Sieze the day, the secateurs and the spade

I was trying to decide if I was one of those who called a spade a spade, or a bloody shovel.

I’m more of the spade persuasion, but after a day on the wheelbarrow and spade and soil work I was filling my thoughts with some rather anglo saxon words.

But how could I resist? It was fabulously sunny today and I have to travel to London tomorrow. So no more gardening for me for a bit.

We had the most tremendous hail storm last night; accompanied by thunder and lightning. And you can see evidence of the hail all over the garden even by mid morning.

But this really is a ridiculously mild winter compared to most years.

Even Artur overheated in the potting shed. He had to retreat to a cooler wine box in the shade.

And I decided to prune the lavenders while I waited for it to warm up the soil ready for my endless ferrying of the soil from A to B.

And don’t they look fetching? I was having a bit of a despair moment today; there is just so much to do. Maybe because I have set the bar too high.

Having the garden and farm photographed in June 2013 meant that I was obsessive about having everything neat and orderly and I gave myself three pretty solid months to do it.

And now I’m starting from a long way behind that stellar moment.   I should just accept the scruffy bits, the landscape that is eroded and damaged, the weeds that are poised to invade as I have NO mulch anywhere in the garden now.

That’s my biggest problem. How on earth do I cover this soil in time for the growing season?

Ugh.  And I even had to look at uncovering some areas. These amazing irises in the courtyard were half hidden under a gentle sea of washed down silt.

Just a reminder: here are the flowers in bloom in June.

But will they even make it to flowering this year?  They grow at the top of the courtyard which is going to be stripped of all its gravel and replaced with a crushed limestone and gravel surface and these plants are in the way.  I’m going to have to be hovering nervously when the builders start the landscaping work; because they are so easy to stand on and crush if you don’t know they are there.

Just tiny little swords of  green sticking out of the stones.

But no time to worry about what might not happen; it was on with work. I have pulled up the weedproof fabric that was left in the courtyard and placed it along the newly raised paths in the potager.

I will need to use gravel to hold these bits of heavy fabric in place. But I haven’t quite got the energy to wash a cubic metre of piled up mucky gravel and barrow it over to the next terrace down.

Instead I filled in the worst of the gaps in the walnut path that lost so much soil in the flood. And then went down to the orchard to continue moving soil.

At least in the most back achey moments I could stop my work, stare out at the majestic Ardeche and Cevenne mountains in the distance and enjoy the view. It’s a fine and beautiful spot; and that’s what counts.  My standards may be too high for this project, but I’ll have to keep on trying.