The Turkeys go Free-Range

The Rector rambles up our old hay-barn wall.
He may only manage one flush of flowers
but he certainly pulls all the stops out to do it.

In the previous post, I apologised for possible poor service and English while borrowing Liz's laptop because my PC was in the doctor's. I can no longer use that excuse. The offending machine is back, delivered today by my new friend Patrick in company of his good lady Lara (no mean techie herself) and ball of energy and fun Tyler (2 and a half)

Red currants doing well despite losing many leaves to the rapacious
gooseberry saw-fly larvae. 

Patrick has done me proud, completely wiping all traces of the old Windows Vista system and installing an official, certificated (and legal, obviously) copy of Windows 7, MS Office etc while saving all our 'documents' (pictures, spreadsheets etc) and moving them across too. We are also right up to date on anti virus/spyware/malware. It all seems to be working; I have been in this afternoon making things happen as normal on email, Twitter, Facebook, spreadsheets and now this blog.

Liz's rose garden with the row of Lady's Mantle doing well.
The roses are just getting there. 

The clean-up has also got rid of numerous programmes which were all set to fire up on a boot-up for equally numerous historic reasons. This box is 10 years old and has seen no end of systems come and go, such as Spotify for music which leave bizarre bits of, for example, Apple software sitting there, firing up at every boot-up and asking for updates.

Our shiny motorway sculpture is now the go-to
poster-boy of dances and other adverts

It also kept telling me that Google Chrome would no longer be updated as Vista is now out of support. We should probably bite the bullet and buy me a new laptop but such moves are so far down the shopping list (Kitchen, chicken house roof etc) that this clean-up and upgrade will have to do for a few years yet.

The turkey poults go free range and, as usual, the Guinea Fowl
lads adopt them and volunteer to mind them. 

Meanwhile, as Summer advances, the young turkeys are released to full free-range having now found their feet in the familiarisation rabbit run. Even while they were so confined, the Guinea Fowl boys were quite attentive and we remember last year how the youngsters were adopted by the Guineas and minded by them.

The Hubbards at 10 days old get to feel the grass under foot
 and the sun on their backs.

I let them out on Wednesday which was a bit showery but that proved to be very beneficial come evening. Turkeys normally get a week or so of being allowed to free range but coming back to their familiar bedroom in the rabbit run. These guys, approaching evening lock up time were relaxing near the coop door when a sudden rain shower drove everyone indoors. No rounding up or shepherding required - I locked them all away and Bingo! Youngsters released AND moved into adult quarters all in the same day.

That proved to be very handy. I needed to put the Hubbard chicks somewhere while I cleaned out their brood-box. Hubbards are huge eaters and fearsome producers of poo, so a week in a small crate can easily have them trampling around in half an inch of the stuff. We started with 13 but one sadly died on the 2nd night (we have no idea why). The remaining 12 are thriving and seem to have doubled in size. White feathers sprout from their wings and tails.

These are not puny weaklings who need constant heat and Infra-Red lamps, they are thugs who can run around arguing about morsels of food and shrug off the breezes of a Roscommon June. As long as you keep them dry and out of the wind, they love being outdoors where there is space to stretch their legs, flap their wings and zoom about like little clockwork toys. So with it now having turned warm and dry, they are out in the rabbit run from morning till evening and then get rounded up back their crate overnight.

It seemed a good choice for a hot, thirsty,
pig-keeping gardener who had been mowing
for a good few hours in the hot sun. 

Only 2 other bits of news occur to me. Mrs C is in the UK for a long weekend meeting the 'girls' for a good session of gossip, gin and eating. The gang refer to it as their AGM. These annual meets which rotate around various European centres have been going for a decade at least and when they started most of those attending had 'serious' jobs in the City and needed a good excuse to not be able to 'just nip in' at weekends. They did not want to get caught slipping up with mentions of anything as frivolous as drinking or restauranting, so they called it the AGM. That way anyone over-hearing the planning talks on phones would assume they were talking business. Clever, huh? The name stuck.

Stumpy's turn to go broody. Probably nice to take the
weight off that poorly foot.

I delivered Liz to Knock Airport this morning for her Ryan Air flight to Bristol. There she'd be scooped up by our good friends Mazy Lou and Airy Fox and taken to Cardiff where this year's host lives and this year's AGM is to be held. Last I heard she had arrived safely and been 'handed on to the next responsible adult'. She's back on about Wednesday.

Good progress by the stone mason on the curved wall about
which more soon. 

Finally, in the warm weather, if it stays dry, I have picked up a bit more sheep shearing. This for a lady who is a friend of a Facebook contact. We are hoping to complete this job, which is only for 3 ewes on either Sunday or Monday, dry weather permitting. More on that when it has happened.

The Great Outdoors

The two marmalade kittens are growing fast. At 12 weeks now (we think) they are not big enough to take on the dogs and we don't yet trust the dogs with them, but they are getting too big and lively to be confined to the one room. If you go into the Sitting Room to sit with them they quickly start doing 'wall of death' style charges around all the furniture and racing up your legs or across your shoulders. They are fast and agile and look every inch as if they NEED a bigger space to let off steam into. They also, rather alarmingly, make a dash for the door to their room as soon as you open it a crack, so keen to greet you that they seem unaware of the doggie danger lurking just outside.

Newest member of our menagerie meets our most seasoned
veteran. 

We have taken to smuggling them outside while the dogs are sleeping off a walk and letting them play round the yard and buildings with both of us supervising in case they should decide to split up; one person would only be able to keep tabs on one of these. The weather has been warm and it is very pleasant sitting out there in the sunshine watching the antics of 2 kittens.

Sitting in the sun supervising kittens. 

They have met some of our birds and even play-stalked the Guinea Fowl. They seem to find the chickens and, especially, the rooster, a bit big, so they've not pushed their luck there. Liz noticed that they seem to have an aversion to grass, even new mown short grass. Maybe they have 'feral concrete jungle' DNA, she says, as the kittens race between hard-standing areas and sprint across the grass between.

When you want to take cute kitten pics
among the flowers but they want to play
among the engineering. 

They loved the front 'drive' bits and the car-port with its 'Mad Max' vehicle and stacks of wood. When we carried them over to the 'Darby and Joan' chairs so that we could sit by the pond, they could not wait to get up off that grass by climbing into a lap or onto a shoulder. Ah well. I suppose they will get used to all the rest in time. We are doing all we can to get them to grow big and strong so that they can join the dog-owning half of the family without risk of getting chewed. When Blue was a kitten of course, Towser and Poppea were tiny pups - they grew up together without one side being dominant and when Soldier arrived he was big enough to cope and well versed in dog-management. This introducing tiny kittens to a full grown dog pack is all a bit new.

A nice tight cosy pen seems to be the answer. Nobody has
space to think they might get up some speed if they charged
 'that way'.

My other 'livestock' stories are 1) just that time came round again to foot-trim the sheep and 2) we 'harvested' a first Hubbard rooster. The sheep were last done at shearing and though you can't really get a good look at feet when they are wading through tall-ish grass, I'd been seeing occasional tenderness or lameness when Lily or Polly walked across the dry mud bits of their paddocks.

A neatly trimmed hoof. Lily in this case.

Nothing for it but to run them onto the concrete of the cattle race and give them a proper going over. We could now see that some of the sides had grown a bit long and were splaying, and some toe-points needed attention. We are good at this one now, so it was the work of no more than half an hour to do them all with my special "secateurs" while Liz subdued and calmed the neck and head end.

Every trimmed foot then gets a splash of the bright purple spray even though I could see no signs of foot rot. I even get most of it on the sheep's hoof (and up the gap between the 'cloven' toes) and not too much (OK some) on my hands or up the side of the sheep. The girls are then all released back into the East Field and we like to see the comfortable, relieved gaits on them as they spread out to graze. Job done.

First Hubbard rooster of 2016

At 80 days the Hubbard chickens are right at the start of their 'proper' harvesting time; we normally leave them to more like 100 days to let them get nice and big. However, we fancied a chicken for the weekend roast and had none in the freezer, so one of the boys got it in the neck. He plucked and dressed out at 2.320 kg, or about 5 lbs and was the ever reliable Hubbard version of delicious, tasty, meaty and tender. They really are superb, these hybrids specially bred to do the job under commercial Free Range or Organic systems and we swear by them (and thank Mentor Anne, of course, who can still get them as day-olds despite no longer being in that business and putting in orders for them by the hundred). We are always so disappointed when we have to buy other chicken in supermarkets.

Soapwort. Don't grow it near the pond - it is very toxic to
aquatic life.

Unrelated to any of this I had an exciting and interesting time a few nights back when asked by a friend in the village to 'rescue' his cattle water situation. No pictures for this story - I was not about to take my camera with me when scrambling about in a stream among cattle. These cattle live in a set of fields where their water supply is to drink from a stream just before that stream vanishes down a swallow hole. There are many of these fascinating geo-morphological features round here due to the fractured limestone geology.

The swallow hole in question sits at one end of a shallow pool but the pool-bed and the bed of the stream feeding it are only water-proof because they form a trough and dish shape made of fine sediment. Water can leak off the sides of this bed into any number of similar holes and this was what was happening when the stream became blocked by a log-jam of branches, reed-mace, plastic barrels and empty feed sacks. The 'dam' raised the water level upstream of our friend's land and all the water diverted left and right out of the stream (and underground) before his cattle saw any of it. Poor thirsty creatures were standing in the drying mud lowing their protests.

At last my Archery paperwork arrives. No stopping me now!

The friend is not really up to scrambling about in streams pulling out debris, so my job was to get in there and try to free up the dam while at the same time packing rocks and some of the bits into the 'leaks' in the sides upstream; really trying to get the stream to disappear into the correct swallow hole, rather than the neighbour's ones. Well, it worked and I managed to free up the log jam. The water surged forwards into 'our' pond and the cattle got to drink some before it gurgled away underground. I checked it all again today and it was still free, so everybody is happy.

Work(s) in Progress

Those beautiful floors made of Indian limestone slabs and
skimmed skinny-size scaffold boards. 

This pic does not really do justice to the intense torquoise
colour of the hand made kitchen

I got so carried away with my bats in the last post, I completely omitted the biggest news story that week, the (near) completion of the Sligo house rebuild to the point where K-Dub and the family were able to finally move in. 'Near' here is just because there is a small amount of the inevitable de-snagging - touch of paint here, connect up something over there, plumb in the hob, that sort of thing. But we spent most of Thursday scrubbing those floors to within an inch of their lives so that K-Dub could spend the evening sealing the woodwork and lacquering the stone, leaving them overnight to dry.

The "we" here as with all these Sligo house posts, you will know by now to mentally add "Mainly K-Dub" to every time I use it - we built this, we moved that, we painted the other. I have helped, but I am only the part-time labour. All the skilled stuff and the lion's share of the man hours are definitely due to K-Dub himself and I know he is as proud as he has every right to be, of the house "we" have built, as are the ladies (who have also helped). I have moved endless amounts of rock, shoveled and swept tonnes of sawdust and wood shavings and run a gazillion 'mixes' through the cement mixer, but in the house itself I have laid at most half a dozen blocks (mine are above the front door!) and stuck a few stones in the exterior stone-masonry. I have 'held' some stuff while the boss screwed it into place and that kind of thing but, as I said, 'we' is definitely K-Dub for 99% of this house.

I love these stairs also built from skinny
scaffold boards. 

So on the Friday (22nd) the buildering paused and we turned our minds to humping furniture about. The family have all the 'stuff' from their old house stored in a single storey abandoned building over the road and in our spare room here. We got into a good rhythm with K-Dub and Charlotte pulling the stuff out of the store, me bringing it across the road to the new house and Carolyn blitzing it with cleaners and furniture polish before it could be assembled , the cushions added or it be moved into its final position. Finally K-Dub and I, 2-handed the heavy stuff (Welsh dresser etc) across before we started on boxes of kitchen gear, bags of bedding and all the other bits that anyone who moves house will know all too well.

K-Dub and Carolyn feeling like they are in. Young H (4) is there
too but has curled himself into the easy chair in such a way that
you'd miss him if you looked quickly.

The family were looking at a fairly mad weekend - no gentle getting moved in, unpacked and sorted out for them. K-Dub's best mate from Dublin was down on the Friday night (there might be drinking involved with that one) and then K-Dub's sister and her little boy are down from the Saturday round to the Thursday (28th). It all sounds a bit hectic.

'Medieval' tented round houses. 

Meanwhile, in archery land, I have been helping with a completely different 'build'. Instructor, 'Con', is a man of many talents. As well as a former army weapons trainer and now archery coach for us lot, he is an ace leather-worker and respected national expert in the construction of medieval footwear (for which he makes 'repro' copies for shows and museums) but is also a knowledgeable enthusiast on all things medieval, Celtic history, Druid-ing and the like.

Inside one of the round houses. 

At his place near Castlerea he has created the earth-banks for various forts and encampments and every year he hosts a "Celtic Lughnasa Games" (Lughnasa being a Celtic festival which happens at the end of July into August). Families can come, camp the nights, socialise and then try their hand at the 'taster sessions' on games like spear-throwing, axe-throwing, knife-throwing and, of course, archery all in a controlled and safe, strictly managed (and sober!) environment. For obvious reasons Con forbids the mixing of booze with dangerous sports; he also (maybe more tongue in cheek) forbids discussion on Religion or Politics while anyone is armed!  

We got the car through the NCT at the re-test stage.

In the centre of all this - the public and socialising areas - he creates a tented 'village' a bit like the space for a jousting tournament, with wooden framed (and skirted) round houses and stripey 'viewing tents', plus a big fire-pit for the evening storey-telling etc. That was our bit - a couple of Saturdays spent as volunteers banging in posts, fixing planking, erecting the middle post and the 'rafters' and then wrangling the tarpaulin canvas 'hat' over the whole thing. Con and co kept us supplied with breakfast, cups of tea and a bit of lunch and we all had a great deal of fun and happy banter throwing these buildings up and getting to know each other. Different but brilliant. I assume we will all reconvene after the event to pull it all down again but I have not heard of that yet. Good luck Con over the weekend. Hope the rain holds off and you get a good croud of reasonably well behaved 'students'.

Meanwhile we chug along through a very wet July, making progress in some other departments, too. The Hubbards continue to thrive and put on weight. At 70 days they are looking decidedly edible and we are looking forward to starting to 'harvest' the big ones (mainly the three roosters). The ducks are also definitely starting to look adult and, so Charlotte tells us, we should definitely start to consider a couple of them who are getting a lovely dark green 'Mallard-ish' sheen to their heads, as drakes.

Note dark green 'mallard-ish' sheen on the heads of the
two rear-most ducks here. Drakes, maybe?

Houdini Duck continued to escape every day through the sheep wire of the orchard and would go on the pond but as there was only one of him he seemed not to be doing much damage and the pond was starting to recover. Then H-D made a fatal mistake and showed one of the others how to get out and invited her to join him on the pond (or poss her/him/her). I have had to nip out today and invest in some 2-inch-hole, 2 foot tall chicken wire to run along these fences to stop the rot. I seem to have settled their hash for now.

One of the Hubbard roosters at 70 days

The very-baby Marans chicks are coming on well too and are getting well feathered despite being only 14 days old. They spend their days out in the rabbit run, all be it able to retreat into the nice, dry, warm, draught free 'bedroom' bit if they fancy a break from the fresh air. We bring them back indoors at night and they can huddle under their 'electric hen' warming plate but on these very warm nights we are looking forward to thinking about risking them outside. It won't be long (maybe 2 weeks?) before we scratch our collective chins and say.. "No...... I think they're done" and pack away the brooder boxes and the elctric hen. Our breeding season will be over. The year is flying by.

Houdini Duck

There's always one. Houdini Duck is out AGAIN. 

There's always one, isn't there? Ours at present is one of the ducks who, unlike his 5 colleagues, is refusing to be contained by my attempts to ban ducks from the big pond. The 5 just went into the 'new' pen (the orchard) on the day we decided to move them, whinged for a while walking up and down the wire fence, but then settled down, uncomplaining, to a life with the geese. They may have tried to nip through the fence and the sheep hurdles a few times but when they couldn't break through at ground level, they relaxed and stayed put.

I was trying to get a good "It's lashing down!" pic for 365.
I was happy with this one.

Duck #6, though, had other ideas. Every time we ran the ducks into the orchard, you'd hear him a few minutes later quacking loudly in the yard or on the front drive. The escapes quickly earned him the name 'Houdini Duck' and we had to keep an eye on him to see how and where he was escaping. He's not that subtle, bless him, and brazenly escaped again while we watched. He had realised that while the bottom 'rungs' of a sheep hurdle were close together (to stop baby lambs), the gaps got bigger further up the hurdle, and if he hopped up to rung #3, he could squeeze through there.

We are getting some striking sunsets with all these storm clouds.

I covered all the hurdles with 1" square 'aviary mesh' to stop his little game, but the lad sussed out that the same size changes also applied to the sheep wire as a whole. He could get out anywhere around the orchard perimeter with a simple hop up to a foot from the ground and a slither down through, but so far only does it nearest to the big pond. My next step is to run 2" chicken wire all along that fence line. This bizarre psychology is one of the good things we have learned about containing poultry. Chickens, for example, will happily fly up and over a 6 foot solid, opaque wall, but do not think they can do the same flight over a transparent, chicken wire fence. They walk up and down the fence looking through it and bumping off it with their beaks but it never seems to occur to them to fly up and over.

They might look pretty in the slanting evening sunshine but
they are still thistles and need clearing

Actually he is not a natural 'free bird' and does not do anything with his freedom. He seems rather upset that his 5 colleagues do not follow him and he hangs around sadly just outside the fence, quacking at them. He does not even go onto the pond much on his own, so the pond is, in fact, recovering slowly. He is, though, a nuisance (as well as an affront to my fencing ability!) so he needs to be contained by this next plan or he is going to find himself 'ate' if he doesn't watch out. I am talking 'He' here, of course. He may not turn out to be a drake but if he is and he is not the only one, then he may be first against the wall come the revolution. [I am hoping here that my readers know me well enough to know that all this may not be 100% serious. We do not, in fact, make 'harvesting' decisions based on how annoying the livestock are!].

Lamb

In other harvesting stories, we were booked to nip down to our butcher in Castlerea on Monday to collect and see cut up, our two ram lambs, Ebony and Ivory. It is fascinating to talk to the lads down there and we wondered how our lambs would fare especially as the slaughterman always has a bit of a light hearted chunter at our lambs being too big or, sometimes being black-wooled and therefore less likely to grow as well. The guys have been at it for a long time, so they should know, but I have to admit to a bit of 'pinch of salt' at the 'black wool bad' thing.

First fruits for 2016. Some nice lamb chops for Monday supper.

This time they were spot on - the white wool boy was definitely fatter and bigger. There is not a lot we can do about this, however. Our #2 ewe, Polly' is half 'Jacob', a bicoloured mountainy breed, which is almost certainly the reason for the black wool and less heavy shape of her lambs. What ever the case, we saved 4 chops from the freezer and had them as our 'first fruits' of 2016 meat. They were a tender and flavour-filled delight.

Thistles for the compost.

The remaining 6 sheep are currently mowing my front lawn for me while I get a chance to nip round and pull the thistles in the East Field. After the rain, it is a good satisfying task as a vertical gentle pull will give you all the stem and leaves plus a good chunk of taproot. The field is not too bad because I do this every year - if you pull the root the sheep can straight way return to graze there. If you mow or cut the shoot and leave the top or any leaves still there, the sheep will avoid the grass and your thistle will just re-grow. I guess there are about 3-4 man hours of work at it and 3 towering wheel barrows of thistles for the compost.

The Hubbard poults spread out across their new paddock.

My only other news is that the Hubbards, at 50 days old are now well settled into and enjoying their new run and have learned to take themselves off to bed in the correct place (in the coop not under it!) as it gets dark. . This was not an immediate thing and I had an abortive day when I'd got 9 of them in, all calm, when Blue the Cat decided to 'help'. That day I had to hire the 'assistant chicken wrangler' to help round up the upset, scattered poults and steer them back towards their (now cat-free) home for the night. It's never boring with livestock.

Only those Hubbards....

The Hubbard chicks at 1 week get a first chance to feel the
warm Roscommon sun on their backs. It's the hottest day of
the year so far  and they will come to no harm. 

Another week passes and there is still no sign of our AWOL turkey hen, Barbara so, naturally, we are becoming convinced that Brer Fox has had the pleasure. Yes, she MAY still be out there, rearing her chicks in the (now) cattle fields and a miracle may happen and she'll stroll back in with a little 'crocodile' of adolescents. Ah well. It does not matter physically for the moment as we will not be deciding whether or not to replace the turkeys any time soon. Emotionally, of course, we will miss them - they were an intriguing and fascinating couple to have wandering about and liked to home in on us if either of us were out gardening or sitting by the pond.

Misty morning across the bog to our North

No babies either yet for the geese or any of the chickens. For our fix of chicks, then, we only have those Hubbards, 7 days old today. We are always impressed by their speed of growth and development - if you want photo's of that clichéd image of the spherical ball of fluff body with two legs at the bottom and a head at the top, then you really do have to get there in the first 3 days. By day 4 and certainly by day 7 they are already growing taller, with an obvious neck and pin feathers are sprouting to give them definite wings among their side-fluff.

The Captain's table? Our former rooster re-appears coated with
a rough and ready BBQ sauce but even though we slow-cook
him, we'd both admit that he was a tough aul' bird. 

Of course, in commercial terms, they are not fast growing at all. Free range, they take a good 100-120 days to reach good carcass weights. Commercial broiler birds housed indoors and grown on a diet of growth promoters under controlled day-length can be harvested at more like 40 days, still covered in chick-fluff. As I understand it (and I'm no expert), those would not be Hubbards - our Hubbards are bred (designed?) to do well under commercial scale free range or organic conditions. We are actually slowing them down by giving them fully free range conditions, too much exercise and a diet supplemented by worms and grubs scratched from the ground.

Breakfast in the early morning sun. 

Meanwhile in other 'babies', our little gilts continue to charm and delight us. They are almost 4 months old now and suddenly seem to twice as long as the day they arrived. We were delighted recently to be visited by the couple who did my pig-training down in Tipperary 3 years back and with whom we have stayed in touch and would now call firm friends.

I love the light under new beech leaves. This is in the pig run.

They were in the area, by coincidence, to collect a puppy and recognised the name of the village as being one I had mentioned. I was delighted to show them around the place and particularly to show the two pigs to Alfie. He pronounced them fit, well and a credit to us. "I love to see HAPPY pigs" he said as the our pair scampered round our feet deciding whose footwear to chew first.

This lovely foal and mare combo (plus the
other filly behind) have moved in next
door as lawn mowers. 

I should add that it's not all sweet perfection, however and a nasty incident between dogs and pigs soured relations between these species for a while.The 3 westies were enjoying their half hour off-lead exercise and gazing through the fence as the piglets wandered over to sniff the dogs.

This pigmy shrew was only slightly chewed by the cat.
Liz rescued him and I got a quick chance to take his pic
before we released him to the safety of a log stack.

Faster than I could react, a pig had got too close, a dog had thrust his head through the sheep wire and grabbed a chunk of pigs ear. The hullabaloo of squealing and barking had me sprint over adding my own roar to the cacophony. The dog let go the pig and the pigs both ran off to hide in their ark while I reprimanded the dogs. I went in to console the pigs and was relieved to find that the ear was only a bit bitten, not actually torn, though it was bleeding quite impressively. First-aid for piggies, anyone? Luckily, no lasting damage done though I note the pigs stay well clear of the fence now when the dogs are about.

Small white (?) on dandelion. 

The 365 photo project chugs on coming to the end of its 4th month. Last week the 'Tidy Towns' group in the village wanted to take part in the (national) Bio-Diversity week, so the 365 photographers were asked to specialise in wildlife related stuff. I have had some fun trying to give them a good choice of subjects and not just the cute and fluffy - slugs, snails, dead wood and so on have all featured. I am not sure I am 'allowed' to be pleased that Blue the cat caught a timely shrew which Liz rescued and then, while it was still frozen in shock and a-trembling, take its picture before it suddenly came to, realised its good fortune and scampered for cover. Sensible shrew.

The long border at Strokestown, still a bit
'early summer' and green. Pic by Liz. 

In the extra-curricular area, we found out about a plant sale happening in our favourite guest-visit destination, Strokestown House. This was not Strokestown selling stuff from their brilliant walled garden, but merely acting as host to a dozen or so traders. However the traders were excellent and the plants were in gorgeous condition and very reasonably priced and, included in the €5 entry fee to the 'fair', was a chance to walk round the walled garden. Despite showers, that was us sorted for a very enjoyable Sunday morning.

Strokestown House walled garden.

For not too much of a dent in the wallet, we came away with a good haul thanks, mainly, to one of the traders doing a "6 plants for €20" deal. All perennials needed (and longed for for a while - Ireland is not a natural gardeners' country and the Garden Centres are few and far between and not well stocked with unusual stuff) for our big raised bed. Some inspired by the lovely plants growing in big drifts in the walled garden - the blue Centaurea particularly.

Admiring the old equipment in the restored working area.
This a lovely old Allen Scythe

We shipped a couple of tall clump-forming grasses, that blue centaurea, a nepeta (cat mint), a sedum, salvia, Solomon's seal, a hemerocallis (day lily) and a frothy-flowered thalictrum (I think) with granny bonnet leaves (aquilegifolia). With all this haul home we go into designer mode placing them out on the bed in their prospective positions to see if it works.

The gardener - muddy knees to prove it!

We are still enjoying the fact that this is not our overcrowded garden in Faversham. By the time we'd finished there we had no space to plant things we'd buy so they sat in pots for too long, or some other plant was evicted to make room. Here, we have 2.5 acres, so we can still buy 'thugs' that will take over space - mint, the Solomon's seal etc or will happily self-seed. We'll get there.