Everything's aching!
And the clocks went forward. I just couldn't get started this
morning. Nice long Sunday breakfast with boiled egg, croissants,
stilton, home-made pear-raspberry-aniseed jam and some very nice
local white cheese. Plus lots of properly brewed coffee. I can't get
up from the breakfast table.
Pottering around on the
patio. There's still a nip in the air but once the sun has punched
through the morning mist, things warm up nicely. OH sows more seed
for the greenhouse. I'm starting to repot various things left in pots
on the two workbenches and discover to my horror that some of the
pots are infested with vine weevil grubs. I serve them up to the
robins but even the robins don't like them. When I return later that afternoon, the grubs have all shrivelled up in the sun.
I start dismantling the
rotted potting benches. OH is getting the cart ready. I take the
cart; he takes the third trellis donated by P. We trudge towards the
plot. OH carries on digging. I level out bits and bobs on my side,
then decide to finally do something useful with that old chest
freezer. I manoeuvre it round the new shed and in position in front of
it, facing the plot. On the patio as it were. It is to become the
bottom of my new workbench. The benchtop is the door from the old
shed. I nail and screw another board to it. Love being handy with the
electric screwdriver! Then I paint the board with the remaining
Cuprinol.
Need to do something
artistic. Manage to paint one Pril flower (a 70s design) onto the
outer wall facing the path. Because the brush is too thick for fine
work, the flower looks a bit random, but the colours are very
fetching.
Old Boy drops round
with good advice: we should screw or tie our shed to a stake rammed
into the ground because he's seen too many sheds take off in a gale.
He apologises about 10000 times for giving us this advice but I think
he's lovely. He's such an original. He probably also has a point –
what he isn't saying but is probably thinking is that our flimsy and
cheap shiplap shed will not last through a spring or summer storm. I
am hoping that, as most gales arrive from the west, our plot
neighbour's stout and quite tall shed, and his hedge, will protect us
from the worst. In any case, we haven't got anything stake-like we
could use right now. Nor do we have a big-enough hammer.
Towards the end of the
afternoon – I've only just sawn up the blue piping and stuck it
over the sprouting kale stumps, to cover it with fleece to keep the
pigeons from munching it all – a massive wood pigeon somehow ends
up under the fleece. How in the world? OH, who has seen it,
explains: the pigeon landed badly on the fence and tumbled onto the
fleece, then off it, and sought shelter underneath it. We get it out
and discover that it's quite badly injured. It's lost an eye and has
a chest wound too. But when I try to pick it up, it takes flight,
ponderously, and sails, like a stricken Hercules, towards the big
willow by the river, but not before clipping the neighbour's fence
(one-eyed flight). Tragic.
In our back garden, my
rickety screwed-together cold frame sits wonkily on a triangular
raised bed. It's totally inaccessible. It really should have gone on
the side bed to the left but the broom is in the way. The broom is
now over 7 feet tall and I had sworn to myself that if it didn't
flower this year I'd chop it down for firewood. But it is huge, bushy
and about to pop into a fiery riot of yellow and red. So it'll stay
and I'll have to find another space for my rickety cold frame.
OH is crazy about his
turbo cider. He's got himself Andy Hamilton's homebrewing book, which
is great, and he's now in the final stages of turning Lidl-bought
el-cheapo apple juice into a gallon of cider. It's already stopped
bubbling and is ready for racking this weekend.
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