Willow Coppice Planting
At last after weeks of hard work and slog, and contending with snow and ice we can finally start planting up the Willow Coppice!
It was as ever a family affair and the kids loved pushing the willow ‘twigs’ into the holes and sinking in the cane beside it to hold up the rabbit guard. My Mum was also on hand to help dig and plant so we managed quite a production line, and got over half of the 200 trees planted.
Van Crash
Thanks to blizzard conditions yesterday we had an unusual visitor to The Farm, attempting to arrive through our hedgerow! Fortunately no one was hurt, and it was brought to my attention by a queue of vehicles forming where usually you don’t see any.
It caused a few problems for passing traffic, with a coach and lorry having to reverse and take alternative routes. Eventually someone arrived to tow the van out. The van appeared to be un-damaged, shame I cannot say as much for the hedgerow! They did not hang around to ‘exchange details’.
Short Rotation Coppicing - Rows
We have always aspired to recycle as much as we can and ideally be self-sufficient. We seem to have made a slow start on the latter, but at last our plan to create our own coppice to sustain us with firewood has begun!
Today, following Tam’s careful plan, we marked out the 12 rows varying between 12 and 16 meters long. Not as easy as it sounds as we first had to shift tons of sand/soil etc which was in the way! Now the rows are marked out we need to get the turf/meadow cut so we can strip it off.
Ditch Work
Mr Liam Lambert was back on site…must stop calling our home a site!
This time he was a week late as we had already shifted approx. 6-8 tons of sand and soil by hand (!) to make way for the willow coppice, but we always have things that need doing if you have a JCB for 10 minutes! This time it was finally clearing the last of the soil/rubble that the previous owner had excavated for the new drainage ditch. Finally the top paddock looks ‘neat’ and there are no piles of junk around.
One of the great things about living at Waterloo Farm is the variety of wildlife we get in the garden, and especially at this time of year, the birds. We always try our best to put food out for them, ensuring there’s something for everyone – peanuts and seeds in feeders for the little birds, apples and suitable leftovers for the bigger ones and food on the floor for those that don’t hover so well like our resident pheasant Fezziwig! As you can imagine we were getting through quite a lot of shop-bought fat balls to keep up with them all, so I decided to have a go at making my own, and I’m pleased to say my experiments have been a total success 
