Oct. 5, 2024

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This week I’ve been prioritising my land, my food forest; pending an official name. Now I’ve completed on it, it’s officially mine, about 3.5 acres of land. About 40m by 200m estimated size… though that was a rough estimate. I need to get moving on my strategy sooner rather than later before it gets too cold to plant anything. Tree planting season has started, so I need to get some things in the ground.

I’ve spent the week mocking out the layout, starting with around 30 trees. I have a master spreadsheet now, which I’ve made a grid out of. Each square/cell represents one square metre. It’s important to figure out where exactly I will plant each tree (semi-dwarf variety), which needs about 5-metre diameter space around it. I wanted a relatively organic-looking layout, not straight lines, both ensuring the 5m spacing, and maximising the space with as many trees as possible. I ended up coming up with a zig-zag pattern with a “jitter” as I call it. So to the eye it looks relatively randomly but uniformly distributed, but there’s a very specific pattern to it. I’m quite proud of the result! Then I went about putting each tree type that’s going in. Then around each tree, am planting a variety of bushes and flowers. I’m starting with the northern corner of the land, there’s no way I can tackle the whole field on the first try.

Now that’s done, I wanted to figure out how to implement this without getting confused about what goes where. Ideally, I would need to put physical grid markers on the whole field as my reference. The problem with putting in things like bamboo sticks might get damaged or messy. It may not be sufficient to mark only each corner of the grid, and I would need so many of them. My mini brainwave idea is to grow a living grid… which doubles as a nitrogen-fixing cover crop. I can plant broad beans now in October / November. In the grid system, with spacing every 20cm, it will grow and give me my perfect layout. It might take a while for something to surface, but I think it will work. I’ll just need to make sure that rabbits or deer won’t eat the mini plants once they come up…

So some genius breakthroughs there in my opinion. I just bought a mattock (like a pick axe) and 10kg of broad beans, so maybe next week i'll get to planting. Who knows how long it will take to plant 2000 beans with a mattock... A lot of thinking, planning, researching. Cool stuff.

Other than that, it’s been a busy week with my paid jobs and other admin. I only managed to do a bit of wood-working on Friday. I got started on the practice dovetail box, and remaking one of the dovetail templates. I have a free weekend to focus on this, so let's see how it goes. One of my first realisations in woodworking was how difficult sawing in a straight line can be. It's not to be underestimated. So I was very happy when one of my saw cuts looked so beautifully straight, quite proud of it! See picture below (the left side).

Knitwise - I’ve been knitting in the evenings, the Scotty sweater is coming along well. I should be finishing the body on the weekend.

Costume wise - I finished the unicorn helmet thing, I don’t think I’m going to put it to use, it’s just a bit too rough looking. Still give it a 5/10 as a first time paper mâché project. I will put this particular one to rest.

Blogwise - I did implement the listen feature on my blog, it’s up there now for the most recent posts. And I’m in the process of transferring my domain name - thecraftofliving.com.

Finally, small mentions of the week include - another successful round of baking baguettes. I’m almost comfortable with the process, getting there, but bread is turning out great. Finally, I made myself a conker laundry detergent; horse chestnuts I picked up in the park, I peeled and soaked and strained into a bottle. It has natural saponins that bubble up like soap! I added a bit of eucalyptus for a nice smell and tried it out on some towels. Seemed to work great! I would store it in the fridge and I think it lasts about two weeks, so you can make small batches and keep your conker supply in the freezer.

That’s all for now.

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