Let There Be Light

Yesterday morning I woke to this view from the bedroom window

 wow what a view, in the distance I can even see the Alpaca shelter, before waking I had to get through the night and what a night, I woke with a start at 11-30pm, with a niggly thought, had I left the iron plugged in down in the cabin, now with a thought like that you cannot get back to sleep, on with the dressing gown and wellies, heading down the garden by torchlight, battling through hail stones, yes I had left it plugged in, that could have been waking up to a very different morning, once back in bed, the thundered started followed by lighting, a fantastic show across a snowy background. I pulled the curtains back and watched the light show from my bed.

 One good thing with snow, you can see who your night visitors are,

these are fox tracks, the circled around the chicken house then headed off across the field

 Sol loved the snow and had a mad moment rolling in it and chasing around the field while I got on with the morning feeds.

 More tracks

 These are from the Alpacas, very similar to deer with cloven hoofs, but bigger.

With the growing season upon us, I bought a new grow light, the other I bought a couple of years ago is OK but did not have a good red, blue and white light ratio, this one is a 300w set up and has a built in fan to disperse the heat produced by the bulbs

A bit dearer that the other one, this one cost £55

 The light is fantastic and covers a growing space of 3ft x 3ft

I have popped my bay citrus trees under it at the moment, but in the next few weeks, they will be be moved off  ready for the first sowing's of the year, 

Why do I use a grow light, well even though we have nice deep window ledges ideal for seed trays, our windows are small, therefore seedlings become very leggy, my solution is to provide them with an overhead grow light, to encourage nice sturdy growth, I have set up a pulley on the unit yet so it can be lowered and heightened as needed according to plant growth. I have one of those you use for hanging baskets, but its out in the shed and yesterday in that freezing wind I didn't fancy another trip out there, so will do that today.

Once we have electric set up outside I will have the grow light set up in the potting shed, at the moment it just has to stay indoors.

I might even look at having some solar panels on the shed and see if I can run it like that, but at the moment there is other things to be getting on with. 

We have ordered another field shelter that is going to become a nice big roomy goat house, with a separate area for kids, it will be here in a couple of weeks, more building and concreting for Martin.

Things are really shaping up outdoors now, with proper buildings for the livestock, next is the new poultry area's.

This year will see a lot of out side changes, I keep saying I don't know what Martin is going to find to do next year at this rate.

Right must move myself we are moving pigs to new pastures today. 😃