Cobbling

We've had another busy day on my day off.  I was hoping for a bit of a lie-in, but as always happens we were wide awake at 6.30am and ready to get up - we forced ourselves to wait until 7am though so I guess that is a lie-in of a whole hour!  So, our first job was to gather some free firewood.  There are lots of dead branches in the wood across the lane which is owned by the quarry.  A while ago the manager said we could help ourselves to dead wood and so we did.  It's surprising how much you can gather quite quickly. This log store was completely empty and it took us about an hour and a half to gather, cut and chop this.  As it has been dead for some time, it is just about ready to burn which is handy, we just need to let yesterday's rain dry off it.

Bob has been and gone and sold another chair at the second Ludlow market on Saturday!  He also took an order for another and sold three of the coat peg boards, so a pretty good day.  Course that means that he has to get on with making some more of everything.  So we had to have a search through our timber store and choose which bits of wood are suitable for what.  While we had the planks out, I treated some of them with woodworm stuff.  Just precautionary/preventative hopefully, but while it was a dry, windy day it seemed a good idea.  We had to buy some bat-friendly woodwormer when we were treating roof timbers and it it really easy to use and not at all noxious, so it was quite an easy job.

After lunch we both got on with different parts of our hard-landscaping in the garden . . . . is that what they call it on Gardener's World?  This is all along the side of the house in various forms.  Bob got on with the next rise of the steps at the top end.  He must be getting bored of them by now I'm sure, but the next stage gets more interesting because we need to build the plinth for the water barrel waterbutt and to incorporate that the steps will have to curve round.  The bit this side of the steps will be a herb garden eventually (when we've got rid of all the builders bags of cobbles and other building rubbish).  At the moment every spare bit of it is covered with wild garlic which the chickens really enjoy . . . . . wonder if we'll have garlic-flavoured eggs?

While Bob was doing that I got on with a bit more of the 'patio' - oh that sounds so pretentious for what it is.  I was doing my bit to empty those builders bags by doing some cobbling.  We have some very big flattish stones which have made up most of the area, but we don't have enough to do all of it so some bits are being cobble.  We dug the stones up from in and around the end barn which is now a bedroom, so it's nice to re-use them.  We researched how to do cobbles and the gist seems to be that you make some 'hoggin' which is a mix of clay and sand and makes a very solid base to hold the stones.  You put a good layer of that down then pack the cobbles as closely as you can and knock them down into the hoggin.  As you knock them in a long way (like icebergs, you only see a small fraction of what's there) they should hold each other firmly in place.  I haven't got them anywhere near as close together as a proper cobbly person would, but they fill the gap.  Once that's done we press lime dust into the joints and ram it in hard and this soon mellows and blends with the old stones - we just made this bit up, but it looks OK.

So, this is how it all fits together.  We need to find
something for the middle bit outside the lounge door.
Unfortunately, I think we might have to buy something -
the rest is all re-used from around the place which
feels very appropriate and green and all that!

Talking of green, there's a definite green haze everywhere as the new little leaves come out on the trees and hedges.  Our bit of laid hedge has green on all the branches and even tiny shoots starting from the cut stumps - phew, we didn't kill it all.  By the end of the summer, it should look quite different.  Elsewhere everything is sprouting and shooting.  We have flowers on the bluebells which seems quite early, there are primroses and cowslips everywhere and the wood anemones and sorrel are coming out in the wood.  Even the roses round the kitchen door have bushed out, shot up and have the first flower buds on.  All the plummy/damsony type things have lots of blossom on them (even the plum tree we pruned quite viciously seems to have forgiven us!).  So, the garden looks quite 'twinkly' just now with little white dots everywhere.  I hope we don't have any vicious frosts now to spoil it all - it's such a lovely time of year.