Eating the hedge

We recently cut back the hedge around the Whinnies Community Garden car park. This wasn't just a trim, it was a major cutback with the height of the hedge halved.



Everything chopped back was fed to the goats over a 10 day period. They ate the leaves, twigs and bark.



We now have a large pile of sticks, twigs and branches. Our big task now is to extract everything of value. In effect, much of what is recoverable in fuel, though not for our stove at home. The sticks will be fuel instead for the outdoor oven. We have been given permission to use one belonging to a friend. The sticks we are saving now will be dried for a year so when we get round to using the oven, which hopefully will be soon, we will be using fuel we saved last year.

So watch this space and see how we get on with baking outdoors. Meanwhile, I had to stop cutting the branches this afternoon. The rain had arrived!

Our first crop from the smallholding

We were down on the smallholding this afternoon to collect some dried cut grass. This was our first crop. The goats enjoyed it!

New land

We are now the proud owners of 2.5 acres of agricultural land near to where we live. We have lots of plans and will be starting work on them shortly. We want the site to be wildlife friendly so there will be hedgehog boxes, ponds, bat nesting boxes and so on installed. The hedgehogs and amphibians will eat the bugs so there is an economic return for us with less damage to crops.

The video above was filmed last week and in it I explain some of the plans for the site.