Season opens

The season officially opens today; well, we have had Sarah to visit in the early spring, but this is the first go at the guest house. So there was a mighty clatter of vacuum cleaners, dusters, mops and clean sheets. The main house scrubbed up well too.

And once that task was sorted I escaped to the cellar to bring out the mower. It’s such a fun toy: you get to create stripes and tidy up the lawns and all the while thinking you being very good by collecting the grass cuttings for the potato bed.

This is a before and after shot. The lawn looks a teensy bit scalped as I set the blades rather low. But it will recover I am sure. In fact I never cease to marvel at what a sturdy thing lawn grass is.

But in case you are tiring of the endless green, here are two pictures I forgot to upload a few days back. This is our very own room freshener. The purple wisteria growing in front of the main house.

It is kept very small and compact, but all you need to do is open the windows above it in the kitchen and the whole house if perfumed with scent.

And here are the iris in the potager that appeared this year. Tall of course as are most of the iris around this area. But at least they are sturdy and give good colour at a time of year when there is only weed proof fabric and sticks in the vegetable bed.

And not content with one noisy piece of kit, I did a bit of strimming as well. The path that leads up from the courtyard to the top road (tentatively called the walnut path as there are two walnuts planted along the route) is going to be messy and a bit wild this year. Well that’s the plan. I think there are too many nettles in amongst the wildflowers, so may just lose my good wild intentions and mow it to crew cut height. But right now this is what it looks like. Watch this space.

The path below the house is a mixture of strimmed and mown. Don’t look too closely at the peaches in a row above the path. They are sickly and peach leaf curled to almost oblivion. I have sprayed until my lungs protested, but I haven’t done much good. That will be a June project when Nicolas makes his long awaited return to pruning duties.

And to finish I found a place for the yard long beans: they have been planted in amongst the corn.

Right, time to change. My work trousers are so covered in lawn clippings I look like a shrub.