Stone steps

The big reveal.

I have been twinkling down the new stone steps to the potager for a few days now.

But as there has been an awful lot of this:

It’s hard to show you in their almost complete glory.

But here they are. The all important before shots. They had to be cemented as it’s a mighty steep slope. But all the stones are from the courtyard pile. So in a touch of recycling glory, they came from the stone wall of the house’s exterior where the new door was created.

And in case of biblical floods (hello October 2013) the water will flow down this part of the garden.

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Needless to say they are not quite finished.

We need to mortar the joints. But if I wait for that, steps will never be unveiled.

Oooh that reminds me. I ought to have had a ceremonial ribbon cutting event before walking down them for the first time. I have been swinging down the side of the rubble field for a whole year.

But I forgot. And it snowed a lot.

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Now the thing you might have noticed…. only half the steps are stone. The rest of the slope is dirt and wooden steps made from the old beams from the bread oven.

In normal climates one could just sow grass seeds and let them look a nice fetching verdant green.

But I just can’t see that happening. By the time the seeds germinate (most of the volume stolen by ants) all the wild unwanted plants of the mountain will take hold.

So I think I might dress the steps with more stones. Very flat ones. Which involves a lot of plodding round the mountain looting from walls.

But I need the weather to defrost a bit first.