A mighty tool

Who would have thought that a simple bucket could do so much?   This was my major garden tool today.   Shovelling gravel for all I was worth.

I hired Nicolas to come over for a day of heavy work: moving gravel, making a wall and doing the most complicated strimming projects I always avoid.

And he arrived just before 730am as there was an awful lot to do.   We had three cubic metres to distribute.

First up was the potager path around the top of the vegetable bed (just in front of the strawberries). I didn’t play much of a role in that heavy heaving of the wheelbarrow affair. Instead I was given my own gravel bed to play with.

All the bald patches in the coutyard.

With my bucket I scooped up stones and scattered them over all the spare bits of ground that have appeared over the past few years.   The edges seemed to be crying out most, but thre were gaps everywhere.   And as it was raining rather hard, it was a slog.

Jan and I had weeded the entire area over the past few days, so I didn’t have to worry about greenery getting in the way. It looks rather chic and tidy now.

But once that was done we both moved up to the large area in front of the potting shed.

It took around 40 minutes to get the gravel from the improvised shoot we set up in the shade garden to the area where it was sorely needed.

Bucket work and great exercise as I trudged around in front of the building and thickly mulched the soil.

It won’t stay this pristine and weed free forever. Alas.   But I just gazed and gazed and looked delightedly at the tranformation of yet another part of this huge garden.

I see possiblities. I didn’t plan on putting anything in the garden here.   But I do have zillions of gaura and verbena bonariensis plants to put somewhere. So we shall see. I wasn’t going to reward myself with planting before all the gravel work was done.

Luckily there was about a cubic metre of gravel left, so I decided it was time to have an elegant path to the potting shed, rather than the existing track.   In French they call it a goat track. In England a deer track.

It has always been a modest and slightly scruffy affair.   But with a few hundred deft bucket loads, it has been transformed.

I had already started filling in the path from the calabert (barn) end when I was doing the bald patches.   So it was just a matter of getting the gravel down from the top end.

The rain had stopped by now, so it wasn’t as sloshing and painful to scoop the gravel.

It won’t be easy to wheel a wheelbarrow along this path, and it’s a bit bouncier. Imagine you are walking along a shingle beach. But the things we do for an aesthetically pleasing path.

The plants look so much better set off against this background of stones.

But boy was I delighted when the last possible bucket was poured over the ground and we could stop.

Amazingly, it was only 1pm. I felt like I had been working all day.