The 'River Cottage five' huts are just being finished and will be delivered to the HQ during July.  They are having one Riverkeeper's hut and four shepherds' huts, which will look fantastic on the hill above the farmhouse.  We have started using the new 'Plankbridge green' paint (also available in a wide range of other colours) on the corrugated cladding, which is exactly the shade of green we have been searching for, in a durable flat finish.  After years of using different types of finish, oil and waterbased, on the corrugated we have finally settled on a really good solution.

With seven huts on the go in the yard and workshop, things are pretty hectic.  As a balance there is a wealth of wildlife at the moment, including a family of swans (cobb, penn and seven cygnetts) which have taken up residence on the pond behind the house.  The kingfisher is around everyday, enjoying the sticklebacks as the water level drops after the long dry spell.  The wet meadow (designated a site of nature conservation interest) will soon be due it's annual cut with a finger mower and raked up.  Treated like a traditional hay meadow, and using the finger mower which doesnt chop up all the insect life, the area is doing really well.  When we first started managing it there were 20 or so Southern Marsh orchids.  This year I counted just short of 200. 

Just watched the programme with Robert Macfarlane who spent a year, in Essex of all places, in search of the wild.  He found it, surprisingly, amongst the roads, intense farming and rubbish tips.  He spoke of finding small patches of woodland, large forest, reedbeds and marshes and even discovered watervoles making a come back (their numbers 95% down nationally) at Rainham marshes which was rescued only ten years ago by the RSPB.  It turned out he was a friend of the late, brilliant nature writer Roger Deakin whose books such as 'Wildwood', and 'Notes from Walnut tree farm' are essential reading for all of us who cherish the wild and are more than embarrased by what man has done, and is doing, in the name of 'progress'.

At one point in the programme Macfarlane enters a wood amongst barren arable fields, and quotes Deakin who said a wood or forest is a good place to find yourself, particularly by getting lost.  He then visits Deakins farmhouse and finds the original shepherd's hut that the great writer often slept in to get close to nature, often lying in bed listening to a deer rubbing itself outside on the tin, or looking out at the wild flowers around him.  Deakin particularly liked to sleep in his hut during a storm, listening to the rain hammering on the roof; feeling 'part of the storm yet protected from it.'

The lengthy cold weather has forced us to push on with adding a front to the workshop, with big double doors so we can build the huts under cover with some heat from a decent woodburner.  Several house sparrows fly into the workshop to roost each evening, so we will be making sure they have access once the front is on.   Uniquely Plankbridge is based on a nature reserve and we have been really pleased with the number of wild birds coming in to the bird feeders.  We also put lots of 'spilled grain' along the wall of the old watercress bed opposite the house.  We still get several yellowhammers, although numbers are well down on the 30 or 40 we used to get five years ago; I think some nesting habitat, untouched by mowers around April / May will help them.  The yellowhammers are joined by ten or so blackbirds, mallards and moorhens.  In the last few days goldfinches have started using the fine seed feeder outside the kitchen window and (we think, as some blackcaps over-winter here now) a female blackcap has joined the usual large crowd of garden birds on the sunflower seeds and peanuts.  A thrush is enjoying the rose hips on the house, and we saw a bullfinch eating the guelder rose berries.