Our garden forks have both died at a far too young age. During their lives both worked hard, turned the earth, dug the ground. Both strove for perfection in tilling soil. Both met an untimely demise at the hands of unskilled labourers.
Goodbye fine forks, you served us well.
P.s. David wanted to name this post Fork off.
After a (very brief) discussion David and I decided that we didn’t want to keep hens, so would get rid of the hen house and run we found when we uncovered the back garden!
The upside of this was that the hen house itself was pretty rotten, so it broke apart easily when my friend Laura attacked it with a hammer! The downside? Well a million tonne stone sink buried in the ground as a water trough took the two of us hours to remove, and there was a lot of chicken poo involved…
Also it rained. There is nothing like standing in chicken poo, getting freezing cold, digging up something that would be too heavy for you to lift even if it weren’t buried in the mud, in the rain.
However, we’re now done, the chicken run is no more and we have to decide what to do with the space. We’ve been thinking about turning it into a veg patch for this year in case we don’t get time to sort raised beds in the back of the garden – what do you think?
As Albert Einstein once said, “People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.”
Dave certainly enjoyed his first wood chopping session today. He’s already talking about the woodshed he plans to build to replace the fairly leaky one we have – maybe a project for the summer months.
He also wants a chainsaw – not sure how I feel about that! Need to calculate the distance to the nearest hospital first…
For now though, it is time to put my feet up in front of this lovely roaring fire – after living with no heating for the last six months this is true bliss!
A big shout out to Ellie who came to us for the weekend for a break from uni and ended up helping us to clear out our rather stinky ponds!
Both were utterly overgrown, there was so much root and stone in each that there was hardly any room for water! Ellie and I nearly broke our backs tugging at matted roots and heaving them, all soggy and smelly out of the pond and into the compost heap.
On more than one occasion the roots gave way and we ended up sat on our bums in the mud – not very pleasant but pretty funny!
One of the ponds has a hard plastic liner which seems to be in fairly good condition, but the other was lined with plastic sheet which needed replacing. We’ve used a thicker plastic liner this time, and added an underlay on top of the (mainly disintegrated) carpet we found under the old pond.
Ellie (a biology student) is keen that we keep one of the ponds natural and unfiltered for the local wildlife and I’d like fish in the other, so it needed a pump. We also needed to find plants, but as the local garden centres all seem to have had no luck with their lily pads this year we raided my Grandad’s pond for a few – thanks Grandad!
Our local stones that we were using around the ponds seem to crack in half when there is frost, so we’ve roped David’s parents into bringing us Cornish stones whenever they visit. We’ve just about finished edging both ponds now…
There is still more to do – we want to cover that area where the black plastic killing off weeds at the moment, and we want to do more planting up around the ponds, but are waiting to see what comes through this year first. We’ll post again on stage two of the pond refurb in a couple of months!
(And yes… Ellie did do plenty of relaxing too, we don’t invite her over just for the free labour :p)
We just bought our first home – a 15th Century cottage tucked away in the little hamlet of Carlingcott on the south side of Bath – it was love at first sight!
The cottage is just gorgeous – it was done up extensively in 2005 with an extension to the back very much in keeping with the old stone style, but with a new kitchen, bathroom, dining area and master bedroom added. The original house must have been very small with just two rooms!
Apparently there would have been just a sleeping platform, and we’ve been told that originally animals would have been kept downstairs. The original beams are still in place so you can see where the old roof would have been, although when the thatch was replaced the height of the ceiling was increased so a new structure now sits above it.
A stone spiral staircase gives a huge dose of character to a home that wasn’t exactly lacking anyway, and a Rayburn and wood fire will keep us toasty warm through the winter.
We’re so excited to be finally in our new home, after nearly two years of searching for the perfect spot. Carlingcott seems like a really friendly little village (we’ve been given chocolate brownies and wine by the neighbours!) so we’re looking forward to settling in.
