Latest guest visit: David Ayre

Last weekend, my friend Dave came out to visit PaulssonPaleo. I have known Dave for 20 years, so was really keen to show him our place and to quiz him on farming. Dave comes from a farm in Devon in the south-west of England where his parents look after 400 or so sheep.

The weather was pretty rubbish the weekend Dave came, but that didn't stop us getting outside and doing some manual labour (something all our guests are keen to do!). The temperature has risen a little lately, so the snow had disappeared and allowed us to progress with getting the land ready for spring. We are further testing out hugel culture (see blog post 'Everyday is a School Day' - 5th October) so have decided to use our paddock to build a series of hugel beds. It has the perfect orientation and is sheltered from the strong winds, so could be a good area to grow produce. Firstly, we dug out the base of the hugel bed to about a spade depth and then started to collect and drag fallen tree debris to the paddock. Some of the logs we found were pretty big, so it turned out to be a great work out.

Dave was also keen to get in a bit of running as he is training for his first marathon in April, so on the Saturday I took him for a gentle trail run up and around our nearby lake, Simlången, this included the notorious 'Murder Hill'. On the Sunday, Dave nervously agreed to join me for my weekly club run which, this week, turned out to be a hilly 22km road run. So, we amassed a pretty good 36km of running in 2 days, good training for the Brighton Marathon and a bit different from pounding the streets of Basingstoke!

Hanging Tough

Dave also topped the leader board for our 'Hang Tough' competition. He stayed on the rings for 2 minutes and 8 seconds. Thankfully, he did this before he polished off 2 Semlor at a cafe in Halmstad before his flight back to the UK!

'2 Semlor Dave'