Finding Enough

I’m running a bit late with this update, as almost as soon as I had updated the numbers for last month, we were overtaken by a life event that has rather dominated the last few weeks. I will talk about it more in next month, but I suspect this update may be a bit more brief than usual as a result.

March saw the beginning of spring creeping in. I have always loved this time of year, but in SW Scotland it is particularly special. Each week a different flower or bird appears, nests start to be built and new voices join the dawn chorus.

Joining the local beekeepers association last year meant that we had access to their annual beginner’s weekend at the start of March. We are so lucky to live in an area with so many experienced beekeepers with a passion for passing on their knowledge. The cost for a full 2 day course was £25 each, which covered the cost of the hall rental and tea and coffee for the duration. Those running the event did so for the love of the subject.

As with most things in life, there is much more to it than you first think. We learnt a huge amount and were encouraged to take time this year to take part in apiary visits and observe before taking the plunge and getting bees ourselves. It is not a cheap hobby, and requires a weekly commitment for the active season (end March to October in Scotland).

We were already planning to spend this year learning, and the more we learn, the more we think this was the correct decision. So why the photo of beehives at the top of the post? Well, we got talking to someone in the association at the Christmas lunch who was keen to find new sites for his ever expanding bee empire. We offered our wild garden as an option, and after a quick visit to determine suitability of the site, he was keen to place a couple of hives here. He wanted to get them installed before the blackthorn blossom, so by the time we got back from a trip down south to help my parents move house at the end of the month, we had new tenants!

We were challenged to put some of what we learned into practice by choosing an appropriate position for the hives. we must have learned something, because he agreed with our first suggestion. The quiet spot which gets the morning sun and faces more of less south has one of the best views on our land. I hope the bees appreciate it. I am looking forward to getting involved with the weekly bee inspections; just watching them coming and going is strangely mesmerising. I think a bee suit might be showing up on the expenses spreadsheet quite soon.

A birthday this month prompted a one night mini-adventure to Moffat. It had been on the list for a while, ever since we drove through on our way to a house sit in 2023. As is often the way, it took a reason to make it happen. As well as exploring the town and it’s antique shops, we stocked up on cake from a local bakery and took on the hike up the side of Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall to the loch and the top. It was a bit of a grey day, but the rain stayed away and the view from the top was spectacular. Definitely worth the incredibly steep trek up there that beat a few others that set out just behind us.

Back at home, I assembled the fruit cage (technically it’s a walk-in chicken run as they’re far cheaper the fruit cages). It was a bit of a battle, but looks good now it’s done. We built a C-shaped raised bed inside from old decking timber we found behind the stable when we moved in. It always takes longer re-purposing old timber, but it saved us a fortune in timber and tidied up a lot of old material cluttering up the shed. Now we just have to find enough material to fill it.

Towards the end of March, we spent a week moving my parents into their new home. You may remember that last February, we helped move them into a temporary rented bungalow near my brother, while they build an annexe onto his new house. Well the annexe was finally finished, so off we went back down south to move them in. Mum hadn’t quite embraced downsizing over the last year, so there was a lot of sorting as well as heavy lifting to do, which made it quite an exhausting week. By the end though, they were installed in much more appropriate accommodation and unpacked enough to sort the rest themselves slowly.

My brother still has big plans for the rest of the house, so they’re still in rented accommodation a couple of miles down the road for now, but they should all be in one place by the summer.

While we were down there, we got a good view of the SpaceX launch which you may have seen images of in the news. Took a bit of Googling at the time to work out what on earth it could be. There’s a photo at the end of the post……

It was hard not to notice the reports of market volatility in the media this month. I knew the freedom fund would have taken a considerable hit when I sat down the add it up at the end of the month, and that is exactly what happened. The value was down £31k on the end of February. As we weren’t planning to make any big withdrawals, this isn’t too much of a concern, but it’s never nice to see a big drop in value.

Freedom fund value – £1,330,248 (down 31k on last month),

Expenditure – £8,671.61 (or a 7.8% withdrawal rate) including renovation costs, or £2,591.55 (or a 2.3% withdrawal rate) without renovation costs

Earned income – £0

Total expenses including renovation costs were huge this month, with the builder’s invoice being due (£4k), a big outlay on new radiators and valves (£1200) and a woodburner (for the newly opened up fireplace – £800). The main spending outside of the renovation was for the insurance renewal for the car (£315), that trip to Moffat (£240) and a tree surgeon’s bill for taking down a dead tree in a difficult location (£250).

There was no earned income this month, but I did spend time preparing for some on site consultancy at the start of April.

What about those other goals I set at the start of the year? Well, mixed results in March:

Reduce plastic waste by making one change every month – March saw us make the switch from tea bags to loose leaf tea. We drink a lot of tea, and although a lot of brands are now ‘compostable’, they are not suitable for home composting. As we do not have a food waste collection service, we do not have the option to send them for high temperature commercial composting. Using leaves, we can compost them at home and it actually works out a little cheaper than teabags.

We already had a (rarely used) infuser tea pot, and stainless mesh tea infuser that I occasionally use for green tea, so we just needed to make the switch to leaf tea in our grocery shop. The choice in our local supermarket is much more limited than for teabags (probably not surprising), so I bought one of everything, so see which we prefer for everyday. We couldn’t really taste much of a difference between the two Morrisons options, but the ‘Best’ one had slightly larger leaves. We preferred both Morrisons ones to the Twinings offering, which is good, as they’re both cheaper.

I’m not a big fan of Twinings Early Grey, so I’m going to have to find another source of that, as there didn’t seem to be any leaf alternatives in any of our local supermarkets.

Do something creative every month – March was another month of little progress on this goal. I’ve signed up for an open-air sketching session in May, but there always seems to be something else that needs doing preventing me from setting time aside for this at the moment.

Record the birds and mammals spotted around the house each month – There seemed to be fewer birds on the feeder in March. The abundance of siskins in February definitely did not carry on into March. We did have a visit by a big gang of fieldfares one day. Normally these are winter visitors here, so I expect this is the last we’ll see of them for a while. There are no mammals listed this month, as the batteries ran out on the trail cam, and it took us ages to get around to recharging them and putting the camera back out. If the disappearing peanuts are anything to go by, the pine marten is still visiting regularly!

Other highlights of the month were finally getting the owl box up (with the help of the local tree surgeon and his climbing gear) and germinating some tomato seeds saved from heritage tomato fruit sourced locally last year.