13b What on EARTH are we doing here? Reprise

#2 The Home Meadow

The Home Meadow

So in the last post I questioned what we were doing here with the land we tend. I explained our questions and attempts at vegan subsistence farming here, with an emphasis on working in harmony with the land. There was quite a lot of abstraction.

But let me show you what we’ve done so far, in the 18 months we’ve been living here. Perhaps I’ll take you from the kitchen door with its scuffed-by-dogs Brittany blue paint round the Home Meadow.

Right outside the door is a peach tree, now with a broken crown after the storms. It has astonishing bright deep pink blossom, and yes the peaches ripen. It’s where the house sparrows and tits, and the robin who comes into the house, plus its mate, hang out on winter mornings, waiting for seed. The peach is nearly smothered by honeysuckle and wisteria, both of which I love, but which have gone too far.

Pruning job this month.

Ahead, at the end of the house where there’s a great red-flowered (obviously not now, in this intensely-heavy frost) climbing rose and a hellebore, after the second peach tree and the two walnuts, is the loveliest bit of the south-facing Home Meadow, with its great oak – so fortunately not touched by the storms, which took crowns and branches off many of the other oaks.

Beneath it is a wooden table and bench, where after a day’s work we drink our ‘brew’ of hibiscus, apple juice and cider, chilled (we drink it warmed on the woodburner in the winter).

Across from the table to the west are our barns, one of which is now nearly full of firewood from the storm damage. Beside them, the holloway leads down to the stream.

If instead we turn east, there is an arch and a little area with fruit bushes and hellebore. Just past that is the huge stash of brushwood, with more coming, to turn into woodchip, which we use as composting mulch, weed-suppressing mulch, and for paths.

Chipping to be done this month.

If we turn left after the brushwood, we enter my circular garden, where four paths meet. I’ve planted it in what was a ‘nothing’ area with a wasteland and rather desolate feel to it; I’ve mentioned before how this spot is now, we feel, the home of the genius loci, and is planted with herbs, perennial veg and bee-plants. I intended to make it into a mandala, a sacred garden to the four directions with relevant plants, but that was too contrived and too much work. It’s fine as it is, and is a bit of a human magnet as well as a wildlife one. I have a little table down there for writing.

On my ‘to-do’ list for January is to weed this and add more leaf mulch.

Over the hedge and further east from that again is the orchard we didn’t discover till we moved in. I spoke of that in my Apple Tree post. I/we pruned that last winter.

Between the edge of the woodland and the meadow on this side there are the six generously fruiting chestnut trees, a couple of birch, and then the steep slope down through woodland to the stream.

If we emerge from the circular garden the way we went in, we’re right beside firstly the huge wooden compost bins TM built, always full with mowings, weedings, prunings, green waste from spent vegetables and the kitchen, and then the little polytunnel, inherited and useful, and the area of meadow that TM has reclaimed, with its many small beds built from cardboard from the move, woodchip and the lovely black organic compost we bought in to start us off, all 13 tons of it, a year ago. This system proved to be a great success in the last growing season, and TM is reclaiming as much again for this season.

Much preparation of new beds to happen in next few weeks.

I was reading last night how it’s much more fruitful in every way to work small areas densely than try and get on top of everything on a biggish plot – sensible, but hard to follow when there is so much to try and do and some of which is time-limited (planting and pruning trees).

Beside that is a ditch and the dogwood bank. The other day I cut a number of dogwood whips from my friend Iso’s wonderful, enviable, forest garden, in three colours: lime, orange and red. They’ll continue the planted bank, and will offer a little shelter to the veg garden, and some more coppice wood for chipping; hopefully also hedging habitat.

Below, in the gentle shade of the woodland edge, we now have a pond filled with water from the barn roofs (hence the ditch and bank). Slowly it’s establishing itself; I’m very much hoping for newts and frogs this year. Last year we had many dragonflies and damselflies – a good start. Roy, who does our fencing, waded out into his own pond in pre-dawn darkness and frost this time last year to dig us a clump of reeds and irises (bottom right in this pic) for when he came over – that’s kindness.

So that’s the Home Meadow. Behind us is the North Field with its tall chestnuts, oaks, wild cherries and alders, and its planted arc of 16 fruit trees with more to come this month (another job), and a row, soon to be two as I have a bucket of whips, of willow for hedging and coppicing.

8 – 14 more trees & 100 willow whips to be planted in next five or six weeks.

If we go out of the gate, now, we’ll turn left down the holloway. Just as we turn, on the right is the Bramley orchard – a huge job to be done over the next five or six weeks of pruning that one with its thickety tangles.

Start pruning Bramleys in next few weeks.

Down in the valley the stream is rushing still. We hear it from the Home Meadow. From the valley, I look up; and over and over I see a site for an Iron Age fort where our farmhouse is; there are so many of them in my native Westcountry that I recognise the placing and the shape.

We don’t know the exact history of the house; we do know the site is probably truly ancient as a dwelling-site: the name is probably Gallois, that is to say Welsh. On the land there are occasional dips and hollows, and disparate piles of stones; probably from previous small dwellings, and maybe once a well or lavoir, the channelled structures for washing clothes in previous eras, right beside the circular bed. There are many intact lavoirs in the area, often with a holy well at their heads. More about those in a different post.

While the woods and trees in January seem to offer only a sere deadness, already there’s a magenta crowning of the birches, the tree that symbolises the returning sun in this part of January in the Celtic Ogham Calendar.

In the North Field, as the sun catches them, the alders shine greengold at their crowns with the furled promise of their catkins.