A trip in the sky

This weekend’s been another busy one, as it’s our last without social commitments for a while and so we had a lot to cram in. But first – the week started with the excitement of a helicopter trip over the Blackdown Hills! My birthday gift from one of my lovely sisters-in-law, we took off from a local small airfield in Dunkeswell and flew over the west part of the Blackdown Hills. You could see for miles, with the patchwork of fields as far as you could see, and the hills in the distance. The couple we flew with had driven down from Hampshire and combined it with a holiday in the vicinity, so we’ll definitely be recommending this to any adventurous visitors we have! 

Then came the weekend and our long job list! John spent a significant part of Saturday back in the courtyard with the pressure washer, trying to clear all the soil and muck that’s built up around the cracks in the concrete. Last year we had real problems when severe rain washed some of it down and blocked our drains, so we’re gradually trying to remove it. Where the concrete’s cracked away, John found what looks like uneven red stone cobbles underneath the concrete. It would be amazing if we can uncover them all and restore it as we’ve been thinking about what we can do with the courtyard (it’s a huge expanse and will be expensive to replace) – but that could equally be a pretty expensive option! Maybe something we can do in the future…. 

It’s amazing just how much time disappears doing general gardening too. With all the rain and sunshine we’ve had recently, the garden seems to have exploded (well the weeds and grass anyway, some of our vegetables less so!). Cue a few hours of mowing and planting out seeds and seedlings – at least as we plant seedlings out from the greenhouse and cold frame it means more space to fill with the plants currently taking over the conservatory. It does feel like a conveyor belt sometimes – moving plants from one place to the next, with pots getting gradually bigger until we run out of space! It’s been another interesting (and frustrating) year of learning what works and doesn’t work – hopefully next year we’ll put our learnings to good use and not end up with too many of one plant and not enough of another! 

Our other main job was to finish our potato bed at last! We’d designed it to have a removable front – so it would be easier to remove the soil when we come to dig them up. But with everything else going on, we hadn’t got round to buying the extra wood until this week. And of course – now we have more space to pile the soil around the plants, we’ve run out of soil! It doesn’t help that the potatoes are growing a few inches each day, the temptation to buy more soil and keep topping them up is too much! 

We ended Sunday by pruning all the dead wood from our trees in our wooden area – of which there was a lot! It’s a little worrying that all the trees are too close together and the lack of light means the lower branches are all dying – plus we think some of them are diseased as we found signs of what looks like canker (although we thought that was only a fruit tree disease so who knows). We did find one tree where the lower branches had been ripped to shreds! We can only think it’s the work of one of our resident woodpeckers…