Bloomin' Lovely

Well, this post has been a long time coming, but it'll be a good one - fear not! Below is a major pic spam of the lovely plants which are working so hard to make our garden a nicer place to be. I'll give you a major run-down of progress in a bullet-pointy form, in order to make up for the mass of pictures.

• The lawn arrived and we now have a patch of grass! We can't stand on it yet, but it's there. It's so nice to have a big area of garden which is no longer producing broken glass or anything of that ilk! 
• The levelling of the patio area has been completed, so we're now pretty much ready to lay it. Sort of. Once I've watched loads of Youtube videos about laying permeable patios and ordered some sand, we'll be good to go!
• We've stopped having work weekends and started having a work day every two weeks. I'll try to remember to post and let you know when they're upcoming in case anyone wants to help.
• A few fruit bushes have gone in along the bottom fence. 
• We've been eating some salad and herbs from the garden on a regular basis, and Finn has started grazing on mangetout and strawberries. We've had one radish so far, but there are plenty more to come. We're not making huge amounts of food, but considering all this was concrete just a few months ago, I'm not complaining :)
• Also, we haven't weeded once :D There are weeds, but they're not doing any harm, so I'm leaving them. It'll be interesting to see how all this lazy gardening turns out.

The lawn, with newly flattened patio bit and path to the right.

Polycultures are just so pretty.

This is a mystery squash. Courgette? We'll soon see!

The comfrey is gigantic - time to make plant food from it!

This squash has been shown to a neighbouring shrub for support.

Runner beans with peas growing up them, surrounding a perennial while it gets going.

Helianthus jungle!

Well done if you've made it this far - this wasn't even all of them! In other news, we're still trying to work out what to do with the roof and how to pay for it. This might include solar panels, and it might not, but either way we won't be doing the bulk of the work. We might paint the house at the same time though. Woop!

- Hannah

June Work Weekend Details

Having just written the job list for this work weekend, I thought I'd share it on the blog so that you can see if you fancy coming along.

So here's what we'll be up to:

Fill skip - We'll be moving rubble and possibly some top soil down the garden steps into a skip at the back.

Lift flagstones - We found some Victorian flagstones under the concrete, and they need lifting for re-use. We had a little go and didn't manage it, so if you like problem solving and using crow bars you might like this job!

Level lawn and create slope -  This is a pick-axing, digging, wheelbarrowing kind of job. We're so close to getting the lawn sorted (and therefore the fruit bush beds) and this is the last job in the way!

Dig out buddleia/brambles - These are big plants and might involve quite a lot of digging (or building a fire on top of them).

Finish shed floor - This is a job which we'll only do if the others get done.


There'll be a simple lunch for volunteers (soup, I imagine), tea and biscuits, and copious good company. Let me know if you can make it!

- Hannah

Garden Work Weekend Update (or 'Mud day!' as Finn called it)

A good sign of success is that there was a queue for the shower yesterday, so muddy and wet were we all from a day of digging, smashing, lugging and bashing. Although today was a quieter affair, we still got loads done and the garden is starting to shape up! There is much work still to be done, but making all this progress is a great start.

I'm going to spare you my usual lengthy narrative, and thanks to Toby's mad camera skills, resort to spamming you with pictures instead!

But before that, a list of acknowledgements seems appropriate, since we received so much help (sorry if I forget anyone). Thank you to Heather, Lis and Julia for the loan of tools, it made everything so much easier, and thank you to Todd, Toby and Ryan for doing masses of work. Ryan didn't even know there was a work weekend, he was just visiting for his birthday. He got stuck in nevertheless. What a legend. Thanks to Toby for taking pictures or we wouldn't have a record of all the frenzied activity. And thanks to Finn, for doing more digging today than you would imagine a 2 year old would be up for, and managing to do it in an actually useful fashion. Between that and his tendency to shout "grow more plants! grow more seeds!" I have high hopes for his future.

On to the pictures!

Day One

There was a breeze block wall on top of this stone one only hours before.

That's some of it in a heap centre-left, next to all our sexy recycled paving materials!

Lifting concrete to make a home for the compost bins.

Flick is a professional digger, and she found a clay pipe stem!

Knocking down the wall revealed next door's rubbish heap - which Toby promptly sorted and bagged for recycling :)

Victorian flagstones under the concrete show how much the ground level has risen.

Day Two

Start of day two: so much ground to level!

Marking out the edge of the patio so we can start not standing on the beds.

It's a family affair :D

Finn asked Toby to take this picture. Quite right too.

The future shed floor is now levelled!

A nice tidy garden, with newly housed compost bins!

Cleaned tools at the end of the day. Woop!

Our newest treasure - a buried shopping trolley!

Foraging in Your Own Backyard

There was probably a point where I thought that the next blog post I put up would be about the glorious construction of the garden wall, with pictures of it gleaming in the sun whilst a Golem sprinted up the steps to demonstrate how wonderful it is to have rear access to the property.

Alas, as you can probably guess, the wall is still not started, and the slope of doom persists. Of course, it's been there for months now, but somehow this last few weeks of waiting for the builder to finish the job before us is dragging on spectacularly. The monster job which is re-roofing 3 tile roofs, installing one green roof (probably), re-roofing 4 flat roofs with fibreglass, re-cladding the dormers, repainting the front of the house and possibly replacing the entire guttering system awaits us, but we can't do a thing to start it (apart from working out the nitty gritty of how the hell we're going to do it) until the wall is done. Sad times.

There are a few things I've been doing in the meantime though, and being me they are all about the permaculture. Although my design for the garden is nowhere near completed, I've been trying to think of positive things to do to while away the waiting for the wall, and what with Spring having Sprung, there are all the lovely plants which will one day grace our garden to think about.

My garden design will focus heavily on perennials, partly because they're a vital part of any productive permaculture system, but also because they are resillient enough to cope with changing tenants and changing priorities. A garden of annuals relies on a gardener with the time and energy to get it up and running every year, but in a house where the tenants may change relatively frequently, and where the work needed on the house might drain energy and attention away from the garden, this can't be relied on. Perennial plantings are relatively neglect-proof, and should produce edible produce even if they're completely left alone, and in years where there are people here who fancy applying some TLC, the plants will quickly respond and become more productive.

Our current plantings are all perennials in pots

So to add to the perennials we already house (mostly herbs and berries) we now have a sea beet, some mountain sorrel, and some water dropwort. Finn and I will soon be planting seeds of globe artichoke, fennel, watercress and nasturtium (not perennial, but a prolific self-seeder) to add to them, and whenever the chance arises I'll be adding plants to our pot collection so that when we're in a position to start on the garden, the plants are ready and waiting.

Sea beet with a (when it gets established) groundcover of mountain sorrel

Water dropwort ('Flamingo'), which tastes like a cross between celery and something else...

We'll soon be foraging for co-op meals from our diverse and low-maintenance garden, and in the meantime we get the enjoyment of hunting for plants in the wider world, and scouring the slope of doom for materials for paving and raised bed building. This is our current crop, and it's nothing to what we might be able to forage out before the builder backfills behind the new wall and buries it all again.

Bricks at the back and stone at the front.

And it still looks like this!

Just to balance this post out with news of what some other people have been up to, Rob and Flick have been painting in the spare room, and barring a second coat on the cupboard and some touching up, it's done. The tiles have been bought, but aren't up yet. If anyone out there adores tiling then feel free to rescue me from this task - I've taken it on but I'm rubbish at tiling! There's almost certainly lunch and some baked goods in it for you :D

Sven and Cass fitted the extractor fan to the kitchen window, and both the prepayment meters have gone so we're in the process of switching to Good Energy for gas and electric. We had a maintenance workshop and now have a much more holistic maintenance plan which will hopefully ensure that when we do work on one element of the house, we do as much as we can at once (hence the slightly daunting list of work to do while the house is scaffolded). Games have been played, tea has been drunk. House life ticks on.

Hopefully my next post will manage to feature our good and glorious wall, but we shall see. Wish us luck ;)

- Hannah

Work Weekend Update

Well, what a weekend. It rained, it poured, it cleared up a bit and then it rained again. Thank goodness we weren't planning to spend the weekend wading through mud-encrusted rubbish.

No wait! That's totally what we were planning! And despite all the water the heavens could pour at us, that's exactly what we did. Here is a brief summary of what we managed to get done:

- formed a sedimentary layer of tiles approximately a foot thick in the bottom of our magnificent skip.
- put all the already-sorted-out rubbish on top of it, leaving a sort of chute arrangement in one corner for adding the bazillion more broken tiles we knew we'd find.

Hasselback Hotel :)

- dug through layers and layers of soil* fishing out even more rubbish and tiles to add to the skip.
- burnt through all the buddleia branches too big to go in the council garden waste.
- chopped up nearly all of the rest so it will fit in the garden waste bags.
- restacked the - by now, enormous - rubble pile into a slightly less scary shape.
- ate all the biscuits.**

Along the way, we received magnificent assistance from Lis, Mary-Eve, Sammie and Beth, for which we are enormously grateful. The skip guy was rather lovely, too.

Mmm, soil. Sort of.

Other fascinating occurrences include a guy stopping in the alley to chat to us. He did some work on the house under it's previous owner and said it was nice to see people tidying the place up. He also said, "that downstairs bathroom is pretty terrible", which is bizarre considering he apparently worked on it. I promise to write that blog post about the bathroom soon - I know you all love a good horror story ;)

We then saw him doing work on a property down the road, overseen by none other than the previous owner of our place, who waved and said hello. I saw him later, and he said "you're working hard, eh?" with a big grin on his face. I honestly couldn't tell what level of cheekiness he was aiming at,  but I think he must have known about the garden's hidden horrors. Again, bizarre.

NB: this is not what gardens are for, people!

We've also uncovered the top of a large metal object, but haven't had a chance to dig it out yet. I'll add a picture of it below later, in case anyone wants to try guessing what it is.

We still have loads of buddleia to get rid of, so if anyone randomly has the urge to take a bag to the dump, do let us know. There is still lots of rubbish and tiles left in the soil, but we've got rid of the bulk of it, and everything is clear enough now to do the garden wall (when we manage to work out how the hell we're going to do it). This evening we've got a finance workshop to get to grips with our work budget for the year, so hopefully the mystery of how to fix the wall will be solved.

- Hannah

* soil is a bit of a strong word for it. It's more like something you'd find on the banks of the Ankh.
** actually, that's a lie. We ate all the vegan biscuity things, but there's a foot long roll of uncooked non-vegan biscuit dough in the freezer, ready for anyone else who pops around to help.***
*** unless we eat it first.

Look at this bunch of funking legends.

Totally tipping it down and they're still at it.

All the co-op folk are or have been involved at some point in the day, and Mary-Eve and Lis have both turned up to assist.

LEGENDS I TELL YOU.

Work Weekend

So as you know, we are planning a garden work weekend on Saturday. In order to entice lots of you lovely people to join us, I'm going to give you a run down of the plan.

Jobs that need to be done:

1. Filling a skip with the rubbish we have already sorted out from the soil. This will probably involved a chain of people passing rubbish along.
2. Cutting the remaining buddleia up into bits that will fit in the council garden waste bags.
3. Continuing to dig through the soil in the garden, sorting out tiles, rubble, rubbish and whatever else we find along the way.
4. Putting all the new rubbish in the skip.

Flick will be making a lunch of some sort, and (probably) chilli for tea. There will also be copious biscuits and cups of tea along the way.

Ways in which you can help include; popping in for a couple of hours or however long you fancy, and doing whatever you feel capable of, playing with Finn when he's around so I can climb over the fence and do rubbish-involving stuff, lending us tools which may be useful (spades, mattocks, rakes, etc) or taking a bag or two of stuff to the dump at Derwen Fawr.

In the event that it rains so much people really don't want to be outside, we have a number of little jobs around the house that need finishing off, including tiling, building shelves, putting up a shower bracket, etc.

Some Golems are also planning to work on Sunday too, so if you're not free on Saturday, you can still come and join in with the fun ;)

If you're at all interested in any of these things then please get in touch either by commenting below or emailing us at golem.coop@gmail.com.

Many thanks - Hannah

Piles and Tiles

Two blog posts in as many days! You can tell it's been non-stop around here.

Today ended up being a very productive workday, one of the ones where we all stick our heads down to a single task and it means that real results can be seen. Well, we can see them, just about. The garden is turning into such a mammoth task that it's good to focus on small improvements to prevent yourself from feeling overwhelmed and burying your head in the nearest bit of soft ground (if you can find any). That's what I've been trying to do, anyway.

Today's small improvements were numerous. Lloyd has been dedicatedly burning through the larger bits of wood/shrub detritus which have turned up, in an effort to stop the garden completely filling up with them. Joe finally got his way and cut down the last of the brambles, meaning that the concrete path which runs a little way down the garden is now a useful platform for rubbish sorting.

A previous retaining wall?

Definite piles are appearing, which gives the whole thing a sense of order which it probably doesn't deserve to have. We now have the most glorious rubble heap, consisting mostly of bricks from the remnants of a previous retaining wall (found this morning) and stones which must come from the original Victorian walls, by the look of them. We are saving all of these in case we need them for infill or building raised beds later.

The pile of chopped shrubs will at least stop getting bigger now there are none left to cut down, but it's still taller than me. The rubbish pile has reached epic proportions and still isn't a fraction of what we expect to find. Closer investigation has revealed that at some point a sheet of that black weed-suppressing fabric has been gloriously draped over the rubble and rubbish, and presumably the culprit has then spent the next however-long congratulating themselves on a job well done. Considering how much crap there is we will probably have to hire a skip to move it on, as without transport we have no sensible way to get it to the tip.

We have so far found 6 rubble bags full of broken white tiles, who knows why. You really do have to wonder, sometimes. They don't even match any of the tiles currently in the house. Mysterious, indeed.

The vast majority of the tiles have been dull, white modern ones, but we did have one or two moments of delight upon finding some beautiful tiles in either plain blue, or blue and white, which look to be part of a set. I think they might be from one of the house's original fireplaces, but I'm prepared to be corrected if anyone knows better. They certainly made hunting through all the broken, old-school credit card machines and tiny polystyrene balls of doom a more fun experience.

Between all the digging we've been making plans for the workday on Saturday. We've come up with a few jobs, so there'll be lots to do, but the rubble-chucking will be punctuated with tasty food and confectionary, so you will be well rewarded. There will also be some crash space here if anyone from further afield fancies coming, so please do get in touch if you're able to help. Even a few hours would make a big difference to us, and I will make sure there are biscuits and a good supply of fair-trade tea.

- Hannah

The garden after today's hard work

A Busy Day

Work on the garden has been continuing apace over the last few days. It's still full of buddleia, only it's all horizontal and in pieces now. There's still lots of rubbish, only it's... well, actually, it's pretty much all where it was. We're trying to keep everything on the other side of the fence so that the garden remains baby-safe, which means that until a load of the buddleia is gone, there's not even room to start sorting the rubbish. In the process of hacking down the shrubs, we've found numerous buckets, many shower components, a terrifying number of tiny polystyrene balls, and a sofa which has been buried so long most of the biodegradable bits have gone, leaving only the metal and foam elements to haunt us, amongst other things.

Honestly, you couldn't make it up.

Lloyd hard at work

Tomorrow we're planning a co-op work day to try to clear a section near the fence so there's room to start sorting the rubbish into plastics, tiles, rubble, glass, polystyrene, landfill, etc. That's a lot of sorting, but we'd rather recycle as much as we can, even if it's a palaver.

Because this is a massive job, and dedicated though we are, it's going to take forever, we're also planning a work day on Saturday to which we're inviting willing victims volunteers. If you'd love to wade through sedimentary layers of skank in the pursuit of us one day having a magnificent permaculture plot, then please do get in touch. If you don't fancy that, but do have a vehicle, we'd be over the moon for you to take a load or two of chopped up vegetation to the dump for us. Being vehicle-less has it's downsides, and the inability to cart stuff away is definitely one of them. If you can help, there'll be tea, biscuits, and one of Flick's delicious dinners in it for you.

All this and more awaits you!

I feel I should note that this is not for the fainthearted. We don't know what we're going to find, and it's all pretty gross, but if you like a challenge, we'd really appreciate your help. In the event that our garden pursuits are rained off, we'll have some work ready to do inside the house, though this is likely to be of a more fiddly DIY nature, just so you know.

____________________________________________________

In other news, we have a shower... sort of. The mixer tap in the upstairs bathroom looked ever so shiny and nice when we got here, but it turned out that it was perpetually stuck in the limbo between spout and shower, spraying water pretty much everywhere but where you wanted it. We dismantled it and tried to fix it - oh, how we tried! - but to no avail (nothing made of metal should have a tiny, vital moving part made of plastic), and new taps are too pricey to contemplate.

The downstairs bathroom... well, that's another blog post, but it did have a working mixer tap which we decided to purloin for upstairs. The mission involved in this was pretty epic, and resulted in the realisation that the bath would have to come out to get the taps off. What luck then that today the washing machine waste pipe, which runs under the bath, sprung an almighty leak! We are lucky golems indeed. Within ten minutes of this discovery the bath was out in the garden, the pipe was bodged back in place pending a decision about the layout of the bathroom, and Rob had the precious taps off.

Getting them back on the upstairs bath was another matter, but he persisted, and lo! We now have a mixer tap with shower attachment upstairs, which is dead exciting after weeks of washing your hair with a jug, even if there's no bracket on the wall yet. Sometimes it's good to be easily pleased.

Our new workflow chart - blutacktastic!

In the midst of all this activity we also had a workshop. I know! We're basically superhuman. Anyway, this thrilling workshop was run by yours truly, and involved sticking lots of coloured paper to the wall. We were trying to get to grips with all the essential and non-essential jobs that we need to do, and put them in some kind of order. Although we didn't quite manage the order bit today, we did sort things into sequential and stand-alone jobs, and group things together into related tasks. An example of this is that we need to scaffold the building and fix the roof, but it will be easier to get scaffolding in once the back wall is rebuilt (possibly with steps to street level in) so it makes sense to do the wall first. It's much more complicated than that, but you get the idea. I've included a picture above for your enjoyment.

So, a busy day, and everyone is buzzing and planning on playing board games, and I'm feeling all happy to live with such a lovely bunch of people.

Fun times indeed.

- Hannah

Hidden Corners

So, there's this thing where we bought a house without being able to see all of it. Three lofts without hatches, lots of mysterious boxed in bits in the eaves, and half a garden which seemed to be one thing and then turned out to be another.

The Other Stuff *shudders*

Joe has been hacking and slashing at the buddleia with gusto, and today Sven even got his machete out. Huge swathes of buddleia have been flattened in order for us to clear the way for the garden wall to be demolished and rebuilt (more on that in a minute), but there is still more to go. Much more. And once the plants have gone, there's the other stuff.

Previous tenants, or perhaps the previous owner, or perhaps previous builders working on the property, or perhaps all of the above, appear to have been using the garden as a rubbish dump for some time. Possibly all of the time. The ground level we thought we had is clearly not the actual ground. It's a sort of densely compacted layer of general building rubbish and household waste, upon which the buddleia have made their home. This leaves us pondering if our garden is heavily sloping, or perhaps even terraced. The rubbish is so deep, we can't tell. Honestly, it's disturbing.

This has led to a few more discussions about the whole private rental market, especially student and generally dodgy accommodation, such as our house once was before we rescued it. Somehow it seems to be a system set up so that no one cares enough to look after anything, so it feels good, if daunting, to be liberating this small patch of earth from it's use as a rubbish tip, even if it is going to take us forever to sort through it for recycling.

If anyone with a penchant for unearthing layers of tat, or generally hacking, slashing and burning stuff wants to come over, there's tea, and probably dinner in it for you, and there is plenty of work to go round :D

We've also been doing a bit more hand-wringing about what work we need to do and how we're going to pay for it, and we have two workshops scheduled for the next week to help us all to plan and understand things. Hopefully this will make us feel like we can forge on with some of the bigger stuff, and in the meantime, there's all that sorting in the garden to be done. After that will likely be the roof, and then... well, then, everything else under it.

In all seriousness, if anyone feels the urge to do get any building experience, we will probably soon be removing a couple of roofs and putting them back on, as well as lots of smaller DIY jobs. We're happy to cook for you and generally foist tea and biscuits upon your person, so if you fancy a holiday in Swansea or already live here and want to help out, do get in touch.

- Hannah

Buddleiacide!

Well, I meant to blog more, and I meant to do more, and neither happened. We're having a few weeks in limbo as jobs are planned, superceded, and abandoned for various reasons. Hopefully a workshop is going to occur to help us plan work and budgets better in the future, so there is less uncertainty about when things are going to be done.

Sometimes it's very hard to remember that we're new at this: new to budgeting, planning major works on a house, living together, doing huge DIY missions, and trying to do all this while still living our ordinary lives, going to work, studying and raising a child. There have been quite a few frayed nerves, and not a little grumpiness, but also lots of laughter to act as a welcome antidote. We clearly have a lot to learn, but being aware of that is a good first step.

Small things have been happening. A lid rack for the saucepans has appeared. A third of the tiling that needs doing in the kitchen has finally been grouted. Cassian has made some fab pockets for our post to go in so it stops wandering off around the house. Lloyd has taken on the role of treasurer and made all our records digital, so we can all have access to our ongoing accounts and it's easier to keep track of spending.

Joe has finally had some time off after working some truly epic shifts recently, and he's been raring to go. The other day he cleared all of the existing rubbish in the concrete half of the garden, and today he climbed over to the fenced off bit and made a path through the buddleia to the bottom of the garden. The fenced off bit is full of rubbish and enormous swathes of bramble and buddleia, and until today afforded us tremendous privacy and looked rather green and lush, with the odd flower. This section of the garden is actually bigger than the concrete bit, so will more than double the existing garden when we reclaim it, the very thought of which fills me with glee.

It would be lovely to leave all this greenery in place until next year when we might actually find the time to do a permaculture design and get some plants in, but unfortunately the shrubbery is hiding a rather dark secret. The retaining wall at the end of the garden is roughly 7 foot tall, and atrociously built. It has a big crack running right up the middle and the surveyor described it as "at risk of collapse". This is not only terrifying on a general level, but the lane behind is used very frequently to access parking spaces in the offices opposite, and the potential damage to cars, and heaven forbid, people if it did collapse is horrifying to contemplate. Our plan is to get this wall taken down as soon as possible, and for a new blockwork wall to be built in it's place, but properly this time.

To get to this bit of the garden to do work, almost all of the buddleia need to go, so Joe got started today with a pathway to the bottom so we could see how far we had to go. I neglected to take a before picture, but got lots of nice ones once he's laid into it with the one pair of secateurs we could muster. It felt a bit weird to be complicit in such a mass hacking of plant life, but needs must. As a random aside, the buddleia is named after a potential relative of mine, so I've always had a bit of a sweet spot for them. Sad times indeed.

Finn helped to put the chopped up bits in our garden waste bag

A temporary reprieve for these lovely blooms

Joe took Finn for a bimble around our new bit of garden

That tiny pale patch on the left is our first view of he bottom of the garden :D

Finn made friends with this friendly snail

In other news, Lloyd got a first in his degree. If you want to have your brain warped by his sci-fi/horror radio play, you can listen to it here.

- Hannah