Easter Visit

We arrived on site a week after Ric had been obliged to head south for a fortnight. We agreed a shortlist of priorities for the following weeks: Start capping what is left of the walls with mortar and blockwork, to protect them from another winter of rain and ice; pull down the north-east gable-end wall (the one with half the foundations missing); finish the surface water drain including filling the soakaway with rubble; clean out the concrete tank; screen spoil, distribute it and level up the courtyard; prepare for the floor slab. Too much to do in the time we have, but we will see how we get on.

Caravan: We planned to stay in the caravan most of the time, with twice-a-week visits to Bucksburn. We brought a 3KW electric heater up with us, swapped our empty gas bottle and got hold of a third one. The first night we were freezing, we went to a supermarket the next day and bought second duvets as well as missing utensils. Once we mastered the art of putting the heating on at the right time, we were very comfortable and quickly benefited from the extra time not spent driving to and from Aberdeen. The water heater was wonderful, good hot showers, reasonable flow rates.

Mobile Coverage: I have changed my mobile service provider from EE to Tesco Mobile. I can usually get two bars of 4G in the caravan and because I can use all my data for tethering, I have better connectivity than in Bucksburn.

Jill is on Vodafone, which also has decent reception. This got tested out for real whilst we were there. Jill’s sister, Vicki, and family were on holiday in Iceland. One of them ended up in hospital and needed a scanned image of their EHIC card. We persuaded Jill’s mum, Lesley, to find the card then to get one of her friends to take the photograph and email it to us. Jill forwarded it using MMS to our niece, Lucy, at the hospital in Reykjavic. Job done. We can use our caravan in north-east Aberdeenshire as a global communications hub!

Misty: Our blue merle collie cross was suspicious for a day or so, but got to appreciate being able to get out of the cold and wet. She spent all day being excited by anything and everything going on. As last year, it took its toll – she got so exhausted she was reduced to lying in her basket to eat her food. We supplemented her diet with extra dog meat.

Caravan: We sorted the longstanding niggle about the caravan sloping to one side. We bought a 4-tonne bottle jack and I cut some plywood shims. I crawled underneath the caravan to where we had put the frame on concrete blocks last year, I jacked up the low side and pushed the shims in. It pushed the side up about 3cm and that was enough to sort out the tilt. I also greased the jacking points, which were getting quite rusty and difficult to turn.

Garden: It is a great time to be in the area, with spring springing. Jill had planted daffodils and snowdrops last year in what we had hoped was a safe area, they were in bloom.

Hedging: She gave all our hedging a good spring clean. She removed the tree tubes, cleared debris and weeds away and pruned them. A remarkably small number had died. Most were bursting into life and had not yet been cut back to tree-tube height by rabbits/hares. The latter may have plenty of other food at the moment, hopefully the hedging will get big enough to simply out-grow pests. We used a tray of hedging plants that Jill’s mum had been bringing on, to replace those that had not survived.

Orchard: We extended our future orchard in the south east corner. Jill had found another end-of-season bargain online and ordered four new bare-rooted fruit trees – apple ‘Falstaff’, apple ‘James Grieve’, apple ‘Ashmeads Kernel’ and plum ‘Victoria’. Driving up, we had stopped at Morrisons in Berwick-upon-Tweed and bought one each of cherry ‘Morello’ and cherry ‘Stella’. They are now safely planted.

Broken Glass: We did another sweep of the grounds removing broken glass that had surfaced since the last clean-up – we are still filling a bucket or two over the course of a year.

Japanese Knotweed: Had not broken the surface yet!

Rhubarb: We cropped it for the first time and stewed it!

We added a second lot of fruit trees to our orchard.

Raised drainage mound: We took time out from our more physical tasks to pin down where we would build the raised drainage mound that will take effluent from our septic tank and allow it to soak away through our otherwise not-very-permeable and high-water-table grounds. There was not a lot of choice, we found a 10m x 7m area where the concrete ramp had been, a safe distance from our boundaries and soakaway, avoiding our area of new fruit trees and the established ash/sycamore trees. Ric worked out that we could minimise the visual impact by flattening the area uphill of where the mound will be, by dumping screened spoil and levelling it. The mound will either line up with the levelled area, or will stick up a bit, but not much. What we are not sure about is whether it needs to be separated from the levelled area by a trench, or could just be an extension of it. I will check with the architect at some point.

Grounds: Hedging prep & other things

We do not want to wait five years to move into the steading and then stare at devastated ex-building site for the following years whilst a garden establishes itself. We will mix building with gardening. For example, our relatively short winter visits will be good times to prepare for planting and for landscaping. In the summer months we will do what we can to keep the grass, nettles and perennial weeds under control.

Hedging: The small Rowan trees we planted back in the early summer are thriving after their months of neglect – the tree tubes have done their stuff and the ground is clearly suitable.

So we plan to start a full hedge along the northern boundary and part of the eastern boundary, around 65m total. We want to get it in the ground in November. Hopefully this will be starting to look hedge-like and sheltering us from the north-west thru north-east by the time we move in.

We want the hedge to be nature-friendly, with season-round interest – we will not keep it closely manicured. It also needs to be not poisonous to the cattle and sheep down our eastern boundary. We have our eyes on a ‘Saxon Mix’ from Hattens Farm Nursery, Fressingfield, Suffolk. This is 50% Hawthorn mixed with Hornbeam, Field Maple, Bird Cherry, Cherry Plum, Spindle, Blackthorn, Common Dogwood, Common Privet, Alder Buckthorn, Common Buckthorn, Wild Pear, Holly, Dog Rose, Guelder Rose, Wayfaring, Hazel, Amelanchier Lamarckii, Crab Apple and Oak. We might look at less of the Hawthorn and more of the others, plus we do have some of our own cuttings of different species.

Finding Hattens was serendipitous, we came across an online catalogue of theirs by chance, they may be local to us but we did not know about them. Their prices are very reasonable. They import their stock from the continent starting end-October and have delivered orders to north-east Scotland.

As preparation, we had bought two 50mx2m rolls of weed membrane (‘heavy-duty woven weed control ground mulch landscape fabric’). One was enough to do the whole northern boundary and extend round the corner. We later used part of the second roll to carry on down the east side until we ran into a pile of granite rubble (the remains of the demolished steading internal walls). We strimmed the grass down a bit, then laid the membrane as close to the fencing as possible. We weighted the edges and middle with a selection of our ex-roof timbers.

We look forward with interest to seeing whether it has knocked back the grass by the time we get to plant the hedging. We did not have the time or materials to actually mulch the membrane – something we will probably want to do once we have it planted up.

A burning question: How long will it take to plant the 350 or so bare-rooted plants? We are hoping to take a long weekend in November, flying up on a Thursday evening & back on the Sunday evening, with three days solid on the ground.

Rhubard: Our Rhubarb is looking quite happy, still nestling in the two old tyres that we figured would protect it from the wind and undergrowth.

Rabbits & Hares: Earlier in the year we had a rabbit that looked as though it had been crossed with a domesticated bunny – it had interesting dark patches on it’s fur. No sign of this, I expect it was predated. We did, however, have a very tame hare & rabbit that kept a close eye on what we were doing throughout the fortnight. This rapid turnover of rabbits and hares is very typical of the area – we simply do not have a systematic problem with them. I expect this will change once we start providing them with cover, but we are expecting to protect our veg plots from rabbits and wind. We will also make sure we use tree guards on our hedging.

Geese: The geese appear to be year-round, flying pretty much daily between the Ythan estuary, Meikle Loch and Strathbeg.

Japanese Knotweed: The Knotweed had grown a lot from our May visit, but was not more than 3 feet high where it did not get sprayed the year before (because it was too tall). This was around 30 square metres. Where we did spray, there were a small number of small re-growths.

We left it a week and sprayed it just as it started flowering. It did drizzle and rain a bit later in the day, we will find out next time we are up whether it had long enough to soak in and do its stuff.