I was only talking to my son on the phone the other day, trying to work out between us what the measurements of the newly built wall were. He saw the pictures on the blog and thought how big it all looked. So I counted the blocks, he knew the approximate measurements of them plus the cement in between, and between us we guessed at around 53ft by 12ft. We weren't far out.
Lovely Hubby printed out a new set of drawings for the builder yesterday and we had to go out with the long tape measure and check all the measurements for the revised position of the garage and workshop. (We hit a bank of extremely hard rock and had to pull things forwards by almost a metre, but we still comply with planning permission - just ... PHEW!!)
It turns out the wall measures 18.7m x 5.1m, which is around 57ft x 15ft ... pretty big then,
The reason it's so big is because it is a double open fronted garage area ....
... with a workshop attached.
Inside the workshop will be a small room for the solar panel controls and battery backups. The entire roof of this garage and workshop structure will hold solar panels to power the house, garage and hopefully enable us to sell back some of the power generated to give us a small income as well as obviously free power for ourselves. We are also hoping to get a hybrid car in a year or so, which will mean that some of our motoring will also be powered for 'free'.
The workshop will be Lovely Hubby's domain for designing and making the things he wants to to sell to give us an income in the future when he gives up the 'day job' and retires to the small holding full time. With his wooden furniture and accessories and my excess veggies, along with the eggs from the chickens we hope to have enough cash to fund the things that we can't supply for ourselves.
How it should look.
Talking of supplying things for ourselves, usually we have lots of compost to enrich our raised veggie beds and the ones in the polytunnel, but obviously with moving we have none to use now, although the chickens are valiantly pooing for Britain and the weeds and grass grow tall and lush with all this Welsh rain so we should have some for next year.
At first glance our soil when we dug out the beds on the hillside and filled the polytunnel beds, looked rich and really good, but the plants have told us otherwise. So we went to our local nursery, Tal Goed for some expert advice and we were pointed in the direction of 6X.
I have to say it's brilliant stuff.
We have sprinkled the pelleted form of 6X round all our Laurels and the trees planted last year and they are slowly recovering from being nutrients starved for the last few months. We should have guessed really that living at the bottom of a hillside that gets so much rain, meant that the goodness in the soil would also get washed down the hill and away.
I also made myself a 'teabag' out of a zip top freezer bag simply filled with some of the bagged 6X and pierced a few times and dropped it in the water trough in the polytunnel. After a few hours the water turns a rich deep brown colour and you can even smell the goodness ;-)
I've watered everything in the tunnel with this lovely nourishment a few times now and soon with lots more applications the soil should start to hold the goodness and pass it to the plants it is nurturing.
The first 'teabag' lasted for four trough fills before it started to lose its vibrancy, so that one has now been emptied onto one of the beds and a new one is about to be dropped into the trough.
I'll have to take my camera over to the polytunnel and get a more up to date shot of everything, most things are doing well. We are getting a handful of strawberries each and every day from the hanging basket along with salad leaves, radishes, spring onions and pea shoots for our evening meals, that is of course along with the snacking I do while I'm over there working, well it would be wrong not to sample what's for tea to make sure it's okay wouldn't it ;-)
This is NOT a sponsored post, just something I highly recommend.
Read more about the product HERE.
Sue xx
I love my workshop having a place to my own thing and leave out projects being worked on, Martin is having a big workshop as well although we are converting one of the barns for him next job on the list is to concrete the floor, Martin is planning on being here full time 2017 so we have a couple of years to get things sorted.
ReplyDeleteI ran some tests on our soil and beefed it up before planting, like you it was nutrient poor having only ever been used as grazing land for horses. We are on a lot of rock bed so we dont have the soil depth hence building up the raised beds.
I hope your plants all spring forth now with an extra boost :-)
There are so many similarities between what we are doing and how we do it I'm amazed, although I'll resist the urge to get any Alpacas for now ;-)
DeleteHow exciting to have it all moving forward at a good pace. We are trying to finalise our house plans and shed plans for our place in NZ but it us hard to be doing it from another country. I hope your poly tunnel is soon filled with lots of goodies.
ReplyDeletegreat plan of action for now and for the future.
ReplyDeleteSue, you definitely have a great plan in place, and you do so much research on caring for plants. I think it's awesome.
ReplyDeleteNothing like a good workshop! Your's looks amazing, I'll be very jealous of it I'm sure!
ReplyDeleteHave you got any comfrey growing yet?
Good grief! Do Wadworths know about this? Where I come from, 6x is BEER! And almost sacred beer at that !
ReplyDeleteYou won't catch me pouring beer on the soil no matter how poor it is ... it would be sacrilege ;-)
Deletesounds fantastic, boy that is big!
ReplyDeletehooray for the chickens adding in! :)
would love to see more photos as you go along!
You mean you're not fed up with all the building photos yet!!
DeleteThis is just what my garden needs right now, so I popped over to Ebay and bagged a bargain. Like Dawn, we are clay over shale bedrock and don't have much depth of soil, so it needs helping.
ReplyDelete