Busy as usual, but a slight lull in madness has allowed a bit of development planning to take shape as we try and think of more ways to do it all better for the coming season. The wind turbine project seems to have developed it’s own momentum and progressing along it’s slow pathway to hopefully it’s eventual erection.
We are now looking at pushing along other projects big and small. Perhaps some replacement hose to replace the old multi-repaired ones that are past their best and super frustrating when they continually catch on things as you drag them about, usually just as you have got near the far end of the tunnel and have to turn off and walk all the way back to release! A couple of new small sprayers to bring the equipment up to date and make the whole job easier. Then we have a collection of irrigation projects to start ranging from a new storage tank and pump, to installing some new application kit. We are going to try and introduce more wet/dry cycles into the plant production process in an effort to toughen the plants up, reduce the growth of liverwort and moss on the compost surface and reduce water and labour use. We are also looking at starting to experiment with the installation of some of the infrastructure to harvest the rainfall to reduce mains water use, trialling tunnel guttering and drainage channels etc. Although we can’t put in a large reservoir at the moment to store all the overwinter rains, we can put in a smaller storage tank and adopt a ‘use it up as we go’ system where we use up any rainfall we get during the 8 irrigating months of the year, to dilute mains use. In theory we could reduce mains use by at least 50% at a relatively low cost.
Unfortunately this is the usual story of jam tomorrow! Lots of spending and work to put it all in place, with the promise of an easier life in future. One day. Trouble is, it’s so easy to get carried away with all this nursery shopping ‘cos it seems such a good idea at the time.
Now my 'old gits moan off the week' goes to our nearest village parish council and their objection letter to our turbine project. Now I know it’s not everyone’s idea of good countryside development which is fair enough, but they have really gone to town, bringing to light a list of objections most of which are irrelevant on the planning issue and others I took personal offense at. They complained about a lot of stuff one of which was that their questions had not been satisfactorily answered and there was not ‘proper’ consultation. I couldn’t have made ourselves more open to queries and info, they had months to ask questions and visit the site (one visitor) or arrange to go and see a similar installation. They also suggest that the comments letters are mostly from non locals and all have a suspiciously similar content (not many objections from local individuals), they really are cheeky monkeys. If you want a look it’s on page 6 of the comments page;
http://planningapplications.winchester.gov.uk/PlanningWeb/Results.aspx?ID=10%2f00895%2fFUL&tab=0
As usual we will be donating a collection of plants to the Sparsholt fete at the weekend, only the council objected, not everyone in the village, and I’m not bitter!
Dragonflies and damsel flies now appearing over the ponds. A stunning blue Broad-bodied Chaser got trapped in one of the tunnels during the week but I managed to rescue it with a plastic shovel! I tried to ‘push’ it out and it simply landed on the orange blade and I carried it out 150ft to the open. The easiest ‘rescue’ I’ve ever done!
Don't forget to do your bit. Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries
No comments:
Post a Comment