Rural Life

The Side Effects of Wind Power

No - not a post about Jerusalem artichokes and their ozone-busting side effects.  Nor is this this a rant about how scenery is destroyed by putting a wind turbine in it - I'm actually rather a fan, having seen impressive sites in Spain, Blythe, France and Lanzarote.

But do you know how they get them to their home site?  Do you know how big the individual blades are?  And if you think about it, you can see why they have to be done in one piece!

There is a smallish wind farm being developed near Cholet, and the windmills are made on the Dutch border (where else?), and somehow, the various bits have to get to the Marais.  Each windmill has three sails.  The planners checked the routes for special convoys and decided that it would be no problem to take the sails through near us.  What they didn't allow for was street furniture, street lights, trees and a partially demolished bridge, or the curvature of the sail on the lorry.

When they arrived at the Demi-Lune roundabout, they got stuck for about 19 hours, until a tree had been chopped down, street lights taken down and road signs dismantled.  After that each sail took a mere 9 minutes to manoeuvre around the Demi-Lune, stopping the traffic in 5 directions.  The wind farm is having 10 windmills, each with 3 sails - there were a lot of traffic jams around us for about a week.

This shows the size of the things (50 meters long excluding lorry cab) as they edge round onto the road out of town.

While I was away....

I would love to say that the reason I haven't added to this blog for a while is because I have been too busy outside, sowing, planting, walking, cooking and generally doing all sorts of good rural stuff.  The sad fact is that I have been preparing for, undertaking and recuperating from the sort of business trip that I have to do to support that life style.  So what has been going on while I have been attending to Statistics, Skills, OR and consultancy type stuff?

• The pear and cherry are now in blossom, the quince has ever larger leaves and blossom buds coming through while the medlar leaf buds are slowly starting to unfurl.
• The pigeon couple in the eaves have hatched and nurtured a young pigeon (or feathered rat depending on your point of view).
• Poirot and Maigret have dispatched said young pigeon, by breaking out of the attic into the eaves of the house, catching it, dragging it back into the house and doing what cats do.....
• White has been laying an egg a day for the past 2 weeks - I must remind her that as a Light Sussex, she is allowed the odd day off!
• Black is starting to look happier about the world (she has been having a senior sulk), particularly now they have been given a bigger run as they have learnt to go into their coop at night.
• Spot has started to lay eggs - Poirot is currently trying to take the credit for this development as she found Spot out of the chicken run, went for her, and presumably frightened her into laying.  Spot can do 6 foot vertical jumps with a cat behind her.
• The peas and spinach that I sowed about 3 weeks ago have started to come through - the peas despite being walked over repeatedly by two cats.
• The broad beans are in flower.

I am now officially behind with sowing for the kitchen garden and have lost the chance to have the asparagus bed strimmed so that I can try to weed it to see where the new spears come up.  Over the next few days I hope to mix desk work with being out in the garden, taking advantage of the light evenings to put that right.

I will finish with a photo of the savage hunter that we harbour in the house - scourge of chickens and pigeons, who dreams of taking down a duck next!

Keep the home fires burning

The main obsessive tasks for the winter are ensuring we always have enough dry and seasoned firewood in the cellar for our needs and then getting the fire lit at the right time so that the living room and bedrooms warmed by the wood burner are comfortable when we need them to be without using more wood than we need to.

First the firewood itself.  We burn mainly chestnut, as there is a lot of standing deadwood on the coppiced chestnut stools in the One Acre Wood, and it gives out a good heat and burns cleanly.  I should point out that we can only burn chestnut as we have an enclosed wood burning stove, as chestnut does spit a lot.  Our living room can sound a bit like a war zone at times.

Then there is the marking up, cutting down, chopping into the right lengths, splitting large segments, stacking to dry, stacking to transport and stacking in the cellar before it finally makes its way into the wood basket under the stove and then into the fire itself.  It has been estimated that in the most efficient systems, one piece of firewood is handled at least 9 times, so that will be a lot more for us as we are still novices!

Then there is the whole science of building and controlling the fire so that it burns just right - to my mind this is very much Man Work, but that could just be me being a bit pathetic and not liking to move out of my armchair much in the evening.

Everyone is a critic as well, and we all have our foibles.  We like to see the flames and aren't too worried about banking the fire up to last all night, others will try to keep it going all night and will have a thick deposit of tar on the window.  The cats like a nice rosy glow that they can get as close to as possible without singeing anything - Shelley was particularly fussy about this (see photo), but Maigret and Poirot are younger and therefore easier to please.

Anyway, as dusk descends, it is time to get that fire set, ready for a cosy winter evening.

Goodbye 2007!

The final group walk of the year had to be cancelled yesterday due to the illness of our guide - winter vomiting virus strikes, or a surfeit of oysters.  Either way, Hugette looked awful when we saw her, so I hope she feels better soon.

Instead we took ourselves off for a walk - more modest in kilometres at probably just about 6, but welcome for all that.  It was good to get moving after a few days of concerted sloth. 

In the afternoon we went round our wood as well (it doesn't take that long), but as the afternoon was so beautiful, we also wandered a bit around the lanes and found a footpath that we just had to follow for a kilometre or so.  I will need a bit of time with the maps to see where it comes out so we can do a circuit next time.

At this time of year it is so important to take advantage of the good weather when it happens - today is not so appealing for walking, with fog and low mist, cool and dank air and limited views.  Here is a picture with blue sky however, as a cadeau for the New Year!

And now comes winter

What a difference a week can make in the wood.  From there being some faded colour and lots of brown leaves on the trees, particularly the young chestnuts, only a few of the oaks (not sure if it is the Sisal or the English ones) are hanging on to a last few leaves.  The views across the wood have changed dramatically once again and with the honourable exception of the far north west corner, you can see pretty well every part of the wood from the wood pile in the central glade.

This time of year makes tree identification a bit challenging, when you are working with buds and bark only, but it is a great time to take stock of what we have and what we want to do with the trees.

We have identified a load of large but mostly dead chestnut stems that will come down for firewood either this year or next - felling them will also regenerate the tree boles and bring on a load more shoots and poles for future years.  We have identified a whole load of Wild Service that we can either play with a bit, trying copicing and pollarding techniques, or we can fell for wild fences - the wood is pretty useless for most things, including fire wood.

There are a bunch of hazels that need to be managed - either copiced for future poles, woven to create barriers, or nurtured to produce more nuts in future.

We don't do much with the oak trees except tidy up the lower trunks, getting rid of ivy and small branches, and pay our respects in the appropriate manner!