Progress, progress

There are things you expect to see outside your local supermarket. Trolleys, cars, random shoppers.

Here were the delightful group of parked creatures outside ours last week.

Yep. Llamas.

I wonder if they were grocery shopping, or waiting for the public laundromat to finish the spin cycle. It did make me smile.

I nipped up to town to buy more sticking plasters (bandaids) for my mangled hands. Not from grass cutting… that job was parked for a week or so as I now have enough stock now for the permaculture bed number two. And number three and number four. At least.

No the damage was just collateral from when you are rushing to get a bit of carpentry done, and forget to wear your gloves and get splinters.

Still it was worth it.

Here is bed number two being built. An action shot!

I didn’t realise how thick (or how heavy) the Douglas pine planks were. They look marvellous. And with Nicolas deftly at the helm we had the second bed up and aligned in a morning.

Well, we are missing the top two planks.

But I decided to surge on regardless and worked away at my now routine tasks:

Add a liner for the whole frame, then start making up the layers.

I crammed in heaps of the cut-down grasses from the lawn bank.

But I need to finish the job next week. There is a layer of more rotted compost to go on top. Plus the rotting leaves, then the unimproved soil, the horse manure, the two layers of chippings and the gorgeous soil from the original bed.

I cheekily placed the dahlia pots in situ – just to give myself the illusion the job is almost done.

The six should be finished by the end of March I think. Just in time for Spring. If I could snap my fingers (or wave my magic wand) then Dobbie the House Elf would appear and get the job done next week…

Still. There is the immense pride in knowing you have killed your back leaning in to add the layers and then the gentle work in front of the fire of an evening tweezing out the splinters…

Progress on the stone walls just beside me on the house continues apace. It’s thrilling seeing the stones go up, extending the stone walls of the original home.

It’s a deathtrap of piles everywhere around the potager of course.

So I’m getting marvellous exercise walking the long way round the front of the farmhouse each and every time I forget the staples for the gun to afix the liner, or the tape measure and spirit level to check the distances between the raised beds and the alignment.

But on days when you think things are going too slowly and you will never see an end you have to tell yourself that progress is being made. And it wasn’t raining, the sun was shining. And I can almost see a future in comfortable vegetable gardening later this year.

No more stooping. A dream.