My lovely wife, aka Kimbo, is already on the forum so I won't repeat everything she has already said. To be honest, I wouldn't presume to call myself a smallholder quite yet. As Kim has explained, we've moved into a tiny converted barn with grazing so that we could have our horses, Boris and Milo, on our own land. Anglezarke (an old Norse name meaning "By Odin, it's cold here") is only a mile east of the M61 but there is fantastic riding on the doorstep. That was really all we had thought about. One thing is, however, leading to another: the chickens arrived a few weeks ago and then, because we have too much land for two horses, sheep are due to take up residence.
By and large, Kim is animals and I'm fruit, veg, fencing, hedging, groundworks, drainage, buildings. land management and tractor maintenance. Of course, we help each other out and so I get regularly de-loused in the chicken run.
We've planted 100 poplar and willow cuttings on the eastern boundary within a little certified camping/caravanning site. None of the land had been cultivated. It's on the heavy side with clay beneath quite a decent depth of top soil. The site we've chosen for fruit and veg slopes a little to the west but is very exposed to wind so I'm not sure how things will do.
Here is my first mistake. I'd thought about buying fruit trees and bushes from the local garden centre (which I hadn't at that time visited) but opted for one of the well-known mail order companies. The plants that came were tiny, bordering on the microscopic, and significantly more expensive than the same varieties at the garden centre which have, so far, done much better despite incessant rain. I won't get caught like that again.
Anyway, I look forward to chatting and picking up some tips.
Topic: Hello (Read 4156 times)
