Out with the new and in with the old

There are days when I feel like I have stepped back in time. This time last year our hurried morning conversations revolved all around train times (pick a time, add 20 minutes then add a bit more to account for SW Trains delays), nursery pick-ups (me or you?) and any meetings that day which were likely to overrun and therefore throw all of the above into a total, panicked chaos. Nowadays the conversation is more likely to go along the lines of “Have you fed/watered/checked the dog/cat/hens/chicks/sheep/tomatoes/carrots/children? Should we really be planting peas on a new moon? Did you know there is a Gloucester Old Spot market in town next week?” in manner of harridan 19^thcentury farmer’s wife. Whereas my days used to be ordered by the hourly ping of Microsoft Outlook telling me which delightful client I was to meet with next or which teleconference number to dial into, our days are now broadly divided into ‘light o’clock’ and ‘dark o’clock’, punctuated only by the blood-curdling shrieks of ‘milk o’clock’ from my three month old daughter. Each day starts with roughly the same slow rising sense of panic as we huddle in front of the ever-expanding To Do list on the whiteboards in the office (you can take the girl out of the City but you can’t take the City out of the girl!). There follows some sort of vague prioritisation based on a) the weather b) energy levels and c) number of toddler tantrums already thrown  that morning. It’s then just crack on and get as much physically done as you can before dark o’clock. Job done (or not, as is more often the case).

You can take the girl out of the City...





Once you’re out there, it’s very easy to lose track of time. Head down, knee deep in weeds with only the worms and the songbirds for company, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were living a generation ago. The only thing to remind me I’m in the 21^st century are the Hawk T1A fighter jets that pass at Mach 1.15 through the mountains at pretty much my eye level or the Airbus Beluga A300-600ST en route to the factory in Broughton (oh yes, I am a self-confessed geeky plane spotter and these two little beauties are a definite highlight of living here for me!). Then you hear the shrill whistle of the steam train that has just been reinstated at the local station and you are brought back to your 19^th century reverie with a jolt.

Not my photo,obviously

Nor this one

Continuing our journey back in time, we had a surprise visit this week from a lovely lady called Mary who was actually born in our house in 1945 and grew up here farming the land with her parents. Clutching a handful of sepia toned photographs (the real deal for once, not your phoney Instagram ones) she gave us a guided history tour of our own house (very cool), pointing out the old snug where dear Uncle Fred was sitting to watch the 1953 Royal Coronation and the former scullery where old Aunt Mabel got her tit caught in the mangle and so on and so forth. It seems the cold store is pretty much the only part of the house which has not been knocked about by its subsequent residents. It was fascinating to hear that the room we now use to stockpile baked beans from the Cash & Carry (such is our faith in our own ability to be self-sufficient) and keep our beers cold was where they used to hide on the day that the pigs were slaughtered. Lovely little heart-warming stories like this (!) are what makes us feel a great sense of responsibility and honour in our humble attempts to restore some of the former greatness of the place:  like resurrecting the old vegetable patch and bringing back the hens and the pigs (we hope).  It is also a timely reminder that as we start to make our renovation plans we need to keep one eye firmly on the past as well as bringing the place into the 21^st century.

Watch out for the old mangle

This visit also made us realise that our quest to ‘live from the land’ in this day and age is a lifestyle choice made from a position of relative luxury, whereas in Mary’s parents’ day it would have been done out of pure necessity.  So is the concept of self-sufficiency desperately outmoded when even in remote Wales you can nowadays buy pretty much everything you need – even pomegranates and soya milk?! Why beast yourself so hard for months when you can just nip to Sainsbury’s (other supermarkets are available) and buy anything you could possibly grow or raise or make yourself?  It’s not just about the cost or the taste or the fact it’s organic or that you can guarantee it’s fresh. I think there is something deep within our ancestral memory that gives you a real buzz from the delayed gratification of eating the fruits of your labours. Not to get all “motorcycle maintenancey” on you, but I think I actually really enjoy making life hard for myself. The hard work in an office is not a patch on the hard work on your own land. Fact. Am I regressing to a more natural, pre-urban state? (*takes a drag on her imaginary cigarette, Carrie Bradshaw style*). Is this such a bad thing?  

Or perhaps this is all just a sign that I am hurtling towards middle age at an alarming rate. I feel like I have aged about 25 years since arriving here, and not just from the stress of moving my entire family to the middle of nowhere and ploughing our life savings into the place to boot. I mean I have easily spent more time pottering in my greenhouse in the past three months than drinking in a pub in the past three years (although not sure ‘pottering’ is the right verb to describe the chaos that usually ensues when a toddler is let loose with some plant pots, a large bag of compost and a watering can!). I have a CQ (Chutney Quotient) to rival any self-respecting member of the WI. My back feels like that of a 70 year old after pulling weeds and lugging wood all over the place (70, incidentally is not that old of course, Dad, if you’re reading) and I felt genuine, unbridled excitement at the discovery of Lily of the Valley at the bottom of my garden yesterday. I mean, what’s that all about?! I have to keep reminding myself that I haven’t actually retired and I am just on maternity leave….

The sub pub  (randomly positioned in an old pig sty)

Check out my Lily of the Valley!  Oh yeah. 

But as a parting thought, I wanted to tell you a little story about a man called Wally who used to live near our old house in Hampshire. At 97 years old he had The Most Immaculate vegetable garden you could imagine and was quite the envy of the village. Despite losing his wife in 1976, he retained such a zest for life and living from tending his vegetable patch that it would seem to me that rather than making you old, growing your own actually keeps you young and ever optimistic. Here’s hoping!

The wee (not so) tim’rous, cowering beasties…

Sometimes I really feel like Sisyphus. No sooner have we had a minor celebration for some seeds coming up (any excuse for a beer really) then there seems to be a legion of pests out there hell bent on devouring our seedling plants. If it’s not snails on the kale in the greenhouse then it’s slugs having a runner bean frenzy on the veg plot. And some things we’ve planted have not even got off the starting grid. Take the peas for example. Despite lovingly soaking them for 24 hours, spending days preparing a trench full of our finest hen manure and compost, and then covering them with chicken wire, somehow not a single one has popped up.  We strongly suspect that mice are the culprits and I can just picture them, in the dead of night, dancing around on my pea patch in some bacchanalian feast of delicious sprouted peas.

I blame the cat. He is getting very slack. After some early “quick wins” (*City lingo alert*) it seems he has “picked all of the low hanging fruit” (*City BS par excellence*), which resulted in some lovely decapitated mice at the back door (and also gave rise to his name – Cooper…. think about it). He now prefers to while away the days in the barn, luxuriating in elaborate grooming routines and long naps. Whenever I pass he looks at me with an expression of: “What? You expect me to get off my rather beautiful bottom and actually go and catch some mice? Really? Forget it”.  I’ve never seen anything look quite so disdainful in all my life. Timorous and cowering? I think not.




Yes?... was there something?

Even the poor lawn, after its recent abuse of a winter’s worth of rainwater and being ‘doughnutted’ by a one and a half tonne Landrover, has not escaped the pest extravaganza.  It seemed a mole was attempting some sort of geometric experiment with new mole hills appearing daily. Something had to be done. RSPCA officers and members of the Mole Appreciation Society please look away now. Picture the scene: a 6’3’’ hairy Scot, all togged up in heavy duty deer stalking clobber – dark green shooting jacket, camo balaclava, top of the range binoculars, The Works - standing stock still right in the middle of the lawn with a 7lb sledgehammer at his feet like some crazed, macabre croquet player. Then all of a sudden I swear I have never, ever seen him move so fast, he charges and swiftly bonks the top of the emerging mole hill before darting off in the opposite direction to grab the pitchfork “just to make sure”. It may not be the way the farmers around here do it but it was certainly effective (the mole would have known nothing about it) and, from my vantage point at the bedroom window, probably one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Who needs a 100lb deer as a target when you can pit your wits against a 4 inch rodent…?

Attack of the moles

It may come as no surprise to you to learn that the two things seemingly impervious to the onslaught of pests and disease are, yep, you guessed it, nettles and rhubarb. At the risk of becoming as repetitive and predictable as one of those survival TV programmes where they subsist for weeks on end eating just periwinkles and coconuts, only with shitter weather and more clothing, this week we have been experimenting with roasted rhubarb ketchup. Mr Heinz, eat your heart out!

Anyone for rhubarb, ...again?

So it seems we either of too much of something (mice, slugs, moles) or too little (veg, eggs, cooperative cats). All of which seems to be telling us that unlike nice, neat project plans and large teams of people that I’m used to working with, although we may technically own the land, in no way do we control it and in many ways it now owns and controls us. Like all of the previous people who’ve lived here, right back to our Iron Age ancestors who hung out on our hill fort, we’re all really just passing through as visitors who barely make an impact on Mother Nature’s stronghold here. The fact that we provide the odd tasty pea shoot or some lush young kale leaves is really just the icing on an otherwise very nice cake for these creatures. I guess the trick is going to be learning how we can all live happily alongside each other and that I suspect could be a life’s work...

But there is however one beastie around here that is quite happy to tow the party line.   Our loyal ‘Springador’, Bru, continues to wander about the place looking still slightly flummoxed that this is in fact now his domain. With his big puppy dog eyes he is always opportunistically hoping that one of us will throw him a stick or anything really that he can retrieve for us to make sure he stays up front and central in our affections. Rather than that dratted farm cat he is now expected to befriend, despite all his doggly instincts!

So how can I help?

Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey

So where have we got to this week? It feels like one step forwards and about ten steps back at the moment. Everyone talks about the change of pace when you move out to somewhere like this but for someone whose life at work used to revolve around milestones and gant charts and critical paths, adjusting to this new way of life is taking some doing.  In my language of old here are some of the key metrics (*cringe*) of the week:

· Seeds planted:  about 8,000 (of which intentional, 75)

· Seeds actually germinated: 7

· Eggs laid: 16

· Price per egg based on hen-focused investment to date: about £46

·Weeds pulled out of veg patch: about a million (feels like)

·Weeds remaining in veg patch: 5 million (actual)

· Worms sacrificed in name of toddler distraction to enable weed pulling: 37

·Tadpoles now departed pond as frogs and hence no longer toddler distraction: ??? 

Other highlights, or rather ‘slowlights’, of the week are our abysmal broadband service which seems to flake out at the slight breath of wind. Endless, pointless hours on the phone to BT this week have uncovered no real problems and our suggestion that they perhaps should send out an engineer to check out the telephone cable, which flaps about like a sail in the wind outside our house, have been met with derision. Apparently it’s pure coincidence that when the wind blows all the broadband lights go out.  Speaking of endless hours on the phone, it then took no less than NINE phone calls to Asda to get our online shopping delivered TWO days after only half of it arrived.  Trying to find good in every situation (ahem) we used this as an opportunity to see if we could in fact rustle up something from nothing, after all this is ostensibly why we are here right? (screw you national supermarket chains who never deliver on time!). Somehow we managed to magically transform a couple of rangey old rabbits from the bottom of the freezer into a Michelin star worthy ‘confit de lapin’ with the addition of a lot of garlic, thyme, fennel and olive oil (ok, so only the rabbit, garlic and thyme were strictly our own, but it’s a start!). Self-sufficient Masterchef here we come! (must write to the BBC and suggest new series…)

Rustling up some confit de lapin

It also feels like all of our wonderful new toys, I mean essential farm machinery, are conspiring against us this week too. Not for the first time the tractor stopped abruptly with seemingly no warning. A comprehensive inspection of the fuel gauge (full) and the left falangee (?? tractors are really not my department) apparently revealed no obvious problems. It was only when the ‘engine stop’ button was accidentally pushed back by a rogue knee did the bad boy spark back into life. Oh dear. Should we really be let loose in a place like this on our own?! The lawn mower also ground to an ignominious halt, mired in the bog that is our lawn currently. Repeated attempts to shuffle it back and forwards proved fruitless and so once again it was the trusty old Landrover to the rescue. There ensued a comic scene straight from a renegade teenager’s party: you know the one where someone nicks the parents’ car and starts driving doughnuts on the lawn…? It was hilarious right up until the point where we realised this was actually our house, our lawn that we were trashing and that we were supposed to be the grown-ups. Suffice to say it’s going to take a little more than a packet of Gro-Lawn to fix this one. And then to cap it all off, the new chipper went on strike – it turns out there is actually a limit to the size of the branches you can ram down its throat. Righto. Lesson learned.

Lawnmower stuck in the mud

Progress up at the veg patch has not been much better. After all of the rain the sun has finally come out and so, of course, have the weeds. I’ve taken every opportunity when the baby finally falls asleep to quickly bundle her into the pram, enticing the toddler with the prospect of finding live worms to feed to the hens, to head up there and wage war against the weeds. It’s slow progress but intensely satisfying work for a wannabe perfectionist like me who revels in neat lines and tidy rows of produce. Sadly we are a bit lacking in the actual produce department so far but fingers crossed something will come up. At the risk of really milking a theme, we have also been experimenting with rhubarb and nettle chutney (husband is much more hardcore than me…he picks without gloves). Now the whole house absolutely stinks but the end result tastes amazing.  

Discovering the ancient art of chutney making

But this new slower pace of life is not all bad. We’ve had time to just sit on the steps and marvel at the swallows darting in and out of the rafters building their nests. We’ve spent whole mornings sitting in the sun and pond dipping, looking for the last few elusive tadpoles that have yet to disappear like their froggy older siblings. Ok so we may not have all the barns converted or the house renovated or the outdoor kitchen built anytime soon but we’re coming to realise that every little job we do is in some small way moving us towards our goal.  Plus with every single day that goes by we are learning something new, be that the finer points of tractor mechanics or techniques for nurturing young crops. It’s been a long time since either of us has been on such a steep learning curve and it’s deeply gratifying to be sharing this particular curve with our children.

Before I sign off, there have been two incidents of dazzling speed and efficiency this week. Firstly, I was astonished to find a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the yard trying to sell me the Watch Tower. Having politely declined and gone back to my weeding, blow me if not half an hour later another lot descended! How’s that for efficient?! You think you’re immune to all that when you move somewhere like this. Apparently not.

And finally, my beloved husband has discovered the local farm shop sells real Sumatran coffee beans. You should see him go…

Mud, mud, glorious mud

We are becoming obsessed with the weather. Where once I used to check the oil price and the latest business headlines before I got out of bed, I now check about five different weather websites, all of which typically tell me quite different stories. Our favourite site at the moment is some random Norwegian number which has proven to be closest to what actually we end up with, which for the month of May so far has proven to be rain, rain and more rain. Now I know that this is kind of what you sign up for when you move to Wales but c'mon, this is MAY not bloody January.
 

And so, rather than roaming around in our shorts and t-shirts we find ourselves still togged up in coats and wellies and having to deal with rain related problems, I mean 'challenges', such as leaky gutters and overflowing streams. We've been out there in near gale force winds balancing precariously on ladders and weilding pickaxes in a vain attempt to stem the rivers of water that continue to plague us. I have wondered whether we should in fact be channelling our energies and all of our wood supplies into building a ruddy great ark rather than restoring these barns!
 

The rain has also taken its toll on the veg patch but we will not be beaten. After the back-breaking work to remove the grass, thistles and docks from the potato bed we used the tractor to move a load of compost and top soil to fill the bed. However, using the mattock to dig the trenches still left us with what can only be described as a shit soup. Somebody or something at some point has invested a good deal of their waste on this patch. So we'll either end up with the best crop of spuds known to man or they'll just rot to nothing. Time will tell. This week we're also playing catch up with the other crops: we've sown peas, radish, lettuce and kohl rabi outside and cucumbers in the greenhouse. And joy of joys, the tomato seeds I thought I had destroyed through a neglectful combination of sub-zero nights and scorching days in an unopened glasshouse seem to have germinated. Hoo-rah!

Preparing the raised beds 

The solar panels are nothing short of awesome. At the first glimpse of sun (and I really do mean a few minutes here and there given the weather we've had) it all kicks into action powering the house and using any additional kilowatts (?? physics not my strong point) to heat the water in our immersion heater. This means that for the first time since we moved in over four months ago that we have piping hot water in the middle of the day and more than one person can take a  shower or bath without sparking a torrent of expletives from upstairs as icicles rain down on their back. We have been indulgently taking mid-morning and mid-afternoon showers, which is no bad thing given the quagmire that is our veg plot (see also aforementioned shit soup). The other marvellous thing about generating your own electricity during the day is the ability to use the tumble dryer guilt-free. Let me tell you this is a god send when you have a 10 week old baby who easily gets through six outfits a day and a mud-addicted toddler who isnt' much better.
 

A break in the weather and a nice job planting out the sapling trees that the previous owners had left in pots. We spent a somewhat reflective afternoon planting a few horse chestnuts, an oak, a hazel and a holly on the drive. There is something inherently humbling about planting something that, all things being equal, will far outlive you as a mere human. There was an added, if unspoken, question for us wondering whether we would in fact still be in this house into our old age to watch these lovely little trees mature. Who knows what the future will hold for us here.

Planting a horse chestnut on the drive 

It has been a good week for the laying hens. We are now consistently getting three eggs a day and they completely surpassed themselves today with our first double yolker. Oh yeah.  We poached it for lunch to appreciate its full mutant glory. Our wee chicks are doing well and becoming less cute by the day. Probably no bad thing given the space we've now cleared for them in our freezer.
 

Yet more rhubarb has been consumed this week cooked up with wine, vinegar, sugar and black pepper as an accompaniment to pan-fried salmon. Pretty lush. We've also been tackling the weeds head on by making vats of nettle and hedge garlic soup. However, we'd need to make enough to feed most of the population of North Wales before making any kind of impact on the amount of weeds that have emerged after all this rain! Bring on the webbed feet.

Starting to feel a bit chipper

Exactly four soggy, bleak months since we arrived here, and after not a small amount of "what in the hell have we dones", this week it finally feels like we are making some progress in the direction of our dream.

 After much searching we have finally purchased a ride-on lawnmower in a rather fetching stop-you-in-your-tracks yellow. This will hopefully mean we can actually still find the hens and the pond once the grass really gets going. Our chipper was also hand-delivered from Devon by a lovely old gent called Paul, who bestowed upon us (and at great length) much wisdom about bees and growing Manuka trees. Not much use to old City me but here you never know... The chipper attaches to the back of the tractor and will turn all the random branches and brush around the place into woodchip for our paths and veg patch (think Fargo but with fewer bodies). And completing perhaps the ultimate triumvirate of boys toys, a new chainsaw with the power to bring down a Giant Redwood in one fell swoop (or so I'm told).

The new chipper in action

The solar panels are now up! And right on cue, as soon as the last panel went up the heavens opened and it hasn't stopped raining since. Fortunately we've been led to believe that they will generate electricty regardless of the weather. I can't help but question whether we shoud have opted for a more water or wind based renewable form of energy but I hope to be proven wrong!

Putting up solar panels in the driving rain

More new arrivals this week in the shape of eight day old Ross Cobb chicks. Yellow and flluffy and surprisingly noisy we now have our work cut out to keep the little blighters alive and well for the next eight weeks or so. We've set up the chick equivalent of Tanning World in the workshop to keep them at a toasty 30c under an infra-red light. Together with a brand new, real wool blanket, sugared water and corn crumbs it is now without doubt the most desirable spot to be in the whole place.
 

Egg update: we are now getting two eggs a day, admittedly they are costing us about a tenner a piece after all the food we have shoved down their necks for the past four months, but nonetheless taste delicious. It would be more but one or two of the hens seemed to have been absent on the day they covered making shells at hen school and so we end up with a soggy mess in the laying boxes instead. That said, we would go so far to say that this week we had a veritable glut of eggs and so indulged in a SIX EGG omelette (oh the extravagance). I only hope that we haven't jinxed the hens as last time we went all out on the eggs they didn't lay another single egg for weeks!



Cheep cheep!

This week we have been mostly eating rhubarb and bacon, separately and together (don't knock it until you've tried it). Rhubarb crumble might quite possibly be the food of gods, especially with old school thick, yellow custard (but ask me again in a few months and I might beg to differ). The bacon we cured ourselves with sage and salt using belly pork from a friend's pig. It's been hanging in the cold store for a couple of weeks now and tastes truly sublime. This I will never tire of eating - I think my arteries will pack up before my appetite for it wanes.

  

And finally, the bloody drainage issue seeps on...

The story so far...

So how is it I find myself on a wet and windy Welsh hillside in May with two kids under 3, a dog, an inherited farm cat and a motley array of freeloading chickens?! This time last year I was an hour and a half into a two hour commute from the City to deepest, darkest Hampshire, together with hundreds of other grey suited, grey faced commuters, each one resolutely staring fixedly at the Evening Standard, reading about a life in London they have perhaps once enjoyed and now wonder upon fondly as they head back to their homes in "the country".

Now I should explain. Before my 12 years working in the City, I grew up in North Wales, enjoying a bucolic childhood complete with ponies, chickens and an endless supply of homegrown sprouts, the latter of which constituted my termly allowance when I fled my homeland to attend university in Scotland.

The statutory global jaunts to the Far East, Australia and the South Pacific ensued before I joined the hoards and masses of recent graduates in South West London, which became my home for over 7 years. Yet somehow, betwixt the crazy nights out and work all-nighters I still managed to grow a fairly healthly crop of tomatoes each year, made my own chutney and always had a selection of fresh herbs on the go. It never leaves you, you see.

And so, aged 30, I departed the Big Smoke for a small terraced house in a semi-rural Hampshire village with a mainline train station into Waterloo. The bare, small garden was soon transformed into raised beds, we invested in a greenhouse and begged and borrowed friends' fields and woodlands to keep chickens, raise a pig and forage for wild foods. Every Monday morning it was with heavy heart that I would hang up my gardening gloves and drag my laptop down to the station to do the whole thing all over again.

With baby number two on the way, the time seemed right to take the plunge. And so we quite literally upped sticks and headed for the hills, buying a farm in North Wales with 20 acres and a crumbling set of barns in various states of delapidation. This is where the 'vision' and the 'dream' have a lot to answer for. It's one thing having a vegetable garden of 25 metres. I don't think anything had quite prepared us for the huge weight of responsibility that comes with owning a load of fields and not really having a clue about how to manage them. Or the rain. Weeks of incessant rain. Less still did we have a scooby about tackling the rivers of water and mud streaming through the place and turning the lawn and the lower fields into a bog. Note to self: don't buy Welsh hill farms in January whilst heavily pregnant. It can really sap even the most optimistic of optimist's enthusiasm.

The hens were waiting expectantly for us when we moved in

Fast forward to May and the initial shock has subsided and we have now rented some of our land to the neighbouring farmer to graze his sheep. The 'bloody drainage issue', as it has now become affectionately known, rumbles on despite our attempts to lay pipes with the help of a mini-digger (much fun). We have welcomed three new hens to our family, Amber, Charcoal and Strike (somewhat confusingly all white) who join Boom-boom, Magic and Snowy (even more confusingly all black). We have sadly had to say goodbye to Rufus, who recently died of we have absolutely no idea what. Relations in the hen house seem to be improving and it no longer looks quite like 1960s South Africa when we shut them up at night.We are becoming obsessive about checking for eggs - after months with barely any, we now seem to be getting two or three a day - deep joy!  We have also seen the somewhat more abrupt departure of some unwelcome moles and foxes plus a few bunnies (the latter of which were delicious pan-fried in butter and garlic). There are new friends in the form of swallows, our resident aerobatics team who amaze us every day with the speed and dexterity with which they fly in and out of the barns, and a family of bats who apparently live in our roof. And the blossom and wild flowers have been nothing short of spectacular, not to mention the wild bird species: bullfinches, goldfinches, curlews, snipe, yellowhammers, nuthatches, treecreepers and tawny owls to name but a few. Our place also seems to be the avian equivalent of Match.com as we have a resident pair of pheasants and red-legged partridges who daily prompt slightly awkward questions from our toddler as they get jiggy with it on the lawn.

Anyone for rabbit?

Our veg plot is now visible again after a mammoth excavation effort to remove years of weeds and grass. We uncovered several gooseberry, rhubarb and currant bushes which despite a pretty brutal pruning now seem to be flourishing. Our £100 eBay rotavator has got its work cut out as we tackle the remaining beds and try and get some veg going this year. It is proving massively frustrating  to make progress whilst looking after two small kids who enjoy planting seeds everywhere but where you want them but I'm hopeful we'll have something other than rhubarb to eat later in the summer. I'm shamelessly accepting any unwanted seedlings this year regardless of what they are. We've also taken down a few trees for firewood in readiness for next winter. However we've already made in-roads into this as the spring has been so cold and we've got tucked into the green ash. Luckily, there's tons of trees and they're all OURS so we can do just what we want with them - hurrah!

And so that's the story so far. Next up: renewable energy, pigs, bees, fruit trees, the list goes on... Watch this space!

Mr Rotavator

Goodbye trees, hello firewood

Asparagus planted - now for the 4 year wait