View over the veg plot.

 

This is a busy, productive time of year, with the harvest season fast approaching. 

Time to get out the dehydrator, and clear out the freezers of the remains of last years fruit and veg. I shall make soup I think with the veg and fruit crumble or maybe wine with the old fruit!

I am now harvesting new potatoes, broad beans, chard, salads of all sorts, herbs, carrots, courgettes, peas and mange tout, the first of the french beans today and lots of cucumbers. The tomatoes outside ( left over plants , not sold or given away, which I could not bear to throw on the compost!) are also doing really well. Which is a first for me as outdoor toms have never done well, here.

The climbing beans have finally got going, the leeks , parsnips and onions are looking good and I should be lifting the garlic and shallots any day now.

Apples, pears and plum trees are all covered with fruit and we have just started picking the tayberries - yum!

All in all, it is looking good so far, so fingers crossed we have some rain ( but not too much) and sunshine!


How is it with you, all?

The Polytunnel in early July.

This is what the polytunnel looks like, now. Lots of cucumbers and salad being eaten, also sugar snap peas, although the outside plants are bearing pods now as well.

I expect the first tomato any day now...

I am very busy at the moment, with courses in the wood, chicken and composting courses coming up, a talk to give on Forest Schools and lots of meetings and work to do with the next phase of my business plans....


So it is good to get outside and weed and pick and smell the soil.

Energy from the Sun

 

A gratuitously self indulgent post, this one! Notice anything different about the woodstore roof, beyond the polytunnel? And can you see the solar thermal tubes on the house?

Thanks to these wonderful bits of kit, for the last week we have been generating around £7 worth of        electricity per day, (thank you, Feed in Tarrif) AND our bought in electricity usage has dropped to less      than 5 units per day. We have also had a seemingly endless supply of hot water! We have had to adjust our usage patterns but that's OK, I don't feel its a hardship to have to wait for the cooker to finish before running the washing machine. The electricity we sell back to the grid then goes off to be sold to other people , thus helping THEM to use truly renewable energy as well. 

Hurrah! *We* are generating clean, renewable energy, which gets sold to Good Energy! How cool is that idea!  Compost Mansions electrons!                                                                                                                                                   

Its wonderful, simply wonderful, to sit and use this computer now, using solar generated electricity, while     drinking a cup of tea made with solar generated electricity, while the washing machine is washing clothes using solar generated electricity and hot water heated by the sun, water which was pumped up from our borehole by, yep, you guessed it, solar generated electric. Between the PV's, the Solar Thermal tubes and   the  woodstore, I feel pretty damn  like the cat who got the cream, right  now !                                                                                            

Sorry, I'll take my grin somewhere else, shall I? ;-))

 

Photovoltaics going up at Compost Mansions.

Well I think I have mentioned it in the past as something we have long wanted to do, but we have finally bitten the bullet and ordered the Pv's.

We are going to have 14, 185 w panels, Sharp NU 185 single crystal photovoltaic panels , each one consists of 48 monocrystalline cells, open circuit voltage 24 volts, with an SMA Sunny Boy 2500 inverter to tie it in to the mains electricity system. There will then be a total generation metre, to record what gets generated.

These will go on the back of the garage and workshop roof. Which rather conveniently faces 165 degrees, so SSE and will be a great site for them. We would reasonable expect to get around 850 KWhrs per Kw installed, so will be getting about 2200 KWHr a year of our own generated electricity.

Some of the tree felling I talked about on here in the winter was to clear shading trees, only a problem in the winter when the sun is low, but it all will help ( and provided lots of lovely wood for the logburner!).

The system will be grid tied (off grid proved to be a bit problematical, with the batteries and the added complication)

So yesterday we did the first part of the install which was to lay armoured cable in a trench from the garage to the house. This involved Ken the Dig and his JCB, and a lot of shoveling and poking of Cat 5 cable inside a sheath to protect it in the trench.

We are doing the gravel drive completely in a few weeks as well, so the mess left behind after the trench was re filled in, doesn't matter for a few weeks and then Ken the Dig will come back and make it all lovely and level and weed free and beautiful ( after we have gone and bought a load of stone, geotextile and gravel)

So , it is all very exciting and I will chronicle the events on here, as they unfold....

I'm back!

and have such a lot to tell you all...but am very tired at the moment after a fraught few months, what with teacher training, intermittent repeated bouts of vertigo, running courses in the woods, growing stuff in the garden and poly tunnel and generally trying to cram 2 lives worth of stuff into each day!

 so .......will post about all that has been happening here another time.

Will also post up a picture of the wonderful new hen run which Compostman made for me, to keep my feathery ladies safe from the fox.

yes, sadly I lost 3 more hens to a fox...RIP Mac, Babs and Custard.....

but then got two more ex commercial flock hens, who are called Cumin and Coriander, as they are ginger hens like Ginger, so I have continued the "Spice Girl" theme. I exchanged them for Spot the Cream Legbar Cockerel, as he attacked me once too often (what is it with cockerels?)

So I now have 10 feathery ladies, all of whom are lovely,

Anyway it is lovely to be back and I look forward to posting a bit more frequently , now I have finished the teaching course.