9th December

I ran out of hours days last week to do a newsletter.

The shed I was building with willow trees and pallets is finally finished.

And already inside for storage over the winter are eight rolls of fleece for the field.

6 boxes that we made for carrying the plants out to the field for planting in the spring.

These boxes again are made from pallets, and have seven shelves, each shelve takes 11 trays which gives us just over eleven thousand plants in each box.

These are inside now keeping dry.

I had made it so big that we can even get in the Carrot / parsnip sowing machine plus the Beetroot / swede sowing machine and lastly well I actually put this in first out of the way a burner for the field which I bought second hand a few years ago, which I don’t really use any more.

And there was still a bit of room, so I put the fleece rolling up machine in too.

And the shed is not full.

Originally, I only wanted to spend £120 on green polythene for the roof.

I had a wild idea of just being able to use willow trees and pallets and make wooden wedges to drill in and hammer in place, this idea was binned pretty quick, and I spent £42 on wood screws.

I cut twenty five willow trees down these were four meters long and all around 12 inches wide at the base, I would expect them to re grow as willow trees do, but I think this will add to the shed and will just involve a bit of trimming maintenance each year.

Thirty four pallets were used with a willow tree in between each pallet to create the back sides, two pallets high, three and the front.

The willow trees are all in hole just under one meter deep, a lot of digging.

It has a lean to roof with the front being 3 meter high and 2 meter at the back.

This is where my nest expense came in, I was planning on using willow trees for the roof truces, but the were not straight enough, so I had to buy 2 x 4 wood at a cost of £160.

The full project took 2 weeks to build, and is 10.5 meters long by 5 meters wide, 3 meters high at the front and 2 meters at the back and final cost was £362.

It has already stood up to our first storm of the year last week and faired really well, and has a huge dump of snow on the roof.

With that working out really well.

I have now started making a small tunnel just for bringing plants on from seed, we are always needing just a bit more space for seeds in trays.

Again pallets a willow trees but with a bigger clear polythene roof.