Busy little bees.....

Our spell of glorious warm weather has left us now and it has been overcast and drizzle today. Not that this has stopped us! Oh no..... a lot of things have been started today.

As we have 39 beds in the potager and I now find out that we can start planting in them almost straight away, I'm going to try to take the grass off of 1 bed a day. With this encouragement from me, Sue set to and dug the bed over. (And don't ask why the bed's that shape. You'll have to come to see for yourself.)

First problem..... and first crop!

You are lucky if you can get the fork in more than 5 cms before you hit a rock; we are getting a good harvest of stones before we've hardly begun. Fortunately, Sue wants to construct a dry stone 'river' through the back garden, but, of course, we can't put the stones from the Potager straight into the 'river' because that will have to be dug out and edged first. We are finding this all the time. Starting one job inevitably leads to one or two other jobs, which ideally should be done first to avoid extra effort and time. 'Tant pis', as they say, and you can translate that how you like.

Then it was back to the wall building for the bed in front of the house. Another learning process. First lesson was how to mix up the cement in the new Mixer. Throw all the ingredients in and switch on....... Silly! You have to have the drum at the correct angle or things don't mix evenly. We've often seen Brickies on building sites using a mixer, but it's not until you have a go that you realise that there is a knack in everything. And, building a stone wall isn't the same as a brick wall. Everything is bigger and heavier, and nothing fits together neatly, so you have to do a bit and then let it go off, before you can put more on.

Having built the 2 end walls, we'll use a string level between them to then build the rest of the wall. And then the front will have to be mortared to match that on the house. All good fun. Still, we are learning and I realise how useful it is going to be to 'practice' on renovating the pig-sty.