Sunshine - Mother's Day delights - and the unveiling of Sandringham...

I'm whispering this very quietly - just in case whoever is in charge of these things hears me - I think it might, really might, be Spring!!

What a beautiful day today.  Admittedly not that promising a start, but those Met Office types had hinted at a lovely day, and by mid morning it had come up with the goods.

I celebrated by officially letting the ladies out of their winter quarters to dip their toes in the green grass and paddle among the newly opening daffs.  It's still a bit too early really, it has been so chilly the grass isn't growing dramatically - I haven't contemplated the first cut of the year with the mower yet, and I had sworn when they went into winter quarters that I would be firm and not let them out onto the grass until it was growing enough to be able to recover easily from their daily nibbling and scratching onslaughts!

My ladies enjoying their first forays back out into the outside run

It's also a bit precipitate as the Engineer is still in the final throes of adding their pop holes, of which there will be two, to lead from the enclosed undercover 'barn' run into whichever of the 3 rotating outside runs is operational...so just for the next few days they have the luxury of wandering in and out of the big personnel door.

When the blossom emerges on the little apple tree, this will complete the picture of what my good smallholder friend Garth calls 'the most extravagant des res for a bunch of hens' he has ever seen....It is true, they appear to live in greater comfort that we do in the house! Priorities...

As always, Delia likes to eye me quizzically through the netting, even if sadly now she can only do it through her one good eye.  The other one has gone completely blind now, and although slightly enlarged it doesn't look infected or sore.  I can only assume it is a peck injury - she is fairly low in the flock order, if not at the bottom, poor chicky.

On my catch up diary entries, I am pretty much almost up to November, when we finally managed to undertake our long planned but much delayed construction of 'Sandringham' (named appropriately, I felt, after the favourite Winter Residence of our jolly Queen, that other old bird who does her duty uncomplainingly too and always carries herself well, just like my ladies).

I seem to have managed to upload the photos in reverse order, incompetence!

There's a strange new bird in the flock!

The official opening of Sandringham - the ladies thought the straw bedding was the most thrilling thing that they had ever experienced - it was hilarious watching them scratch about enthusiastically, raining straw down on the unsuspecting chicken behind.  Snug, warm, and dry at last but still well ventilated.  It's own very own Hyacinth Bucket-inspired 'indoor outdoor BBQ with finger buffet'!

Under construction - we can see the poor ladies having to put up with the generally grim and damp autumnal weather with only the shelter of their little dustbath roof and the space under the chicken house when the rain got really nasty.  This section of garden wasn't ideal as it was so exposed, but they needed to be kept well out of the way while the Engineer was busy swinging around great lumps of wood and sections of wriggly tin roofing.  They punished me by digging ridiculously large holes in the cricket/tennis lawn...

Leaf fall and it's still not finished! Time is pressing, but the half term break to Cornwall got in the way and delayed it all even more....

All in all, it took us (well, mostly him, bless him) quite a few more weeks than expected to build - mostly of course as in November the light is completely gone by the time he was home from work so progress could only be made at the weekends.  As I was generally taking on the whole of the normal weekend child-ferrying and supervision duties in order to allow him unfettered time to work on it, he was also mostly working single-handed, which also slows things down considerably.

Yes, I know it should have been done in the summer with the leisure of no weather deadline and the lovely long evenings... but there have been so many priorities for that time this year.  I was thorough in my design planning though - I knew it needed to be covered but well ventilated and visible, as I didn't want to feel like they were shut up completely in an enclosed dark barn environment, out of sight, out of mind.

The grass definitely could not have supported their maraudings when it cannot grow to replenish itself, they would have made a complete morass of the whole orchard area.  And the poor cheapo chicken house was already after only one season showing signs that it was not up to the job of an unprotected winter in the West Country wet...the hinged end of the roof was starting to rot and everything was expanding so that I couldn't slide out the droppings tray to scrub it clean.  The hope was that with the rain kept off, this little house might last a few years at least, and as the chickens themselves were not getting wet through in the rain every day, and then sleeping in a dry house, they ought to be able to cope much better with the cold of winter, being dry and fluffy.

But here we are emerging blinking from the other end of the winter (more or less - fingers firmly crossed!) and it has worked even better than I could have hoped.  The ladies have been dry and well.  They have not stopped laying or even slowed down at all - 3-5 eggs a day has been the pattern still - though whether that is because they are all young and still in their first year, I'm not sure? But I had understood that they ought to stop laying in the depths of the winter when the light levels drop? The house has been clean and dry and presumably warm and comfortable in the night times, and I have felt confident that locked inside the house, inside the 'barn' with its welded mesh dug into the ground, surrounded on the outside by the electric fence too, that I have done my best to protect them from the winter risks of the hungrier predators.  I can't really do any more.

They seem to have been content with their feed pellets and daily corn treats, but I have also regularly treated them with their favourite cut kale from the vegetable patch and any weedlings that I removed in my general winter tidying round the garden.  So, I hereby officially declare Sandringham a success! God bless her, and all who sail in her!

And on that uplifting note, God Bless the Engineer, who wisely took note of my not-so-subtle hints about potentially ideal Mother's Day gift ideas - and so I was the joyful recipient of these gloriously cheerful mugs, just exactly what I need to keep that Spring-is-coming positivity flowing - thank you!

Along with these stunning irises from the lovely flower stall man at Wells market, from amongst whose wares I was allowed to choose my pick on Saturday - hurrah to that I say....Not that I would ever, ever openly criticise the good Engineer's choice in cut flowers, you understand...but I much prefer these bright spring beauties to the samey samey bouquet jobbies at the supermarket.  Who really wants Chrysanthemums and lilies in March?Not me, anyway.

As always, however, my little phone camera has struggled with the colour (it seems to have these problems with blues, purples and reds)... Please be assured they are not quite such a technicolour electric blue, but the normal, fabulous purpley blue dutch iris, with that flash of yellow on the fall that just makes the zing and lifts my heart every time I see them.

I want one like this...

I have been gently nudging the Engineer throughout the winter months that I would very much like him to construct for me a suitably fetching and daintily tempting 'Honesty Shelf' from which I hope to sell my wares of eggs, vegetable/fruit gluts and the odd pretty bunch of cut flowers, to the as yet unsuspecting but hopefully captive audience of school mums and dads, and general strollers and dog walkers who daily pass my gate to go to school next door, or onto the footpath which passes along our boundary.

With the untold riches thus gained, I intend to help provide for my lavish chicken keeping and gardening habits without feeling so much like I'm stealing from the housekeeping...so it's all in a good cause!

However, as with all 'gentle nudges' these have been heartily ignored and as spring is almost upon us, my need for 'The Shelf' becomes daily more pressing.

So yesterday I insisted he pull over on our way through a nearby village so that I could take a quick photo of this:

A reasonably attractive example, and I felt, quite achievable to his carpentry skills....no? I particularly like the deep shelf with equally deep roof, so that the eggs in their more vulnerable cardboard boxes could be pushed further back to protect them if rain was likely.

The huge blackboard here would be overkill for my passing trade, who would likely be on foot - here they are right on a very busy through road so need to attract the motorist's attention.

I would favour the more tasteful example below, which I fell in love with as we passed every day from our campsite in Wales during the summer holidays:

I am hoping to have a go at painting a similarly striking chicken sign myself.  It was the thing which first caught my eye as we drove past, and really made this house's honesty shelf stand out.  It also made me smile, which can never be a bad thing.

I have drawn a total blank in scavenging in the garage for something solid enough and suitable - which amazes me considering how much junk is being kept in there 'just in case'...so I am forced to demand a purpose built offering, after all, there is an equally huge quantity of 'garden suitable' wood also being stored under a tarp by the chicken house for this sort of eventuality.  Watch this space.  (Hopefully not for too long, or it will be autumn again and I will have nothing to sell).

Diary catch up #4 - October's bounty gathered in

Big harvest day finally came on the 5th October.  I left it as long as I could, the weather had been so amazing and I just felt that every day ripening in the sun on the vines would mean tastier and longer-keeping squashes and pumpkins.

In then end, I caved in after about the third day of builder Graham doing his "frost is on its way - I can feel it in my bones" comments...perhaps I was pushing my luck - the mornings were feeling nippier, with that smell of the change in the air, even though by 10.30 we were still all stripping off our jumpers to carry on our work on our respective walls.

Even so, I was still pleasantly surprised at the quantity of the haul:

My first Windy Acre harvest of pumpkins and squashes (with a few late tomatoes thrown in)

The 'Munchkin' pumpkins were the most astounding - the quantity mainly being the result of all my 7 plants which were planted out, all surviving and none lost to the demon slug.  I had actually expected only 3 or 4 to make it through unscathed.

The 'Hunter' butternut squashes were also the best haul I have ever achieved from a butternut variety - pointing firmly to the excellent weather conditions we have enjoyed this year, lots of sun, warmth and rain intermittently distributed throughout.

The 'Turk's Turban', 'Harlequin' and 'Big Max' were less prolific - I will be interested to assess the flavour of 'Turk's Turban' as I have never eaten this one before, and they did grow to a good size just less fruits on the plants than the butternuts.  I don't think I will bother again with a big one like the 'Big Max' as the colour didn't seem to ripen deeply enough and so looks less appetising.  Also, you end up with so much leftover pumpkin in the fridge that after endless meals of it everyone loses interest, whereas with the small 'Munchkins' which are essentially one person portion sized, or the smaller butternuts which do one large or two smaller meals, they seem more 'kitchen-friendly'.

After my disastrous experiences last year of storing our pumpkins in the cool/cold/dark passageway in the old cottage (which has the same sort of conditions as storing in a cold cellar or garage), when they pretty much all started to rot off well before Christmas, I decided to emulate my favourite veg guru Charles Dowding's advice to store in an airy, light, dry and neither too cold nor too warm spare bedroom - the end bedroom fortunately fitted this bill perfectly as we are not using it at the moment while the wall continues it's drying out phase for the foreseeable future, but we are keeping it aired with the radiator and the door open to the rest of the house to prevent that musty smell of a shut up, unused room.

Spare IKEA shelving unit pressed into service, just the job for spreading the pumpkins out so they weren't actually touching.

Only time would tell whether this storage method does the trick - but of course by the magic of time travel (!) and the fact that I am writing this catch up entry in March, I can reveal that it did! It has worked beautifully - we are still eating pumpkins as and when we fancy from these stores, and still have plenty looking good.  I have checked them over about once a month and had to remove to the compost about 3 or 4 over these last few months which perhaps had had damage to the skins which I hadn't spotted on harvesting.

After the big harvest, came the big Horticultural Vandalism event...

BEFORE - the pyracantha, though a splendid sight to behold, was over 2 feet thick from the wall, impossible to maintain the gutter, still heading skywards and outwards and equally impossible to lean a ladder against if I wanted to try to maintain it.  Add to that the need to renew the painted surface behind it, and the newly discovered urgent need for the builder to access the little dormer roof over the bathroom which was springing leaks left right and centre...

AFTER - A mammoth and extremely painful task both physically and psychologically

Almost done - in the end I took advice from Hil and reduced the horizontals from over the windows as well

It took me nearly a full week up the ladder, nibbling away and then carting the cut off material to our bonfire site.  My heart very nearly snapped in two having to cut down this glorious plant in full berry.  But once I could see what I was doing, I was glad I had chosen to knuckle down to this job - several branches thicker than my wrist had grown behind the downpipe and were forcing it away from the wall, in fact it is split completely just above one of it's brackets where the pressures pushing both ways have proved too much for the corroding old cast iron, which of course (along with the wall behind) haven't been painted or maintained since the plant had established itself.  In one way, the thickness of the growth may indeed have been protecting the wall, but it was certainly reaching the point where something had to give.

It is soooo prickly! Even with my thickest gloves I was spiked in my hands and forearms every day and the next day I would wake up and every one of the spike injuries would have swollen up filled with a clear but bloody coloured fluid which hurt for days before subsiding.  The thorns seem to have either dirty tips or irritant, or perhaps I am just sensitive to them.  The builders laughed at me every time they heard me yelp - they wouldn't go near it and recommended a chainsaw to the trunk at the bottom...

In the long term, I hope to keep the section below the windows more shrub-like and rounded, but perhaps to retrain a lighter fan design of branches back up the wall which I will keep firmly pruned back to hug the wall, in order that access to gutters etc can be easily done.  I can't imagine even a heavy pruning like this will harm or hinder such a sturdy, well established and healthy toughie like this pyracantha, but it just looks quite sad at the moment!

Safe from the predations of the prickly pyracantha, the builders' mini scaffold tower can at last be erected ready to tackle the unknown disasters hiding in the bathroom dormer roof...

We didn't know what they might find when they stripped off the tiles and felting above the leaking bathroom roof - except that it can never be good, in a house like this!  But we didn't expect this:

Old wasps' nest in the little roof above the bathroom

That explained the roaring sound - almost like a motorbike starting up - that I used to hear at about 5am back in the Spring.  The head of our bed used to be up against the bathroom wall, so this nest was essentially almost above our heads!  They were exploiting the gaps and cracks in the old cement fillets of the ridge tiles and where the dormer roof meets the main roof - which also turned out to be where the water was getting in...

Lots of lovely rotten wood - it got worse - once the main roof tiles were removed in the right of the photo here, it was evident that the whole wallplate and most of the rafters had been taking the water for quite some time, and had pretty much rotted away completely

So a presumed 'quick leading job' turned into almost a total rebuild of this little dormer, with the advice that the main roof here is well overdue to be re-felted and re-battened, ideally in the next 12-24 months, unless we want to risk more seriously problems...argghhhhh....just add that to the ever expanding list of 'urgent' repairs...

We just about managed to get this job in and finished before the real autumn weather rolled in, and put and end to my exterior wall painting mission.  So we will pass the winter with an attractively patchy multicoloured wall - but at least a repaired bathroom roof.

A fitting conclusion to our summer's work: the unveiling....

After the scaffolding eventually came down in November, we were able to see the repaired walls in their full glory!

Beautiful stone of the repaired east gable wall

So, from mid October rain and normal autumn weather stopped play on any sort of exterior renovations...although I couldn't resist adding these wee pictures of our beautifully repaired stone walls at the east end of the house.  The scaffolding finally came down toward the end of November, and we could truly appreciate the skill of builder Graham and his care in replacing the damaged stone and repointing the whole thing so wonderfully.  Inside, even by this point, we could feel the walls drying out immensely, though we intend to allow this to continue for at least 6 months before we start to repair the interior surfaces.

From now on until spring thoughts turn more to the garden work which needs to be done, as well as the inside tasks we can get on with regardless of the what the weather throws about outside....

Diary catch up #3 - Windy Acre cottage through the years

Looking back through my September photo library I noticed that I had taken some shots of the cottage from a particular angle - from somewhere I don't often stand in the garden and look back...and I wondered to myself why?

Then I remembered that around the time we created the Time Capsule, the Engineer had gone hunting about in the massive box of old slides that grandma had left for us to 'caretake' (along with a great deal of other similarly old but much less useful things...), and had found several lovely old shots of the house from back in the 1970's.  So I had wandered out to photograph those same angles to put them side by side.  I had posted this on my personal facebook page for friends and family, but never got around to putting it on here. Time to rectify that, I think!

Above, this must be sometime in the early 1970s, the kitchen (single storey extension) still looks pretty fresh and new! But the surprise here is the flowerbed in the foreground - absolutely no sign of this at all now, just lawn here where the tennis games and cricket is played in the good weather.  Not fantastic lawn here either - dries out the fastest and goes brown very quickly in extended dry spells.  Oh the joys of the island bed! All that edging to be done...urgghhh.

Apologies for my brother-in-law enjoying his paddling pool! That dates this photo to 1971 probably as he looks about 18mths-2years. Again, yet more flowerbed extending out where there is nothing but lawn now, straddling the little slope.  The interesting thing I find in this shot is you can see that grandma and grandpa are obviously in the throes of removing the old pigsty building which used to stand where the little square patio in the circle bed now sits - you can see the wheelbarrow abandoned mid shot and the half de-constructed old stone walls.  Could that be our magnolia already in place and full grown immediately behind the stone walls? In which case it is of a venerable age now.

It also looks like a little vegetable patch or cutting garden perhaps used to extend between the old pigsty and the amazingly glorious looking greenhouse!  What I would give now for a fab greenhouse like that - it would cost a fortune.  And how illustrative of the ever changing fashions in gardens - here they are labouring away to remove what they saw then as an 'eyesore' of a decrepit old bit of agricultural building...now I would love to have that old collapsing romantic utilitarian ruin, around which you could create a gorgeous naturalistic planting with the stone walls as backdrop...Oh well.

Looking up the driveway in 1976 - the boys and a friend from round the corner. Note the newly planted wee trees and hardly any conifers!  The one visible in the middle right of the shot is now the same height as the chimney... Old porch and the original boiler house visible behind.

Same view Sept 2014 - garage extended and no longer half made of timber, new porch, no more boiler house, and a generally profusion of conifers over 20 feet tall

This is one of the oldest photos of the cottage that we have - apparently grandma and grandpa took it on the day they bought it at the auction, in December 1968.  You can see both tie bars here (the right hand one is now hidden inside the roof structure of the porch).  Look at those Crittal windows!  The boiler house is there, half hidden by the shrub in the foreground, and there appears to be a patch of lawn in the middle of the drive.

Here's grandma with my brother in law as a toddler - the corner pillar and old open apple store have been filled in, so this must be shortly after summer 1969, though the pigsty (which we saw being dismantled in the photo above) is still standing here, just visible in the shadows mid left of the photo.  Dew on the grass and young leaves on the trees - could be late spring/early summer 1970?  That would make Simon about 10-11 months old.  Taken from underneath the horse chestnut trees in the South west corner of the garden - you can see the leaves just overhanging the corner.

This looks like the closest I could get to the same angle - the massive pyracantha growing up the south wall is hiding the window visible in the earlier photo, but there is the well still, but the pigsty, shrubs and young trees that had obscured the view of the west side of the house have all gone.

It's so strange, but also nice, to have the luxury of being able to place these old shots alongside the new - and see how much has changed but also how much is still the same.

We have a painting hanging in the upstairs hallway, which someone made of the front facade looking from the driveway dated 1950 - 20 years earlier again even before our earliest photo in 1968.  Tomorrow I will try to photograph it and perhaps add it on to the end of the post here. I like it - it is by no means amazing artwork but truthful and simple - perhaps painted by the house's occupant at the time?  I must ask grandma where she got it.  It shows the walls the yellowy ochre limewash colour that I found on the walls when I was repainting the south wall in September, and had so desperately tried (and failed!) to find a match for.  It is a naive simple rendering but so full of the feel of the cottage, even though much had changed even by then.  It looks welcoming and homey.  It is the picture I look at when I am reminding myself of what we are trying to do - to return the place to being simple, welcoming, and homely.  Sadly the 1970s and 80s do have a lot to answer for in that the fashions and 'new technology' did a lot to somehow spoil the old rustic simplicity of this type of buildings.  I'm not blaming anyone - they were doing what was thought to be the right thing at the time - and doubtless in 50 years time others will say the same thing about what we are doing! Plus ca change...

Here's the painting - I photographed it this morning, the light is terrible as it's pouring with rain, but it hasn't come out too bad:

Our painting of the cottage here at Windy Acre in 1950, artist unknown

Meet Polly, our first bee!

Named by Evie:

Polly Nation, our first bee and official mascot

Apologies - but 10 year olds enjoy such puns...

I brought Polly back last night from my last Theory session on Introductory Beekeeping.  The lovely people at the Beekeepers Association made it a special last session with lots of lovely honey cake and flapjacks, but some amazingly clever person had made lots of these little bees from icing and decorated all the plates with them.  Inspired, I thought - but I had to beg to steal one to bring home for Evie as I knew she would be very taken with her.  A typical reaction from Leo: "Can I eat it?"...hmmm, boys....

She has, for now, been saved from such a fate but I don't know how long that will last.

Meantime, I move on to start my practical training sessions in April, and who knows, equipment gathering dependent, there may be bees being welcomed to Windy Acre by the early summer? If I'm brave enough and lucky enough.

Diary catch up #2 - snippets from the rest of September 2014

Crucial achievement by the Engineer #1 - at last the creation of my much-longed for 3 bay leaf mould heaps!
I fear these may in fact need further adaptation and reinforcement when bulk quantities of leaves prove to be weightier than we at first envisaged, however, something is better than nothing.  And they needed to be ready before the autumn and the Great Leaf Deluge which will come...

September achievement #2 - the last replacement stone being put in the wall...Our lovely builder Graham advised me of his ritual of putting a Time Capsule into each wall he completed - he always offers the householder the opportunity to do it and choose the contents, but if they aren't interested apparently he feels it is important so he usually squirrels a little something in of his own anyway.

So we set to and each one of us put in the little tin something which was important or precious to us.  The children chose to put in some loom bands, a nerf bullet and some lego, and I put in a little drawing and a written page about the history of the house as far as we knew it with our family, starting back in 1968 when Grandma and Grandpa bought it.

Then we popped it into the space in the wall that Graham had found and felt was a good place, before he fixed in the last stone.  Now it's on to the repointing and the home stretch for this phase of renovations.

Placing the Time Capsule in the wall

Here it is, tucked in safe - a boiled sweets tin wrapped in a plastic bag to keep out the damp

 Even though the weather is still incredibly warm and dry, there are signs that the moisture of autumn is silently creeping up on us and the season is turning.  One of these was less welcome - the appearance of a few random patches of this weird stuff on the lawn:

 It was the strangest thing. Almost like efflorescence, and if you poked at it with a stick it turned to dust almost.  Naturally I turned to google to diagnose...what did we used to do before the internet?

My diagnoses was assisted greatly when a day or so later it looked like this:

So I was able to state categorically that it was the gorgeously (and indeed aptly) named 'Dog's Vomit Fungus'...Seemingly innocuous and spores present in the air and soil simply activate when conditions are just right - which they obviously are, as there have been a couple of other patches here and there in the garden. But I just left it and it turned black and sort of disappeared.  Not that there was much else you could do - if I tried to scrape it up to wrap in newspaper and put in the bin it sort of dissolved.

And we had a visit from this colourful wee chap:

Pale Tussock caterpillar

Who is a Pale Tussock Moth caterpillar (Calliteara pudibunda).  Apparently he eats tree leaves including elm, birch, hazel, lime and oak.  I think he must have had to change his diet to ash, horse chestnut, beech and walnut to survive in this garden!  I didn't fiddle with him as his hairs did look suspiciously unfriendly but I think he must win the prize for the most outrageously attired village resident so far this year.

Diary catch up #1 - Back to August and the Big Tree Felling Day

It was the Friday of the August Bank Holiday Weekend, and all began quietly at Windy Acre....

But not for long!

First of all the Engineer was witnessed erecting this Mary Poppins-like contraption onto one of the posts around the Veg Patch...

A time lapse camera (with Heath Robinson sunshade) in order to capture for posterity the day's events. (Although we got to enjoy these, I have no idea how to go about uploading the film onto here, so stills from my camera phone will have to serve).

Old 80ft Cupressus macrocarpa (Monterey Cypress) in centre, with baby Ash tree nearest to house - too near!

Our lovely tree surgeons 'Special Branch' (yes, really) arrived with their man toys and proceeded to calmly slice and dice the Ash tree a limb at a time, until it looked like this:

...and then took it out to the ground.  I felt a bit sad about this, as the ash was a lovely tree, waving at me from the ensuite bathroom window and giving us a nice sense of privacy from the school buildings next door. But it was only 4 metres or so from the foundations of the north wall, (not at all popular with the insurance company!) and as only a baby still it could only have grown bigger and bigger.  My plan when re-doing this area of planting will be to make sure I include a back layer of native types of multi-stemmed tree/shrubs which can be periodically coppiced and which do not grow over 15 feet or so ultimately, giving us the nice naturalistic look coupled with privacy and dappled light, without the threat of having to do such major surgery again.

But this was just the warm up! And it only took them 45 mins...

Next came the turn of the huge leaning Monterey Cypress which used to creak alarmingly in the wind.  As the trunk was bare for over  half it's length, all the branches were at the very top and it looked like a top sail that could threaten to go over onto the school buildings (if not our roof) in a bad storm.  And it wasn't pretty - it loomed over the house and garden too tall and thin.  We will have to keep an eye on the smaller Monterey Cypress alongside to ensure that one doesn't eventually do the same thing.

This was an impressive felling.  One minute it was there:

A quick climb, whip off a few likely troublesome branches, secure some guide ropes, stand well back while the chosen one carefully chainsawed a wedge out of the trunk at the bottom...We all had a guess at how long it would be and where exactly it would fall and had to stick our marker in the grass.

And the next it was down and we had this huge expanse of blue sky instead!

The stump was enormous, and actually took longer to grind out than felling and chopping both trees together.

In the foreground is the pile of chopped ash:

And here is the pile of the Monterey Cypress, just cut into rounds for Andy to chop and stack himself. Interestingly, here I am writing this catch up entry on the 11 March 2015 and that pile is pretty much still in the same location! Piled up and tarped as best as we could, but basically waiting for it's permanent home to be constructed - soon hopefully! as a sort of Boy's Wood Heaven area, around the old Horse Chestnut stump where the Engineer will have his log chopping station and we will also have a bonfire/BBQ pit.

It was a big job, which we are still clearing up after - and which ultimately had a slightly negative effect on my precious stone potting shed, as I will reveal in a later entry - but it needed to be done.  I don't like taking down trees completely.  But I am sure when I have replanted the area it will feel and look much better.  And there is nothing A likes more than a nice pile of wood to play with.