The last mow

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Phew, for a while there I thought that was all you were going to see.  This post made an accidental sneak preview for the earlier viewers last week.  I blame too many practise mince pies before the festivities begin.

It’s a good thing I can walk behind the mower for hours and hours on this farm and get some decent exercise.

The best bit is I have a new area to show you.

The upper terrace.  We have some lovely chestnut steps built into a very steep terrace right behind our guest house. (Formerly the barn where the silkworms were stored.)  There shouldn’t have been steps at all, but the terrace, once stone, had fallen away over the years.

And I could only reach this enormous steeply sloping field by walking all away along to the top vegetable bed and winding my way up the hill.

And it’s hard to walk past the top vegetable bed without seeing a zillion things one ought to do. Like weed. Or harvest cabbage, or shake one’s fist at cabbage moth butterflies or bugs.

So a few years back when we had the novelty of damp proof coursing the barn – it is built into the side of the mountain, so you can imagine the condensation that used to seep through the walls – I thought the bulldozer man could be put to use.

He graded me a slope on the bank. It was just beside where he was working, and I didn’t see the eye roll that I usually get when I start the sentence ‘while the bulldozer is here, is there any chance you could just….’

And then Nicolas came through with chestnut logs. And bingo, steps.  I have a few more acres of land to play with. Well, to strim and sort.

We have a fantastic oak tree here. (Just along from the oak tree that was hidden behind the ash. I really must get the drone man in the next village to do a sweep with a camera so you can see.)  It needed pruning. And the fence needed removing.

This is the last of the nasty metal fence on the top terrace that served no purpose except to hold the brambles in place.

So the fence came down, the strimming on the edges were done. And I got to mow this large sloping prairie for the very first time.  I did need help getting the heavy mower up the steps (cue more eye rolling from David and Nicolas) but once up there, it was brilliant. No stopping me.

I reduced the jungle to an almost sward (if you avoid the wild boar damage).  And I harvested sacks and sacks of dry grass for mulching.

The whole terrace is now strimmed and ready for a new life as a feature of the farm rather than an eyesore.

And with Nicolas keen for work, we put him to it.  The culverts are dug out ready for the next flood; the area around the water supply and tank are all cut back to ground level.  No more brambles, bracken and broom.

And we even have the soil removed from the lid of the water tank (concrete) from two floods back.

We wouldn’t have done it. But the wild boar had churned up the entire area a few nights back. So it made the first layer of soil to remove a whole lot easier.

Well, what do I know? I wasn’t wielding the shovel.

I was too busy bossing people round, asking for my mower to be brought back down the steps so I could complete the rest of the last mow.

 

And yes, I have neglected you with Artur shots. So here is one of the mighty hunter climbing about the barn roof looking for mice. Or the way down.