Well, its been a while. I’ll gloss over the absence of posts for the last while and continue as if nothing happened. 2025 (and really 2024) was a bad year – my mum was ill for a long time, and died at the end of May 2025, and then the rest of the year vanished. When we first came here, 14 years ago, writing the blog was a way for my mum and dad to see what was going on here, and for quite a while I suspect that dad was the primary audience. But he always knew what was going on when I spoke to him, and then when he died, the motivation to keep going with the blog went with him. But as I look back I realise that having that record of what we got up to is really precious, and now I am writing it for our future selves, so that we can remember what was happening here.
So… onwards. Two years ago now, we lost our big polytunnel in one of the huge storms. It did over ten years before it gave up completely, and where once I’d have been tormented by the thought of it being destroyed, at the time I was positively casual about it. There are a couple of photos and barely a mention anywhere else. We still had the other two tunnels, but the big one was our pride and joy and a wonderful space to be in. When it happened, in January 2024 I had neither the motivation or the money to do much about it.
Now we are finally restoring it – I have been replacing all the timber framing, and Claire is working on the beds and getting it clear again. At the time we put it up, we were dead against the idea of using treated timber because of the chemicals involved. We didn’t really consider that the wood would literally vanish as it was decomposed by fungi. That led to the plastic basically sitting there unattached, and then to the cover coming adrift in the wind.
Age has hardened us a bit, so the timber frame is now treated and should last, and our base rails will be aluminium not wood. Hopefully this one will outlast us.
We’ve all the bits here to re-cover it, now it is just a case of waiting for some warmish, benign weather to get the plastic cover on.