Clearing the M1 -The Mystery of the Missing Trowel

The Mystery of the Missing Trowel

Now this story will take some believing, but I have photographic evidence. I peered round the corner of the extension as Martin the builder was attacking the wall he and his dad Joe had finished yesterday. Kango makes a lot of noise. Brrrrrr, brrrrrr, brrrrr. 'Why are you doing that?' I ask, innocently. 'Joe's lost his trowel'. I thought this was a joke. 'I wouldn't mind, but it's a good little trowel' says Joe, in his lovely soft lilting Irish accent. Now this piece of wall had to be shuttered and large amounts of concrete or some such poured in. Joe had just poured in 3 buckets full when he mentioned to Martin that he couldn't find his trowel. They could only assume it was under the aforementioned 3 buckets full. Martin had a poke around, 'It's not there' says he.

So here we are this morning, listening to the dulcet tones of the Kango. I had visions of archaeologists in 200 years time finding the trowel and wondering. 'Didn't they use primitive tools in those days'. 'Maybe it was symbolic, when they'd finished the building work, they placed this trowel here as an offering to the god of building works'.

Joe then began attacking the wall with a hammer and chisel and sure enough, there it was! It's like a surgeon leaving swabs or scalpels inside a body! So here is Joe, chipping away. 'Well, it's a good little trowel'.

You can just see the handle sticking out! Unbelievable.

I kept chuckling to myself about it all day. This was yesterday morning, not today, Saturday. I couldn't blog last night as it seems at the moment if Jim and I compute at the same time, everything slows down and almost comes to a grinding halt. The wonders of modern technology.

A new Butterfly

Yesterday morning Jim and I spotted a very small and rather cute little butterfly on one of the cosmos flowers. 'Go and get your camera', says Jim, 'while I watch it'. Hmm, off I trot and the resultant photos enabled us to identify said butterfly as a Small Copper. I've never seen one and not heard of it before, so there was a buzz of excitement here at The Deenery. (maybe that should be a flutter of excitement)

It looked a little dull with its wings closed.

But how pretty with them open, displaying the 'copper band' around the top wings. Just one more:


They are quite abundant in some areas and love sorrel and dock. We have lots of this in our meadow. Jim and I both love lepidopt.... erm, lepadot.... butterflies and moths.

I also took this photo of a ladybird:

Hopefully it's eating its way through lots of aphids.


The Deenery Garden

Jim has grown some gladioli on the allotment and the first ones have just flowered. When I looked in the snug, he had picked a few and put them in the spaghetti jar (unable to find a vase in all our building chaos). Here is a close up of one of the blooms:


As you can see, it had been raining again, as it did most of the morning, off and on. These were specialist bulbs and the spikes of flowers are incredibly long. They each have at least 20 flowers on them. Jim said when his father used to grow them for shows, they thought they had done well if a spike had 12 or more flowers on it.

The large bed on the arboretum also has dahlia and this one bloomed yesterday. It's a really pretty pink on dark purple, almost black leaves. The bed is now so full it was hard to take a photo of it. Can you remember when we first made the bed?

This was taken on June 22nd. The left hand side is the new section we added to the already established right hand section. I suppose it was about a month old then.


How crazy is it now? Do click on it to enlarge it if you'd like to see more detail. Yes, I know the grass needs cutting again and the edges trimming. There is still a lot to do here as you can see. Much of it we can't attack yet because of the building work (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it).

I took this joiner from the other side of the bed:



Now the 'M1' in the title is the road just to the right of this bed, with the living willow fence beside it. When we first moved here, the way up to the meadow was sopping wet and full of green algae. It was impassable, so we spent many happy hours building a raised road there. It's been brilliant but does get very weedy. We should weed killer it but it's been so wet that job's been impossible. Yesterday I attacked it!

There is a road under there somewhere!


That's better! It does need another layer of gravel on the top but that's a minor detail. I still have the top section left to do. The sun's shining at the moment so I'll be out there soon.

A little colourful section from the arboretum bed to finish.

Buster

Buster clearly can't make head nor tail of life at the moment:


I was really tired when I came in last night but was revived by Jim's cooking! Home grown potatoes, peas and our first french beans. Plus some long sausages. Soon be runner bean time. I did a bit more to The Wicker Man before bed. Right, I'm off.