Slates, strawberries and a surprise YouTube appearance

Although the blog has been quiet, we have been very busy at Bossiney Court, both outside and in.

After over three months of continuous work, the main roof of the house is almost finished. The back portion of the roof proved much more complex than anticipated, with a lot of woodwork needing to be replaced, a lot of surface area to be covered, and some tricky balancing work required to finish the steep upper slope. The roofers are finishing off a few last areas of the roof, and soon the scaffolding can come down. The house already looks and feels completely different – more of an exciting restoration project than a total wreck. My heart lifts every time I round the corner and see how lovely the roof now looks.

Around the house, we now have the bones of a productive veg garden, with 14 permanent beds and a greenhouse full of tomatoes and salad crops. After a slow start, we are starting to get some crops, including delicious strawberries and fresh endive. Soon, I hope we will have potatoes, squash and gooseberries, plus a lot more salad crops. It has been hard work setting up the beds. Even though I’m choosing no dig, there has still been a lot of surface weeding to remove grass, brambles and other perennial weeds which are determined to come back. Hopefully next year it will be easier and I can focus more on successional planting. In the meantime, the veg garden is easily my favourite place to be.

Further afield, we realised that the border between our place and the caravan park was too permeable, especially for our little dogs, so, with advice, assistance and trees from our friends at Arbor Farm, we have planted a hedge of blackthorn bushes in one area and 50 or so native trees (including rowan, willow, hazel and sea buckthorn) to fill out the rest of the gaps along the edge. We also strimmed and rotavated the big area covered in bracken – the first step in what I suspect will be a long war where we try to weaken the bracken so that we can replant the area with fruit trees and meadow grasses. The long period of dry, hot weather has meant extra watering for the new trees, but they seem to be surviving. It’s fortunate for us that the stream runs right past this area, so we can dip in watering cans relatively easily.

Inside the house not much has changed, but we have begun to prepare for the next stage of the build by planning the sewerage and heating systems. This week we took delivery of a large Graf biodigester, which we are installing close to the main house to deal with all our lovely “by-products”. We may have slightly over-specced it, but we wanted to make sure it could deal with more people in future if the Court returns to a big family home or has a lot of visitors.

And we’ve also chosen a contractor to dig the boreholes necessary for our Kensa heat pump. They are estimating that we will need three 130-metre boreholes to cope with the size of the house and our heating needs. At the same time, we will also dig a 40-50-metre water borehole to supply the house and garden (we’ve realised how necessary this is after two years of drought and a seemingly permanent hosepipe ban).

While all of this has been going on, Fiddian has also found time to become an unlikely YouTube star. A few months ago we were doorstepped by the team at Skillbuilder, a very popular YouTube channel for people interested in self-building. Roger Bisby, the presenter, grilled Fiddian on all aspects of the build, including his commitment to caring for bats! This week the interview appeared online, so if you would like to see some great video footage of the house and hear Fiddian talk about it in more detail, do take a look. Hard to believe but it has already had 12k views!

Finally, another important piece of equipment has arrived – a new electric kiln to replace the long defunct gas kiln in the pottery. Now if we could just get EDF to install the electricity meter we need, the pottery could be up and running once more!