Working in the garden

After I finally got round to posting about our holiday I can update on some more recent stuff.

The leaf fall is gradually picking up pace. We're hoping to buy a heavy weight leaf picker upperer (technical term). They are very expensive and so we're going to go halves with Michael and Ellen next door. It's a good idea because it's an expensive bit of kit and something you only use for a very short period each year. We're going to store it in our mower shed and when we renew the fencing at the top of the garden we'll have a gate put in so that Michael can come and help himself to the machine when he needs it. Meantime we have to do the job manually. Look what I loaded into the barrow by mistake!

Two lesser spotted leaf-eating termites

The gardner came and pruned the rose arch and worked on the willow tree. There was a lot of dead wood and now it's looking much tidier. It will mean we don't get the constant drop of dead twigs and branches from it.

The newly pruned rose arch

Kindling wood from the willow tree pruning, those termites have escaped from the barrow!

The colours in the garden are really lovely at the moment. I love this time of year (apart from the leaves falling of course!)

The new grass is growing where the old vegetable patch used to be. It's not tough enough to use yet but hopefully it won't be too long. It will give me a much better area for my agility once it's ready to use.

A couple of weekend back Andy had a really good clear out of the green house. It was still full of junk from the last people and from when we moved in. We used it as a general storage area. It's not something I could really help with because it meant disturbing lots and lots of very large spiders and I'm not at all keen on them (that's putting it mildly.) This whole house is very spidery. I can cope with the thin harvest spiders but I really don't like the big house spiders. Zeki likes to chase and eat them if she gets the chance - YUK!

Anyway, the greenhouse is now very tidy and we are using one half of it as our log store. It's much better than the old store as it's completely weather proof and it's right down by the house so you don't have to go miles up the garden in the dark hunting for logs when the basket runs out. We survived last winter using up wood we found in the garden and from trees we cut down ourselves. This year we've got two loads in and they're all stored in the greenhouse ready for the cold weather. What am I on about, we've already had the wood burner most nights over the three weeks!

The tidy greenhouse above; below the logs put to good use