Ponds, Ponies, Pumpkins and Fun at Frugaldom

October 2017

Frugaldom is a magical place for creating memories so that's what we plan to do forever more. We have started plotting and planning for the yard area as it's no longer muddy, it's now nicely sheltered and the hedge along the back of it has started to grow, encouraging the wildlife to venture closer.

Now that I have 4 grandchildren, there's usually no shortage of little people to have about the place. I have to admit that the 'terrible twos' don't seem to show half as much outdoors as they do indoors.  At Frugaldom, the biggest problem is when it's time to try and get the 2-year-old to go home! He doesn't seem in the least concerned at visiting on his own while the older ones are at school and the littlest is still too small to do much out here.

Yard work is fun

Right from the outset, I knew what would be put at the top of Santa's list for this particular toddler - he loves barrowing anything anywhere! You can never lose sight of a little kid with a big wheelbarrow, that's for sure. It's like having my own mini research team on site when the children come to visit because they show me all the things that are most important to them and what entertains them most. This gives great insight into potential future developments as we launch our frugal holidays, plan more themed breaks and prepare for various child-friendly events at Frugaldom during 2018.

"I love Pippin"

Pippin the pony is always a hot favourite. His name, as far as grandson is concerned is, 'My Pippin' or 'Wanton Pippin' and the pony seems to tolerate absolutely anything said child does... much to the detriment of my ragged, gran nerves!

"I love muddy wellies"

Our first themed short breaks were introduced and aptly named 'Muddy Wellies Weekends' for one good reason - all kids seem to love muddy wellies and so, too, do some adults! :)

"I love playing in water"

Exploring in nature is fabulous fun and the mini-pond gets checked regularly in the hope that the frogspawn and resulting tadpoles return. Of course, it's even better fun if you get to forage in the garden for your own dinner before going exploring. This is one little boy who loves his soup and knows where it grows... in the soup garden, of course!

"I love cleaning my wellies"

Biosecurity is of the utmost importance and should be taught as soon as possible. It's another of the fun things toddlers seem to love and is also something that didn't take long to sink in... washing one's wellies both on arrival and on departure is important so as not to take germs into the barn or near the plants, poultry or ponies.

Back on the frugal bandwagon of bargain hunters - I managed to find a bulk lot of these interconnecting grids that are used for shed bases and parking spaces. We aren't anywhere near ready to use them yet but the prospect of saving over £50 just couldn't be missed, especially when the seller was fairly local and offered to deliver them to us. There are enough here to do the base for a garden room.

This was another of the bargain buys of October - a lovely little futon (double bed size) that will be utilised in the on-going improvements while trying to create extra space for extra guests in the various accommodations we are attempting to provide.

The ecoarts project will soon be launched fulltime, as 2018 sees the start of the creation of the designated trail at Frugaldom. It's a really exciting time despite also being a time of reminiscing. It's still hard to believe that my dad isn't here to see that we really did manage to succeed in finding and affording a piece of land to try and do everything I always spoke about doing. I'm sure he'd have approved! (Mum planted this oak tree and 'Mr Ecoarts' made the wild wood bird for displaying the dedication plaque.)

October was a month of growing - everything continued to grow, with the willows, Rowans, Hawthorn, Buddleia and Blueberries doing exceptionally well but it was all closely followed by the later sprouting Holly. Many more of the same will be planted in the future, now that we know they like it here.

Lyn's bridge got a coat of paint and work began on clearing the path at the other side, which will eventually run almost to the river, flanked on either side by native woodland species, such as willow, hazel, alder and birch.

We can't forget about the picking and preserving. We weren't able to grow any beetroot at Frgaldom but we did receive some, traded for fresh eggs and apples, so it all got boiled and pickled.

The apples just kept on coming, so I think most of our friends and neighbours at the holiday park were eating either stewed apples, apple sauce, apple tart or apple crumble. I have enough frozen apples to last a while longer and the cold-stored ones still need to be stewed but are being used as required.

The chickens are doing well, even if number 3 grandchild is still finding it difficult to keep up with them or catch them. On this particular day, the children were using the lean-to / potting shed as an art studio and had been out looking for things to make into pictures. Feathers are fun but the chickens kept following the kids into the shed! 

This was grandson taking his fnished nature art picture to show his mum, He did have a little bit of help making things stick to the bit board (we recycled a cardboard box) but he collected all nthe bits and pieces by himself - yes, he even picked some of the Oxeye Daisies because he thought they were 'pretty flowers'.

This is the lean-to potting shed. It's just leaning up against the side of the barn at the minute but we hope to make it a substantial, permanent structure that will double up as a learning room for the children. It isn't a full height sed but it it high enough for short people (like me) to walk about and the children love it. I want to make a proper panelled wall where it meets the barn and turn it into a chalk board on one side and a pin board on the other. It will then make a great space for displaying all the nature leaflets, posters and childrens's artwork.

Goldcrests everywhere this month! It hardly seems any time since they were here las year but here we are, picking them up from the barn where they have arrived, exhausted after their long flights from, I think, Scandinavia.

The new ponds finally settled and we got a bit more of the track around the edge laid, thanks to the help of our lovely volunteers. I am now 99.9% sure that this part of the project will see the arrival of its first amphibian visitors in spring, as we already have an assortment of birds and insects visiting. I plan on planting a row of willows around the edge just as soon as I have got them all cut.

Willow cuttings

The forst of the willows got cut but all of these were planted along the side of the newly cleared path beyond Lyn's bridge.

More tomatoes

We weren't the only ones with late tomatoes - these were all handed in as surplus to requirement, so they got made into pasta sauce, curry and chutney.

99p pumpkins are amazing!

As October came to an end, we had visitors arriving for the Hallowe'en paty at the holiday park, so we bought some pumpkins. We had tried growing our own but the wet weather just didn't give them a chance. So here's what I got made with the shop-bought variety.

Happy Halloween

Pumpkin carving at Halloween

As the month ended, we started looking towards the final events of the year - Bonfire night, tree planting, winter solstice and Christmas. I also had a couple of volunteers arriving to help during November, so that was an extra bonus and something to look forward to, with the arrival of Marnie, from France.

The Wildwood Fairy

This is one of the latest sculptures made by Mr Ecoarts - it was made for daughter and son-in-law, who recently moved house, but I couldn't really post it here before Christmas - even although she did see it before then. 😊 Being this size, it was kind of difficult to hide at the caravan or at Frugaldom, where the children explore.

'Mr Darcy'

 The horse sculpture was commissioned to go on display at a very special project in central Scotland. 'Mr Darcy', as we nicknamed him, was modelled on a real horse and the sculpture is now on display at Darcy's Equine Assisted Learning Centre near Strathaven in Lanarkshire.

I think that's enough for October but I did say it was a very busy month. Onwards and upwards... to the penultimate month of the year. I'll be back soon with some more updates.

August 2017 and the frugal living challenge continues

Where do I start? It was another tremendously busy month at Frugaldom but it didn't stop there: August was as busy on the home front as it was at the field and at the caravans, with work exchange students, holiday makers and the next investment to join the realms of the Frugaldom project. 😊
Work on the main yard seemed relentless but we finally got to the top layer and even during the very wettest days of summer, we had no puddles or floods in this area.

 At Frugaldom, we had several visits from little people wanting to play with ponies, search for beasties, make things, learn more and explore the willow dens. This frst one is progressing well and has sprouted so much that we need to coppice the new growth.

In the Thrift Cottage orchard, there were apples galore to be picked and processed. It would seem that our regular apple crumble with custard habit has now been carried back to several European countries, thanks to it proving to be a hot favourite with all the students.

 August saw several visitors arrive at Frugaldom and on one particular weekend, we had a jolly get together after moving more hay - I think there were about a dozen off us took part in the most fun-filled archery tournament ever and then had a great chatty night of giggles and laughs.

 It wasn't all play and no work, we made a serious start on schooling ponies to get tem accustomed to some of the work they will be doing in the future. All 3 ponies have now been ridden and are continuing their training barefoot and bitless. We don't need metal!

 Willow takes absolutely everything in her stride and is ready to join in or take part in anything at all! Eldest grand daughter has been practicing her grooming, mane pleating and pony leading skills, as well as having her first bareback riding lessons on our medicine hat 'spirit' pony. I'm still intrigued by native American tales of these unusual ponies and hope Willow will live up to expectations as a fabulous companion.

 Over the past almost 2 years we have been introducing heritage variety apples to Frugaldom. Our longterm aim is to farm these apples for supplying locally and for trading from Frugaldom. The trees are now 2 and 3 years old, so the first of them bore enough fruit to allow us to try several things with them - cooking them into crumbles, chutney and sauce. The Galloway Pippins are lovely apples and are also tasty eating apples. We haven't tried cider making with them.

Our orchard project will be expanded year on year, as we clear and prepare more growing space. We'll be focussing mainly on the apples but now have a mixed orchard of pears, plums and cherries as well as the apples. Now that we have the lean-to, I plan on experimenting with grapes and hardy kiwis.

 
 As you'll have noticed, keeping up with blogging has been very difficult but that should hopefully, now, be brought back under control and I'll be able bring us all up to date now I can get online anytime. This is the latest gadget to hit the Frugaldom family - the Huawei sim-operated mini wifi hub on pay as you go data! I LOVE IT! It can provide internet access via wifi for up to 9 connections, so now it's easy to get online from the caravan. Now all I need to do is get online from the barn and we're sorted!

 Chickens have been laying eggs daily and providing a regular supply for fellow caravan residents at the holiday park. With only 4 lating hens, we have still managed to sell a dozen or so each week and still have enough leftover for home use. Once the next 3 hens start laying, we should be able to sell a few more during 2018, when 4 out of the 7 hens should be laying blue eggs.

During quieter, more reflective moments, I have had the great pleasure to be able to clamber onto spirit pony and sit with her as she carries on being a pony. I know that this sort of 'riding' is not recommended, nor is it seen as safe, but we are strongly focussing on a much more holistic approach to horse-keeping here, a method that is based on trust and allowing ponies to live the way nature intended.

With plans afoot to open our Galloway pony heritage trail by 2020, our ponies will need to be well used to all sorts of events and activities by then, so August was also a fun month for pony play school. Frankie, Willow and Pippin could be representing the ancestors of some of the greatest horses the world has ever known. Who'd have thought that their common denominator would be the humble Galloways?

There was so much going on throughout August that I'm cutting this blog post off here and doing a second August one - announcing the next phase of our frugal project - the long awaited frugal living experience that we first set out to offer several years ago. Follow our progress on Facebook and get updates via Twitter or hang on in there and wait for the next installment of the frugal blog. 

Back on the Trail of the Frugal Microholding (Part I)

Too Small for Smallholding? Try Microholding!

Part 1 of 3

 

It's been two years since we moved into our fixy-up. That's another two years of scrimping and saving, trying to get an eco-renovation done on a very tight budget and trying to create a semblance of normality in the wilderness that was the garden before the property lay empty for a couple of years. I'm pleased to say that we do now have water running from the taps rather than all over the house and through the roof, mains electricity reinstated, a phone line with broadband, a flushing toilet, an electric shower and a stand along multi-fuel stove (although this still needs some work done to complete the installation properly). We have some floors, even managing to uncover and salvage the original stone tiles that make up the hallway, but everything else is taking far more time and money than anticipated. But we can see the path we're taking, so that has to be good.

 

Garden progress is even slower! Weeds grow very fast, almost as fast as the dreaded slugs and snails munch through my plants! And this year's exceptionally long winter with several feet of snow certainly haven't helped matters. Regardless, the 90m x 10m strip of wilderness is slowly taking shape on what little budget we afford it.

 

OK, so it's painstakingly slow, despite trying to get it to a stage that it will produce food for us as quickly as possible. I've been trying my best to do as much as possible with as little as possible, salvaging useable 'stuff' in an effort to try and follow a frugal version of permaculture. As you can see, the Foxgloves are in full agreement with this strategy.

 

The bottom of the garden remains untouched barring what the hens have managed to achieve for us by way of clearing the ground. Moving from the hen run we have the burn, which has flooded once during the severe rains we had last year. Next to this is the wild bird corner, seen above, which is surrounded by Foxgloves and a selection of shrubs donated by friends or traded for through our LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scheme) group.

 

 

It's a very pretty corner of the garden and one where we were happy to see Blue tits nesting this year in the first of the boxes we'd hung in the old plum tree. What with that and the ducks having the run of this part of the garden, it makes for an ideal shady retreat - if the old wooden bench remains with us long enough to enjoy using it. All around the edges, I have planted raspberry canes but these have taken on a life of their own and will need sorting out later this year so we can train them into neat productivity in future years.

 

About halfway down the garden, we dug a pond and linked it to the stream, hoping this would help siphon off any excess surface water during floods. There's another wooden bench beside the pond but you tend to get soaked when sitting there if the ducks decide it's more fun to bathe in the pond than swim in it. They do love their pond but, like everything else about here, the pond project hasn't been completed yet.

 

 

The willow whips have sprouted and had to be cut back this year, the reeds have rooted and are growing well and the little fruit trees that had to be rudely transplanted from the previous garden at a less than suitable time of year seem to be recovering from the upheaval, some even beginning to produce fruit. (Only apples and cherries, the pear and plum trees are much slower) but that's as far as the central garden project - the micro orchard - has reached, so far. But the ducks love it!

 

In true permaculture fashion and in support of several pleas to leave parts of the garden uncut to attract and benefit bees and other insects, I have banned the mowing of the daisies and buttercups that grow among the fruit trees, barring a path through them to get to the bottom of the garden and reach the hens.

 

In this mid section, we also have the duck housing and two compost bins but I have to say they will never produce sufficient compost to sort out the entire garden, so I have had to invest in pre-packed bags for starting off seeds and getting the vegetables going. The hedgerow is slowly becoming edible, as I have all the raspberries, crab apples, blackcurrants and elder. We'll see how things go with those before embarking on any further developments in that department.

 

Apologies if these posts seem to be rather image heavy, but it's the easiest way of recording progress so I may look back this time next year and see what progress has been made.

 

Frugaldom

 

www.microholding.co.uk

Surveying the Lie of the Frugal Land

Fools Rush in where Angels Fear to Tread

Microholding is another life choice I made several years ago - it's like smallholding for people who can't afford to buy or rent their own land.

 

Since leaving home to follow my adult route through life, I have moved house 13 times, this is my 16th address. Every one of those addresses has had garden space where I have started trying to grow fruit and/or vegetables and, where possible, keep chickens, ducks and quail. The garden in this first photo was the smallest ever, so stretched to no more than some pots of herbs, salad leaves and an attempt at composting. This was taken in 2006, at the cottage we rented after a family crisis in 2004 forced me to relocate - again!

 

The following year, we'd to move house again, but it was a good move as far as gardeing was concerned because the garden was massive in comparison to the little green postage stamp we'd been restricted to at the cottage. It was great fun sorting it out, as the owners had already begun planting veggies before they left and let out their house. Some of you may even remember these photos from posts done back in 2007, when I finally used the proceeds of my £2 coin savings challenge to buy the plastic greenhouse, extended the veggie plots halfway up the garden and dug out the first 'micro pond'.

We had a hedgehog lived in this garden and a serious snail problem, along with major cat problems from the 12 or so cats that lived between the houses on either side. These photos were taken in 2007 and then 2008, showing progress made and the lovely old fruit trees that grew in the top half of the long, thing strip of back garden. I loved that garden, was very proud of progress and very sad to leave it behind, when we'd suddenly to move out the following year.

 

From there, we went further out into the country, renting a run-down, semi-bungalow with a scrap of garden area that hadn't been cultivated in some time. 

 

Time to start over, again...

 

I was living in hope that this move would be for the long term. It was tough going while trying to create any sort of garden from the rocky soil, if it was even worthy of being called soil! Anyone remember this, from when we first moved in 2009? It took a full year of clearing and digging to get much growing in there, then we managed to get the little greenhouse from neighbours, who moved out from the house next door. It was starting to get interesting by 2010 - we had the chickens, ducks and quail, plenty of eggs and over a mile of driveway for foraging wild berries. We also had sheep escaping into gardens and cows munching everything they could reach by pushing over the broken fence!

 

Then, at the start of 2011, we were dealt a particularly cruel and unbelievably vicious blow! Once again, we had to uproot - literally - and find a place to stay, after being pretty much made homeless.

Fortunately, the legal bigwigs were able to protect us from that, delaying it long enough to allow a solution to be found. But it let me see, once and for all, how little one can trust those you think can be trusted. Of course, that's when the car chose to give up the ghost and houseshare lost his income!

 

We threw every penny we had, right down to the contents of my son's coin tin, into buying a fixy up - this place! It wasn't habitable, but we'd no option other than to move in as soon as we had electricity and running water, even if it did mean carrying buckets of water from the burn to the house to flush the toilet until that got fixed! That was last April, and this is what we had acquired by way of garden. (Anyone remember this?)

 

More work was done in that 'garden' during the latter half of 2011 and first half of 2012 than in any other garden. This, at long last, was going to be HOME! It's ours, there's no landlord, there's no mortgage, there's just an awful lot needing done to turn it into a proper home and the usual legalities to resolve when you throw all your savings in with a third party to jointly buy property. (Those technicalities have still to be ironed out, so 2013 MUST include having a will made! I have been sharply reminded of this by the four deaths that have occured in the family over the past 14 months!)

 

Work continued, as per all the blog posts - clearing the hen runs at the bottom of the garden, digging into rubble mountain, clearing the banks of the little stream that runs throught the bottom of the garden, creating a wildbird garden, planting the mini-orchard, digging a duck pond, planting all the fruit bushes, digging raised beds, herb gardens, building wildlife habitats, a recycled greenhouse, even a brand new shed! It was starting to look fabulous in summer (what we had of it), with a load of colour and the fruit canes and trees all beginning to settle after their rude uprooting last year from the previous garden.

 

It's been a long time in happening, and there's still a huge amount of work to do before the place comes anywhere close to becoming a microholding. A friend who is a permaculturalist (is that the right word?) visited and, from thereon in, it's been a case of observing the lie of the land to determine where best things should be sited for the longterm good of the garden. THANK GOODNESS we did!

 

The Mayan calendar may well have foiled the doomsday believers, the earth did not end. But, here in Frugaldom, yesterday's midwinter solstice definitely marked the end of an era and this morning saw the dawning of a new age - one that acknowledges once and for all to any doubters that  nature is the ultimate dictator in how we lead our lives. We NEED to respect that. Losing the car last month was a bit of a big deal for us, but we'll manage without it somehow. Seeing the garden destroyed is something I'm not relishing the thought of, so fingers crossed!

 

Right now, I need to hope that the hens survive the floods by staying on the upper levels of their coops, which are down by those trees, and that the water level stops rising soon, otherwise even the ducks will have no safe place to go.

 

This is a sharp reminder that we need to follow the natural course of things, keep to the contours of the land and, most importantly, show respect for our environment and all that sustains life on this planet.

 

Keep safe everyone, let's hope the rain stops soon and the water levels drop quickly. I realise that this little garden problem in Frugaldom is nowhere near as serious as events documented on the news, where towns are flooding, rivers are breaching water defences and landslides are closing roads, nor does it come remotely close to the devastation caused in foreign lands by tsunamis, earth quakes, tornadoes, droughts, epidemics or famines, but surely it comes some way to demonstrating how lucky we are that we have the ability to choose how we solve our own problems and lead our own lives. There are many millions of others can hope for nothing more than survival.

 

Cheers for now,

Frugaldom - with sand bags at the ready, just in case!