More sheep

Yep. Back up the hill with the strimmer.   I am very, very grubby. But I’m almost done.   I suspect my trousers (mighty moleskins) could stand up on their own.

This area which I thought only needed a last go actually took hours.   But I was determined to get it over.

And it is a beautiful sward. Well, sort of sward. An Ardeche sward.

I managed to save a lot of hellebores from the blade. But took out nascent cherry seedlings and lots of Spanish broom.   Along with festuca grasses galore.   They made a great ground cover, but I don’t need them to seed.

Once done, there was the tricky question. To rake or not to rake? Dario and I had a chat about it. He was for raking. I was for a cup of tea and a nice lie down.

But I compromised. I have raked around 200 square metres of the steep area near the gite.

And just stacked the grass cuttings around the base of random trees. I just found the closest and waded towards it.

Boy does that feel great.   I keep turning round wherever I am in the garden to gaze at it.

Dario had a great view of the project. He has done all the under tiling by day’s end and hopes to finish Friday.

We did a bit of investigative work last night by putting up a night vision camera trained on the guest house.   Our aim was to see if the pine marten could be seen climbing out of the roof. We know he is in there somewhere.

So imagine our suprise when we retrieved the pictures. Not one pine marten, but two. Argh. I hope this a territorial fight to the death and not a courtship.   Pine marten babies are the last thing we need in this guest house roof.

It’s not easy to see on the screen, but if you click the image you should get it magnified.

We are going to put the camera up in the forest later tonight to see what else we can catch. We spotted the retreating back of a baby deer a few nights back.

I’d love to see just how many wild boar go past. They churned up a lot of the ground on this top terrace. I noticed because I kept lurching into the holes they leave when they are fungus hunting and stirring the ground.

Anything else done today? Well it all had to be gentler after the morning’s exertions.   Clearing broken tiles from the roof. Picking strawberries and raspberries. Playing with Artur. And doing house things.   A lovely gentle wind down to the day.