Infrastructure Work - Security Gate

Last year I did some work for someone and as part of the deal I got to take away some security gates before the place was demolished. I had no idea what I'd do with the gates at the time but I knew they'd be handy somewhere!

Removing the gates and cutting off the posts. Major downside was I killed my generator in the process! Doh!

It was only when I installed the field gates the other day that I realised it made the place feel much more cut off and safer for the children. I decided that one more gate by the workshop would mean that to get into our area of play/work you'd need to either open or climb a gate.

Infrastructure Work - More Gates

At the top of our land, runs a footpath. Generally this is a positive thing, as most people are friendly and nice. But in the past we have had issues with dog walkers dogs attacking chickens or just running onto our land and juumping up on the children. 

It seems very few read the "keep your dog on a lead" sign.

So a number of years ago (2014) I planted a hedge across the top to give a wide access to a tractor but to also separate the footpath off. This has given us loads more privacy and made things much better.

Like all good jobs though, I hadn't finished it!

Mobile Barn?

The sheep have gone to the Tup and it makes me think about lambing next year. 

My biggest problem is having to lamb outside, or more importantly not having enough space to bring many animals in if I need to. I can use the shed that I have access to for a few months each year and I can build around four or five bonding pens in there. 

Ideally I'd like to build a proper barn, but that's off the cards for a while yet (fiances, planning & time to build it). The next thing I've considered is the standard mobile field shelter that you see around the countryside, timber clad and open fronted, stable style. 

I'm fairly sure I could build a timber one fairly cheaply, although timber cladding is expensive, but then whilst watching Justin Rhodes the other night I saw an even cheaper to build type of barn and one that looked solid. 

Something like this would be great to have a row of bonding pens in or once half the flock has lambed, keep the others in. I could build it with wheels, metal frame on the bottom, making it easy to move, even moving it once the season was over so that it was easy to muck out. 

I love the idea of this mobile type of infrastructure, it's great for many reasons but I love the idea of trying out different layouts to see what works best. 

What do you think? 

Would this type of barn works for you? 

Do you think it would blow away?

Patio Progress - Stone Down

Stone down, pipes hidden! 

This feels like a major milestone for the patio, it's looked a mess for a long time so it's nice to have moved forward with it. Dad's helped me every step of the way with this, he's my expert digger driver and he's always pushing me to get more done in a day, he'll think nothing of starting to concrete something at nine at night!

Here's what's gone on in the last week or so with the patio, most of it over last weekend ( I also had my brother help me one night to get the stone down, I'd be lost without my family on jobs like this!)

Before picture - it's looked like this since November last year! 

Pipe work and ducting to the boiler

Drainage pipe in to pick up from the extension

Levelling the ground before adding the top layer of stone

Grading off

Adding some concrete against the retaining wall for extra strenght

Concrete added to the edges 

Weed membrane down then stone added to the top 

As usual we had a little bit of digger trouble! Track tensioner broke, not a difficult fix luckily!  

Stone then scalpings added and wackered down  to give us a firm base to lay the slabs on

Another view of how far we've got with the patio

We can only get half of the patio in at the moment as the extension needs to go in before we can do the other half, but at least this way we can get somewhere to eat outside again, we've really missed out outside meal times! 

What do you think to our progress so far? What type of slabs or finish would you go for up on our patio?

Patio Progress - Under Patio Storage

So on the post I put on Wednesday night I mentioned that I was installing some storage under the patio that I'm building. 

The idea behind this was that the patio was going to be raised no matter what (the garden is on a north facing slope) so it's a good way to add storage space without another structure in the garden.

By adding the ribs to the wall it adds a lot of strength anyway and I wanted a flight of steps down the middle so it wasn't much more work to increase the foundation size to allow for my under patio storage idea. 

It has created me some work though. 

The tops of these storage areas are going to be reinforced concrete, I can only work on the one at the moment as I have to leave the blockwork for the other down to give e access to the garden at the moment.

Last Saturday I managed to put up the form work (shuttering) for the slab on the right hand storage bay. It's only about 6ft wide by 3ft deep but it should still provide a useful area (I'm thinking kids toys at the moment).

I cheated a bit with the shuttering and used blocks to support it, with timber supports just under the OSB sheeting that I could knock out when the concrete has gone off (this is very important as they're is a lot of weight in concrete). I also used sash clamps to fix it to the block work as if I had screwed it to the blocks the chances are it would have pulled that single block off the wall. I did wrap my clamps in bags to save concrete getting on them (I'm sure that there was a god of carpentry angry at me somewhere!). 

When we started to pour the concrete some friends turned up - just at the right time (for us anyway) so it helped to get the concrete into the form work. We managed to get the tractor and mixer right up to where we were working as well, so with the addition of a little bit of tin sheeting it meant that we didn't have to use a wheel barrow! 

Dad forgot about a trench we'd dug earlier in the year. 

Concrete poured

Looking good, I roughed up the surface to provide a key to the slabs that will be laid on top

Form work removed, self supporting concrete roof/shelf.

Next job is to start shuttering the steps up to the patio and then to fill in the top (our pipework from last November is still exposed at the moment) with stone and slab it. 

A lot of work for my silly ideas - but it'll be worth it in the end! What do you think?

Outside Progress - Patio

I've been doing my usual of taking on so much work that things here fall to the wayside, but we have managed to do some things lately. 

One thing I managed to organise a few months ago that I haven't posted about was to get the retaining wall in for the patio.

The old wall was crumbling and inadequate and for my plans I want to build something that's going to last and cause me as little maintenance as possible. So I got in my trusty bricklayer, Dill, and he came for a day and put up all the blockwork you see in the picture below. 

I was impressed with how much he managed to lay (as most of those blocks are laid flat), I had made sure that I had put all the blocks ready for him and the sand, cement and mixer were as close as they could be (good tips for keeping costs down when having work down). 

The "ribs" coming out of the wall above serve two purposes; firstly they add strength (pretty important) to hold the soil back, secondly they allow me to break up the front in sections. The middle part is going to be a wide set of steps to make going up and down to the garden easy and then a section either side will be storage under the patio (more on that on Friday's post). 

Hopefully this should make a great outdoor eating place, I have plans for a BBQ and hopefully some form of outside oven and/or smoker. 

What would you have in your ideal outdoor eating space?

Wet Gateway Sorted

Not high on the priority list but dad came round last night to use the digger to move some more soil and stone (stuff we hadn't quite finished on the weekend). I put the girls to bed with my wife and when I got down to him he'd started stoning the one gate way.

I haven't got a "before" picture, but the ruts had got so bad that we couldn't get dads truck through and the muddy water was breeding flies. 

It only took him about an hour, some hardcore and stone but it should make things easier going between fields easier for years to come. I sometimes set up a pen for the sheep here as well so it''ll make it much better for that as well. 

Another infrastructure job done on the homestead.

Who else has sorted out any gateways or has some that desperately need doing?

Draining A Field

It's been a busy few weeks, with no real sign of it letting up just yet. One of the big jobs we've done is to drain the field next to the house. 

Although it's on a slope this field always lies wet and makes it a nightmare to move vehicles around, so whilst we were putting in new drains for the extension and had the machinery there we decided to go for it and put land drains in the whole field. 

 This involved using the Robocut with trencher to dig the trenches, lots of digging on the junctions by hand and cleaning out the bottom of the trenches with a home made tool (which I'm going to post about later).

We then shovelled drainage gravel into the bottom of the trench, added perforated drainage pipe, jointed all the junctions and then added more drainage gravel on top before backfilling with soil. 

It was a massive job but one that should make the land much better for years to come. 

To me adding this kind of infrastructure is key to improving this place to make it somewhere that we're going to stay for a long long time. I'm just lucky with my family that between us we have the knowledge, skills and tools to the job for the lowest cost possible and it's always enjoyable working with them. 

More Mud!

Sunday was mental. My dad and brother came over, it was a long hard day, we were all covered in mud in the end, but we got a lot done! Cables and pipes all safely under ground and lots of things ready for the future as well. We also had the right equipment which makes a big difference. 

More patio going. This time for a man hole as well, ready for the extension. 

This is 90cm deep. Pretty nifty! 

Robocut - the machine that made things a bit easier. A radio controlled trencher. An amazing bit of kit! 

Ducting, and a water pipe as a spare

Laying ducting for cables ready for the telegraph pole to be moved later in the year. 

The patio..

The way to the chickens is a bit muddier than it was!

Some of the garden! 

View from the upstairs window! 

More to come this weekend on this project! Wellies only! 

Making More Mud

Now the wall is nearing completion it's time to crack on with the back of the house so we can get the boiler in. 

 Unfortunately this means digging up more of the patio to put in a proper retaining wall. I'm doing this a stage at a time though as we only need to do the first section to get the pipes in for the boiler.

The boiler is going between the two pillars on the wall.

 Unfortunately the day we chose to do this it rained all day, both my dad and I were soaked through and were both ravenous by the lunch time, I think we were burning calories just trying to stay sanding up in the mud!

As usual we ended up concreting the footings in the dark, but I was pleased with the results in the light the next morning. 

Tomorrow we're doing more digging, again regardless of the weather, to lay all the pipes and cables that we need. I have a feeling it's going to be a long, wet & muddy day! 

Setting Up Garden Infrastructure

A few years ago I was on a days course and I got talking to a guy about self sufficiency and my property, "5 acres!" he said "you can easily be self sufficient on that." I politely walked away.

I know it can be done, but anyone who thinks its easy has never grown more than a lettuce from a B&Q plug plant. 

As many of you know it's not just growing the food, it's having the infrastructure in place to do it. The fertility in the soil needs to be built up over years, you need to have a supply of seeds that you know will grow well in your area, produce your own fertiliser and you need to be able to harvest, process and store all your produce, let alone all the other bits of equipment you need to store to do all these things. 

The paths I added last year to divide the garden into beds

My "new" greenhouse added last year.

I'm slowly getting more and more set up each year. Last year I felt like I got the garden into a more manageable position by laying lots of paths and erecting my new greenhouse, I put up fences all around the smallholding and generally kept on top of things. 

This year it's already making a big difference as I'm using the greenhouse loads and I've got veg beds ready to plant when the time comes instead of messing around trying to lay paths first and remove lots of weeds left from the previous year.  

We did start from scratch here so it's going to take a while to get into a position where it doesn't feel like I'm chasing my tail. We only had a couple of old, useless tin sheds when we moved here and no veg garden or perennial plants or fruit trees, so although it gave us the advantage of having a blank canvas, it also meant that we had little to work with and anything we wanted we had to buy, build or erect.

So each year I try to knock something off my list (and in turn my workload) and add something back on. This year's big garden infrastructure projects are going to be a garden/food storage shed, that's going to be frost free and rodent proof, and another nursery garden area to grow on my grafted fruit trees. 

So my question is how long did it take you to get everything set up and running smoothly in your garden? And what big infrastructure projects have you got lined up for it this year?