We had long agreed that once the glass house was up, the next project would be to build the deck in the breezeway. However, just about this time, I saw a photo in the local newspaper of a willow ecohut made by the local college for a sustainability challenge. I had not seen one before and thought it was just what we needed.
So that is where we turned our attention. We searched the internet for a source of willow but then noticed the council was clearing all the non-native vegetation along the river which just happened to include masses of willow. So after a quick trip to select the best place ...
... we returned at dusk with some secateurs. We looked the other way while 2 dogs and their owners went past ...
... but met them again when we were sneaking home with our booty.
We had to leave the poles to soak in water for a couple of weeks which gave us time to clear the site. But then we had some bizarre weather with a tornado hitting the coast a few kilometers to the north of us while we had hail and torrential rain.
But eventually it cleared up and we could get on to clearing the bank for the hut. This sort of merged into another task of concealing the wood shed and washing line with a trellis fence. The land around them was a bit too high and we would need some extra soil to make a path along the slope to the ecohut. So he did the earthworks while I cleared the gorse, bracken and knee high grass.
The sticks marked the route ...
... and it had certainly become a bit of a jungle.
But soon it was cleared and was covered by a very heavy frost, which was a bit of a surprise as we had thought it would be very sheltered along there.
Then we had more weather dramas and ten days of very strong westerlies brought a wreck of prions to our shores and we helped many other locals to rescue hundreds (literally) of the surviving birds.
And we decided to install a heat transfer system to take the excess heat from our living room to the bedrooms and bathroom. The main living area of the house is so warm that we have rarely needed the fire to heat the room but have needed it to heat the water on non-sunny days. So this seemed the perfect answer ...
... and kept us entertained in the bad weather.
The weather cleared and we had some heavy frosts which did not seem to deter the first daffodils (and neither has the hare so far!) ...
... or upset the veggies too much.
So then it was back to the plot with turf to rearrange near the woodshed ...
... until we had another interlude for a severe southerly storm, the coldest day since records began, and snow where it almost never gets.
Of course this didn't stop Dave - his one concession to the temperature being to wear his new birthday hat!!
I opted for an indoor job - designing the hut itself. This was such fun and seemed to work ...
... so we then transferred it to the real thing ...
... which was also a lot of fun.
And though there were a few moments with lots of willow going in all directions it soon resembled the plan. Yay. If we remember to keep it watered it should sprout and be a great place to relax in summer (I should be so lucky!)
We then planted lots of exotic and mainly fragrant trees and shrubs in the new clearings on the bank between the remaining gorse shelters - lilac, syringa, persimmons, cherry, lemon and, at last, a magnolia. This was a gift from Julie and Ann, my former colleagues with whom I had spent many lunch hours over many years admiring the wonderful magnolias in the Botanic Gardens. This one is a new cultivar 'Brixton Belle', bred from the Magnolia Campbellii, which looks the much the same but should flower almost immediately rather than taking 8 - 10 years to bloom. I am much too impatient to wait for that!! It was lovely that they could both come to greet it.
Finally we had another wee bird interlude - when we found a green Indian ringneck parrot in the garden.
It seemed hungry and we didn't think it should be out in the wild ...
... so proceeded to persuade it under Dave's jumper which was not a very sensible place to put it as it had an enormous beak!
