Raised Beds and Wasp Nests

Today we finally made a start on the new raised beds. The wood we had, (I’ll post a pic later) was in bad shape to say the least. It was originally an old fence but was dismantled and left lying in the forest area for 8-10 years until we salvaged it last week.

Both myself and Jasper were kinda at a loss on how to treat the wood. We werent even sure if anything could even be done with it, the rot seemed to go pretty deep almost an inch deep in certain places.

Having a father who owns his own tool hire company is always handy, so we called him to see would he have some sort of industrial sander (not very self-sufficient I know- but desperate times call for desperate measures). Luckily he did have one and we had it within the hour, but before we could even dream of touching the wood we had to clean it.

It was soaked the whole way through and covered in a mossy, jelly-ish mess. Time for the wire brush. After vigoriously scrubbing every inch of each plank (each plank is about 15-20ft) it was time for the sander. About 4 hours of non-stop sanding we finally have them all looking well. Without getting caught up in too many details the end result is eight 20 ft planks are now lying in my hall drying out.

Another interesting, maybe thats the wrong word but anyway, thing that happened was we discovered a wasps nest in the wet garden yesterday. Myself and Jasper were clearing out some very dense brambles when I started getting harrassed by a wasp. I tried to ignore him but after a few minutes I got a very bad sting on the arm. And it was at just about the same time I was getting stung I happened to notice the nest

So over the next day or two we are going to have see about getting rid of the nest. I have refused to do any more work in the wet gardens until its gone, and Jasper isnt overly pushed on the thoughts of working next to a wasps next either. Anyone have any ideas on whats the best way to remove it?

Found Some Pictures

I was just looking through some of last years emails and have recovered some pics that I thought were lost with the old blog.. yay.. I love old pics.

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This was one of my finished pots that I arranged in the garden centre. It sold within the hour, while my mothers sat for 2 days

Jasper working on the boat. If I remember correctly the whole side of the boat had to be completely stripped down and replanked with new wood, this is when they were almost finished.

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This was from one of those days where I was out walking about looking for wildlife to photograph and I very unexpectantly came across this little fellow.

Oh yeh, my first lake fish… yay. He was 5lb and I caught him on a montana. I thought I was doing great catching a fish (and a decent fish at that) before Jasper. But he made up for it by catching 9 that day. Show-off.

Travelling

Its another very wet day outside, and right now Im pretty much waiting for Jasper to get back before we can start building another raised bed.

Over the past few weeks we have being discussing the possibility of travelling around Ireland to mingle with like minded people and also to make more friends.

The idea being that we have/had subscribers in pretty much every county (including the North). Generally speaking most small-holders and self sufficients (from experience) are very friendly and would go out of their way to help anybody. So we think we could probably arrange to travel the country staying with subscribers and other people we would meet along the way. Obviously we wouldnt expect them to cater for us like a hotel. We would work with them and earn our keep. Then after a week or so move on to the next.

I think if we do it, and right now that seems like a very real possibility, it would be a great learning experience, not just for us, but also for our hosts. And Im sure some of them would enjoy the company and help of two extra hands and the experience we bring with us.

Let me know your thoughts on this, I would be very interested to hear them.

Wheres our subscribers….???????

I know its only being 2 days, but seriously- out of all of our subscribers and all the emails we sent out- still not one single subscriber.

And apologies to all our lost subscribers, we only have contact details for those we were close friends with. So our apologies do go out to everyone, and we hope you stumble upon our new blog at some point in the future- and this time talk to us!!!!

Back and Shiny

Hey its Lexi and Jasper, ‘what happened your old blog’ your probably asking….. yeh about that. We were having waaaayyyy too much hassle with it and Mike and James werent exactly what you would call hospitable so we decided to start afresh. Its a pity because we lost all last years stuff. In a sense it was almost like our diary to the year that documented everything we did from fishing, hunting, knitting, river cleaning, Jasper building the boat, our raised beds, our adopted animals… and thats just the stuff I can remember off the top off my head. So many lost memories

So this is going to be a fresh start to our bloglife. This probably means we have no excuse for everything being in a mess any more!