CHIPPINGS OFF AN OLD BLOKE

What can you do when the ground is frozen? We are just above the snow line here at 365 ft and all is rock hard. First wear gloves, two or three pairs of socks (except then you cannot get your wellies on), several old jumpers and so on.
Of course what I do is go out in one pair of socks, a good pair of trousers and a good shirt and get really mucky. R has given up.

So, four tons of Burlington blue slate chippings are barrowed onto the garden paths to repair the damage done by last year's weather. We could have had welsh purple chippings or green slate ones but the blue is less intrusive.
The path edges have rotted and new ones are being put in. Steps need to be remade, not, this time, with discarded scaffolding planks but I have found a cheap source of pressure treated fence posts. So, sawn up into lengths of about two feet, they can be used as the risers, pegged well and then infilled behind with soil and the chippings. I have abandoned the wood chip path through the wood as the surface rotted (especially this year) in a few months. Stone, I hope, will last longer.

Another victim of the rain was our electric gate at the bottom of the track. (R insisted she did not want to get out in the rain to open and shut it so it was one luxury we indulged in when we built the house.) The water has affected the motor and penetrated the seals. The paper lady arrived one day, popped the paper through the letterbox and then could not get out! Trapped by a shut gate. As it was very early it was a pyjamas under trousers job.

The track will need repairing, the ponds will need redigging, lining and the boardwalk repairing. Bankings are rough as all was so wet in the late summer and autumn that strimming was not possible. As the daffs are coming up any cutting back will have to wait until July at the earliest so they can build up their bulbs for next year.

It always amazes me how much wood falls off our ash trees. we have been collecting it and storing it under cover.

And the muckwork goes on, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow up from the horse heap off the lane below the house.
Hard work but one of the secrets of a garden which bursts with growth later in the year.
Whilst we were watching the rain the creeping buttercups have been having a field day, well a buttercup field day - tough to extract their clawing roots.

And, much of the lawn areas are still out of bounds,
boggy and soggy, the grass sparse, (I'm a poet and don't know it).

First buds on the snowdrops and the mahonia coming into flower and woodpeckers pecking nuts at least mean we are the right side of the dark days. The world is waking - which is more than can be said for myself.
I have found a cure for insomnia - sleep!
No, the cure is shifting manure, heaps of manure.

And now is the time to try Cousin G's mole disperser again - out with the human hair and down the molehole it goes.