Bloomin'

Took custody of some orchid plants from Mum earlier this year - repotted, and yay - one at least has bloomed!

Jen's Hen

And on to the second girly weekend of October - this time my sister's hen do 'Girl's Night In' . . .






Stayed in a very nice cottage in Norfolk -  food, cake, snacks and drink (they even provided 'emergency wine' cover!) - a log fire, massage and manicure (and of course, Jen's favourite films - cue Love Actually and Mary Poppins).

We did have a day out in Norwich - including an 'escape room' experience in the old Guildhall - so nearly 'escaped', but were timed out on the final lock.  Great fun - topped off with dinner and cocktails!

All in all a lovely weekend.

Jammin'

Mixed fruits from the garden - grape, raspberry, strawberry - sucking in the sugar . . .

Sweet!

Archive Girls On Tour: The Return

Time for the unintentionally biennial archive girls reunion - this time basing ourselves in the Forest of Dean.

A different cottage - a different location for our main 'day out' (from Ludlow to Ledbury), but the same great company!

Good food, a few drinks (of course), and the traditional evening of Strictly.

Finished our trip with a visit to Westbury Court Garden  - a restored Dutch water garden, with some interesting old trees, and lots of carp to feed . . .

The question now is whether we can actually manage to keep the diary date for next year, or whether I'll be reporting back again in 2021!

Solar: One Year On

It has now been 12 months since we had solar installed - and we've already planted a few trees:

Looking more closely at the the stats . . .

• 12 solar panels on the roof of the house (all made by LG)
• Total generated 3.01 MW-h
• Individually the panels averaged 257 kW-h over the year
• The top performing panel generated 275 kW-h and the poorest 231 kW-h

The shade cast by the yew tree is a big factor for at least two of the panels (it will be interesting to see if its recent downsizing will impact on next year's performance). Keen readers may notice that the panel average does not equate to the totals below, this may be due to the fact we had the wrong inverter installed for a day or two..... Or it could just be inaccurate reporting by the Solaredge equipment!

Our best performing day for solar generation was 28th May 2019 when we generated 24.24 Kilowatt Hours (kW-h), with the month of May being the highest month for overall solar generation. Below are the Top 10 and Bottom 10 dates for solar generation throughout the year. It should be no surprise to see that many of the bottom 10 dates are near the shortest day of the year.

Date	Watt Hours		Date	Watt Hours
28/05/2019	24,235		15/02/2019	50
04/05/2019	23,822		23/12/2018	102
11/05/2019	23,385		07/01/2019	115
21/05/2019	23,345		18/12/2018	130
22/06/2019	23,107		13/11/2018	224
12/05/2019	22,899		05/12/2018	226
21/06/2019	22,796		06/12/2018	258
20/06/2019	22,760		15/12/2018	261
05/07/2019	22,729		29/12/2018	304
03/07/2019	22,720		31/12/2018	316

The table below shows the electricity generated by the panels - the figure in green is the resulting reduction in our monthly electricity bill.  Much of our surplus generated electric goes straight into the hot water with the rest being fed back into the national grid (a back of the envelope calculation estimates this as being an average 47% of the energy generated).

Year	Month	Generated kW-h	Consumption reduction %
2018	September	156.106	- 29.3%
	October	206.419	- 36.2%
	November	87.261	- 22.2%
	December	32.87	- 25.2%
2019	January	62.46	- 37.5%
	February	175.996	- 42.3%
	March	283.345	- 32.5%
	April	393.949	- 49.9%
	May	489.449	- 54.6%
	June	401.437	- 51.5%
	July	445.908	- 67.1%
	August	404.56	- 53.2%
	September	337.506	- 23.6%
Total		3477.226	- 42.5%

And of course there must be a graph!

Looking forward to seeing what the next 12 months generate . . .

Back to the Woodshed

We've not done much with the woodpile for a couple of year's or so now - except for a bit of a tidying up exercise back in 2017 - and it was all returning to a state of chaos once again.

So, with a couple of sunny days ahead of us, decided it was time to turf it all out, have a bit of a sort, move the dry and already split wood inside the woodshed, and get the chainsaw out . . .

Can't say we got through all of it - but Martin had a good work-out with the axe, while I moved and stacked.  We now have room outside to store and dry out the off-cuts from the yew tree -  and an almost full woodshed again. 


Hopefully enough to see us through the winter!

Cutting Back

Earlier this year we took a look at the yew tree and decided  the time had probably come to scale it down a bit:

High Winds + Large Tree + Close Proximity to House 

It wasn't an equation we were entirely comfortable with . . .

So today (on a damp but at least still morning) the tree surgeons arrived to do the business (having scheduled things for once nesting season was over).

Two men (one up the tree, one dealing with the cuttings), a chainsaw or two, and a chipping machine.

Taking us from 'Before':

To 'After':

They did a very neat job, leaving us (as requested) with a heap of chippings to distribute around the garden, and a pile of stripped logs, which we'll dry out to feed the log burner next winter.

So, it's done - still not entirely comfortable with the choice, but we'll probably sleep better on windy nights from now on!