Actually, there ended up being two holes in the log cabins last week... 

It’s a lot less dramatic than it sounds. 

What do we do before we sleep?, We’re bringing in the sheep.

We were certainly counting sheep this week, although not falling asleep...   

The old adage is true…

It’s not much of a challenge, but at least the second log cabin is coming along well…

…is what we were thinking by the end of last week.

That’s not the only thing we were building last week…

Onwards and upwards, as they say, quite literally in this case…

We had all of the above last week…

As you may have guessed from the title, we had some very exciting news regarding our Spacehive campaign last week…

Unlike the Italian Job, we were putting doors up this week rather than taking them down, but before that…

The new shed build got underway last week and guess what was needed for the base…

Well, it was just the one crane actually. Nevertheless it has been another exciting week…

Picture of the week: Boris and Rory witnessing the arrival of their new neighbours…

It all begins with an idea. Or in our case, with this book.

The Askefield Project’s story started back in 2005, when our boys were 5, 3 and 1 and Chris was working for Ricardo Motorsport. Having small children is tough enough (as we all know) but add in two dogs and a husband who is regularly abroad and when he was home, worked long hours and I’d had enough. Mum and I started talking and the seeds were sown of an idea that I had no inkling would take off in the way it did…..

So everything was going along nicely. We gave up the jam and chutney to concentrate on our cordials (no pun intended!). We had a good relationship with the local prison and welcomed prisoners to help on the farm and it began to dawn on us that our small farm and odd way of life could have a big impact on those needing help in some way. This all came to a head when we were awarded a grant to help with the method and recipe of our cordials to get them on supermarket shelves; part of the deal was we had to apply for a trademark for our company, Peter’s Eden. Then it happened, we had an objection over the name “Eden” from a company in Germany, so everything had to stop.

So the idea was there, where to go from here??

After one or two false starts, including us piling all our savings into starting to build a toilet block then running out of money and leaving it with no roof for an entire winter (I wouldn’t recommend it!), the NHS came up trumps and we got funding for 12 months. We knew we needed to prove what we could do first before we looked for serious funding so we bit the bullet and opened on Mental Health Awareness day, 17 October 2017. Seemed like an appropriate way to start!

All was not lost, we did receive funding for two other very different projects, Challenge Askefield and The Toolshed. These were a godsend while we worked out what to do. We had another setback in March 2020 when our first Lottery bid was rejected. A fortnight later, the world went mad.