since there is so much that needs 'dug'.

A few weeks later, thanks to the festive power of eBay and Peer2Peer lending website Ratesetter  that very machine was dropped off by Santa (in his artic lorry) a few days before Christmas.

He called in early since it took so long to turn around and get back out of the yard !

I was of course quite excited since I already had a matching coloured top (or maybe it was the effect of playing with Tonka toys as a child)

And it wasnt long before everyone wanted a slice of digger fun !

First,  the local farmer got bogged down right next to me . What were the odds on there being a digger twenty meters away !? I'd only just driven it up the hill for first time as well. So he was happy...

I was less happy when I realised that he'd got stuck in a bog created by what looks like our leaking water main... good thing I've got a digger !

A few days shifting the salvaged timber and metal from  the barns saw the lower half of yard much clearer

...and provided materials for the start of the treehouse, which will be finished when the weather eventually warms up !

 ... although local children have already started playing on it !

Some unexpected assistance from Michael Fendr prompted me to start immediately demolishing the concrete slabs in the yard  ...

...and it wasn't long before a big area of concrete had been lifted - here helped by Peter Singlehurst. Thanks to you both !

 .
 Obviously all that concrete and the huge pile we had accumulated last year had to go somewhere so I decided to start on a new lorry turning area at the top of the hill. With the yard eventually being a garden we need a way for delivery lorries, the binmen , etc to get turned around. It was also a good excuse to tidy up the old fencing and make use of a soggy section of field.

Before one could say "Wow! What a mess!" it was a mess ! Its not been helped by what seems like consistent wet overcast weather for months and the dumper really churned the soft subsoil into a thick orange paste . The track up the hill has become a  smooth slurry of soft mud , which periodically washes right into the yard.

Scraping off 400 square meters of topsoil and laying a few hundred tonnes of hardcore proved to be quite straightforward. The next digger job was to improve the access to lower part of farm (so that the yard would not need be used for access when it becomes a garden).

It all started easily enough,  just move that corner of the hill that stops people driving around the corner of wall into the lane behind (it is also a rarely used public footpath)..

Sam and I set to work and rapidly lost count of the number of dumpers we filled. We were filling and shifting  twelve an hour so we have moved several hundred loads now at least. All the clay subsoil has been taken up the hill and a sizeable hillock has appeared , which is already big enough to act as a windbreak to the yard some distance away it seems !

The "access" track expanded slightly and is well on its way to becoming a new parking area - this will also help level out the entrance to yard to reduce water (and mud!) washing in. It all looks a bit horrendous at the moment and several passing walkers look distinctly unimpressed that they might get their feet muddy, (in January, in the country, on a farm, after the wettest year in the last century!- ).  It will soon be just a distant memory ! It is quite a sizeable excavation, maybe four meters deep at least !

Below the yard, behind the archway ,has also been dug up - but this time to stack up the piles of topsoil that appear to have been shifted from the yard before the barns were built.  The soil looks immaculate, as would be expected since it had been worked by experienced gardeners for well over one hundred years. The irony of spending all this effort rebuilding something that presumably took weeks to remove has not been wasted on me and I hope I never get to see a future owner shovelling it all out again to "build a useful concrete yard" !


Then we had some snow which proved a welcome distraction  and also hid the mud  for a while!

Some building work did get done however...

...and for a while the yard was a safe and peaceful place again...

 mainly because no -one could drive in or out !

Thats all melted away now, and the days are starting to lengthen at last, hopefully we'll have some consistent dry weather soon. My leather workboots have been damp since at least November !

These picture really dont give an exact idea of how muddy it really is here , for further photos on a more regular basis check out the Grove Farm Facebook page

Time for a well deserved coffee break with a cupcake decorated by the kids !

Until next time, keep digging !

reuben welch