April was quite a good month weather wise and by the end of it we were in shorts and tee-shirts but May up to now has been quite wet.
The extension is coming on, we are doing it in two stages. Most of the building work has been completed on stage one, unfortunately our friend couldn’t put the tiles on for us and this needed to be done as we had thunder storms on the way so we ended up doing it ourselves with the help of our latest volunteer, Michael. The store room has had the rat holes filed with clay and straw and has been painted and the main bathroom building has has the old plaster taken off and new clay and sand plaster applied, the old windows and door have been sanded ready for painting and the new windows are still to go in the frames but the electrics are done and most of the plastering is finished, so it’s almost ready to start on stage 2 .
The garden is coming along nicely and we have managed to get some water melons, okra, carrots, beetroot and even some parsnips germinated so fingers crossed they will survive and add a bit more variety to our veg menu later in the year. On the fruit side we have currents and gooseberry fruits that we didn’t have last year and all our trees seem to have plenty of fruit on them at the moment apart from the fig, but that was a late starter last year so we are still hopeful it is ok.
Work has started on the duck pond in the orchard area, this has taken a bit more time than we thought due to the amount of roots and 2 large stumps that needed to be removed but it should be finished by the time the pond liner arrives. We are going to run guttering from the animal sheds into the pond to keep it topped up, just hope we get it finished before thunder storm season ends 🙂
