Apron and Plastic

While Sparks wrangled his plumbing joints into order as manifolds, Mum and Dad got a chance to work outside in the spring sunshine. In Mum's case she was trying to wrestle from the ground some plastic sheeting just behind the caravan. This is, we think, the old wrap from a couple of silage bales. The silage has long since rotted away leaving just the plastic half buried in the grass, trying to trip you up every time you walk by. This should have been and easy job. Follow each plastic end back to ground level, cut off with the inherited (from TK Min) "psycho-knife" (it's a big shiny kitchen knife which was about the most useful thing we found in the house, but J-M decided it was proof that murderers had lived here). However Mum decided to follow some of the bits of plastic below ground and ended up knackered from an afternoon of pulling muddy plastic up and scrunching it into a one-tonne builder bag, which it filled. Heavy, tiring work.

Dad, meanwhile, was back at the old familiar achey job of digging the damp sticky yellow Roscommon clay with its head-sized boulders. The west end of the house, which is to be the kitchen garden needs an apron of concrete, sloping away from the house to try to stop the last of the damp at that end. This meant digging out to 8 inches along that side of the house for at least a metre from the wall. Much of the scraping and some digging had already been done by 804-Pete in the mini digger, so this was not as arduous as it could have been, but it was still heavy work. We decided to extend this concrete 'path' along beside the Tígín as far as the door, which also then meant we might as well carry on that line and make an apron which would be more like 1.5 metres wide running alongside the house itself.

Being Roscommon, this clay is peppered with the big boulders of hard sand stone that we also dug out from indoors when we were digging down into the floors. We now have quite a collection of them which will be used about the place for a rockery by a pond, or maybe attractive groupings on the gravel of the yard.

Not so much 'gardening' as landscaping and physical stuff, but it all needs doing so that we can end up with a garden and grounds to be proud of, and lovely work in the warm sunshine.

Deefs.