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.

More hedging and trees, also a Building Warrant

We were back in the area for a few days at the end of May, again making best use of the bank holiday. Over the last year or two we had been bringing on an array of shrubs and trees that were destined for the steading. Come the late-May bank holiday, we decided the time was right. So we drove up in the Ford Galaxy, jammed tight with potted trees and shrubs. We also saw an interesting addition to our water supply, I expect Cadger must have been back after we left in September. We think it is to help stop it freezing up…

Our own shrubs & trees: Being effectively container grown, they mostly had proper root balls, so our hedging technique was not suitable – we had to struggle with a spade, digging out as best we could in the usually stony ground – slow and dissatisfying.

Our conifers mostly went into a patch on our north side (that we had covered with weed membrane on a previous visit), not far from where the caravan is at present.

The trees we planted at 5m intervals along east and west boundaries, continuing from the ones we planted the previous November. We gave them proper tree stakes and rubber tree ties. Most needed two of the spiral tree tubes, or the solid plastic tubes that we had acquired at home and brought up with us. Several of the trees had sentimental connections. We had copper beeches from Spilsby, where I was born & brought up and Bucksburn, where Jill was brought up. We had a cherry plum that a friend of ours in Lowestoft donated and so on. We had a couple of cherry plums that Jill’s Mum, Lesley, had propagated from trees right next to Slains school. We ran out of room, so had to do another stretch of strimming and putting down weed membrane, this time a bit of a way along the southern boundary from each end.

Caravan: We had had a message from William at Nia Roo that the truck delivering the caravan had trouble because of waterlogging where our track runs onto our property. So we were unsurprised to find the caravan put up against the north wall of the steading on the concrete hardstanding. There was quite a mess. The drop off the track was well rutted, a couple of our fence panels were fairly smashed up – I think they used the panels under the wheels of their truck to get it back on the track. Finally, quite a few of our slates were on the rutted area – they were in small pieces. Again they had probably used them to get their truck out. We also saw bits of broken plastic – a vent cover over the shower on the caravan roof was no more. We were not well pleased. We tidied up the broken slates, flattened the fence panels almost back to normality, filled in the ruts, then levelled up the caravan and checked it out.It was fine inside but obviously nothing was connected up. Still very nice to escape into during showers and for lunch breaks.