The view from… Windsor Hill Wood, Somerset

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/19/tobias-jones-view-from-windsor-hill-wood

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Marble and Harriet, our two breeding sows, are due to farrow next month. For all you urban readers in need of a translation, that means they're about to have piglets. For weeks now they've been sauntering around, struggling with this sultry weather.

They constantly tip over the water trough and place their bellies in the cold mud. They're languidly munching through the carrots and cabbages we scrounged a couple of weeks ago from the Glastonbury festival site.

We follow a regular worming regime with our livestock, but the girls have been frantically rubbing their backs against the trees and tree guards in the orchard. The sows love having their backs scratched, so I had kind of ignored it, but yesterday Polly and I went up to take a closer look and we realised they've got lice.

Now Polly is the glamorous blonde of our little woodland community, not necessarily the person you'd ask to shove a thermometer up a pig's rear-end. But she's worked as a veterinary assistant, so she and I take their temperatures , give the sows a thorough rub down with lice treatment and then disinfect the arks.

For Polly, things go downhill from there. First she discovers that she's caught nits from one of our kids. Then she notices that her dog, the beloved Bear, has got fleas. Fair enough, you think, such things happen on farms and in families. But the coup de grâce is the realisation that her boyfriend, Rob, has got a tick – you couldn't make this up – embedded in his right testicle.

The last time Rob had a tick, that time, in his hairy six-pack, the head didn't come out with the body and so, carpenter that he is, he used a chisel to gouge out the rest of the critter. Not this time he didn't.

Water music

It's been so dry here that we spend an hour or two every day watering the greenhouse, the polytunnel and all the raised beds. I find it a very calming, contemplative activity. The smell of water on parched earth is my favourite aroma. The colours at this time of year are startling: the glossy purple of the aubergines, the ochre stars on the courgettes and squashes, the red dots of runner beans and the yellow sprays on the cucumbers and tomatoes.

As you're watering at dusk you finally have time to reflect on all the chaos and camaraderie that is communal living, to think about what you've got right, and what wrong. Sometimes one of the kids is there with me, hoofing mangetouts and strawberries as we talk about life and what we'll get up to in Italy this summer. But this evening I'm by myself, relishing a rare moment of solitude.

I watch one or two bees crawl out on to the landing board of the hive, taking the air on their little balcony before saying goodnight. I check on Dave's vine and admire the ancient shed that Rob and the Good Woodcutter put up this week.

Gimme shelter

We're increasingly running courses here, teaching people how to make stuff with wood, how to weave willow, cook Italian grub and so on. Trouble is, we need a temporary shelter as a workshop space and the planners struggle to get their heads round what our little sanctuary is up to. So Lewis and I spend an afternoon chatting with Robin, a maverick builder who, by his own admission, is sufficiently lunatic and bossy to help us build a temporary shelter.

This is a guy who built a café out of Argos catalogues, so he knows how to upcycle. He loves the simplicity of building with, as he says, "grannies and children". He sketches out a design on his notepad using ash poles to create a wigwam resting on stone plinths. I'm no good without a deadline, but Rob and Polly have just announced they plan to get married here next summer solstice, so we're sorted.

Tobias Jones is the warden of Windsor Hill Wood. His book about the first five years of the community will be published by Quercus in the spring.