Jam and Jerusalem

18 days in and we are still very much enjoying (and being amazed by) this lovely dry spell and we are getting as much outdoor time in as we can while it lasts. The current forecast from "Wet Éireann" (as it was becoming called, really it is 'Met Éireann', of course, the Irish Met Office) is that the rain returns on Wednesday but we can't complain now for a while - we've had the best innings ever for a Feb/March nearly-three-week spell.

My first 2 pics here show a before and after of the old compost site mentioned in a previous post. You can see what I mean about the rather unsightly and rushed construction based around an old fence line and loaded with compost more as a way of suppressing nettles and brambles than anything else. The triumph of hope over experience? When did you ever manage to kill nettles by piling 'rubbish' on top of them?

With the compost moved you can see that the space has now been leveled for use as a flower bed and is, in fact, already planted with some Crocosmia (Lucifer) which we had bought in Lidl's. The third pic shows the neater new arrangement. The 'good stuff' is held in behind the wooden paling fence and the nettle-y rubbish, now buried under some rabbit cleanings, held in by corrugated sheet. The chickens are on hand, as ever, to inspect. They loved it - all those worms! Our friend and Mentor, Anne actually grows worms in wormeries as a source of vital trace elements and key base proteins for their (many!) hens and estimate that each hen needs only 7 worms a day to meet that need. Anne was in that business (organic eggs) in a 'former life' and has all the scientific knowledge backing it up. On that basis, our hungry worm-guzzlers have had about a month's worth.

Along the outer edge of our Kitchen Garden we have created a row of currant and berry bushes which we hope will grow to form an edible hedge. I have seen this done before in Kent while judging the Environmental Action category of the Calor Gas "Village of the Year" competition where the team making it happen called it their Jam and Chutney Hedge. They had damsons, gooseberries, currant bushes and more in theirs. We do not have damsons in ours but the name still fits except that we started jokingly calling it the 'Jam and Jerusalem' Hedge and that name has now stuck.

So far this 'hedge' has been a bit of a piece-meal affair with the bushes going in at roughly the correct spacing as and when we bought or were given them. Liz today decided that this needed to be a proper 'project' and the line of the hedge should be more formally marked out with stones and weeded. She's been getting on with that, barrowing weeds round to the new composts, robbing stones from up the left side of the hay-barn and gathering good topsoil from the hay-rake bank. With this area being still on the flat and not yet a raised bed, it has been a damp job even after the days without rain.

Our main weeds in there are creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) and good ol' couch grass, neither of which will happily let go the soil around their roots when damp. By comparison, I have been weeding around my allotment raised beds and I am delighted to find that the soil there has dried nicely enough to crumb up easily at the touch of a shuffle-hoe, and to fall easily off the buttercup, dock, annual grasses and nettles which are 'my' main weeds. It is pure joy weeding down there. We look up occasionally or call 'Coffee?' across the orchard to one another, and then meet up at the chairs by the nearly-pond to chat and sup in the warm sunshine.

Bull and Barrel

Feeling a bit sorry for the guy (Mike the Cows) who rents the fields next door because he only had a scrappy warning sign up (faded felt pen on old hardboard) I decided to do him a secret favour, nicked his sign and painted him a decent one. He won't know it's me, and I don't even know if a) he's putting his cows in there this year and b) running Felix the Bull with them. I have now sneaked the sign back up and we are wondering whether anyone will comment, or suss us, and if so how soon. Hee hee! 

The sign looks very smart and quite professional. The white is just some exterior woodwork undercoat. The red gloss was left over from painting the Utility Room door and the dark green was just a small tin of wood preserving stuff useful for the rabbit hutches. The red was dabbed on using a half inch gloss brush salvaged from my jar of old brushes. The finer stuff was done with a set of kiddies 'art' brushes got from a local shop for €1.99. No expense spared! The design was just scratched out in pencil and then lashed in free-hand; hence it is a bit wobbly in places. 

Mike, though, does need to attend to his fences if he is going to put Felix and the gang back in there. I don't think I've ever seen such a rat's nest of scrappy barbed wire, rotting posts and baler twine set to hold back 800 kg (or so) of Charolais bull (and his wives and children).

I have now made and installed the Mk 2 version of the goose bath. The geese, you will recall, were using a temporary arrangement made from 4 lengths of timber and old plastic sheeting. This worked OK and the geese enjoyed it, but geese, although they have webbed feet, do still have claws on the end of each toe, which are reasonably sharp. The geese eventually puncture the sheeting and the water drains away. 

All around here, in almost every field, the locals use a type of blue barrel cut in half as food bowls and drinkers for cattle, sometimes plumbed in with loo-cistern style float valves and standing in posh frames. I tracked a supply of these barrels down to a local agricultural supplies place in Castlerea. They are 25 gallon capacity and nice tough plastic. 

They are empty but sometimes have the last 'dregs' of what ever was in them, still in there. Unfortunately (and rather alarmingly) few still have their labels on them, so you have no idea what this might be. One barrel in 'our' pile said simply 'flouride' and the shop guy had no idea what was in them. His attitude seemed to be 'buyer beware - at your own risk'. We believe they may be 'food grade' as an embossed mark on the plastic says "Do not refill with Food Grade product". The huge number of them around the local farms made me wonder whether they might be an ingredient in the local animal-feed milling industry. 

Ours proved to have a small amount of a white, milky, odourless liquid in it which diluted down with my rinse-water and was 'lost' as safely as we could. The insides of the barrel also seem to have some kind of wax protection, presumably to stop the contents picking up plastic taints, or the contents attacking the plastic of the barrels and becoming contaminated with residues. We scrubbed this off as best we could with hot soapy water. It then remained just to sink the half barrel into the ground and fill with water - three buckets in the barrow three times. We have sited the new 'bath' near the bottom of the orchard so that when I have to bale it out to clean it the water can run off harmlessly under the hawthorn hedge, though this made for a long walk with the water-laden barrow. We then steered the geese down past it so that they'd know it was there. 

We will see how it goes. That was yesterday. Today I fed the geese some sprouted wheat close by the bath and saw them drinking and head-bathing in/from it but we have not actually seen them climb in for a paddle about. If they do, this will be, we think, the first time they have ever been in water deep enough to swim on so it might be a bit alarming for them. 


Finally, just a quick picture of me on the sofa surrounded by the dogs. Poppy is on my lap, Towser on my shoulder and Deefer sitting by my side. We'd lit the Living Room fire that day, so we were as warm as toast and recovering from the jolly gardening and dog-walking. 

An Update on the Update

Sixteen days now without rain so we are now officially in drought. Please send any Aid Convoys and water bowsers soonest. Seriously though, we are enjoying the current dry spell and spending most of our time outdoors working together. I am cracking on with the pond and we are also moving a temporary compost 'site' to a more convenient position. This set of heaps were established in a hurry while we were still buildering and slung together using a rather ugly collection of corrugated iron and of wooden off-cuts banged into the ground as uprights.

There was an old broken down fence which used to run across from the cattle race to the gate into the 5 acre field (part of the land we didn't buy). Only the bit near what is now the orchard gate was still standing; the rest was lying flat or part-buried under mud and weeds, it's barbed wire looping out of the ground Loch Ness Monster style as a superb trip hazard. We had pulled much of this out but we used the standing section as the backs of two back back-to-back heaps, one for good stuff, one for rough. This set up now part blocks the entrance to the orchard field and is unsightly, so the sheet metal is going to go, the compost get moved to new heaps 'behind' the wall of the cattle race, the messy barbed wire extracted for scrapping and the posts pulled out and logged up for burning. We will then have another bit of nice flat bare spoil for gardening on.

The 'inherited' chain saw proved to be a very good one and in excellent, nearly new condition. Our man Felix-the-Fix (Chainsaw genius) serviced it and set it up for the outrageous sum of €6 (£5.18 to you Brits - I know... where does all the money go?) and even showed me how to start it etc. It turns out that Stihl equipment is date stamped, so we know that this saw was made in 1998 although, obviously, not when it was purchased. It might therefore have been bought by TK Min while he still lived on this site and it might be him that used it for the very few times it has been run. Felix could tell this was 'few' because of the very small amount of dust and rubbish under the chain guard and the lack of scuffing and wear on the chain 'bar' (big flat 'blade' sticking out of the front, around the edge of which the chain runs). Anyway, Felix declared it as safe as a new one. He also accepted the offer of my old one for salvage and bits. Oil pumps and air filters are apparently the thing.

We were just done pond-digging and compost heaving and we were sitting down on the outside chairs for a coffee, when two livestock things happened in quick succession. First some bizarre noises from the goose 'pond' drew our attention to the fact that Gander was doing naughty things to one of the gals (which, we are told, only happens on water). The other goose was hopping from foot to foot and flapping and honking. We do not know whether she wanted a turn, or was worried he was trying to drown the lady. This is the first time, to our knowledge that this has happened (though we are not there all the time to watch) but may portend the girls coming back into lay. That would be nice. We are also wondering whether we might get broodiness and goslings.

No sooner had we got over that excitement than Blue appeared with something big in his jaws which we at first thought was a bird with its wings spread. It was, in fact, a decent sized young rat, so it's good to know the cats are still on the case. Not to be outdone, Rolo was later also walking around with a dead mouse and even visited Liz while she was sitting on the 'throne', but his was stiff and cold so we think he just un-stashed it from some hidey hole to prove a point.

Sorry no pics today. More soon.

A Drought in February?

According to textbook Meteorology a 'drought' in the British Isles is any period of 15 days without rain. My paper-diary had it's first mention of "warm sunny spring-like days" on Feb 14th so if we manage tomorrow without rain (and it looks as if we might) we are officially in a drought situation in County Roscommon in February. This is unheard of! Given that if felt like we had rain every day through November, December and January it is a very pleasant change and we hope that it is a portent of a decent spring. We are starting to enjoy plenty of 'signs' by now. We have primroses open in the 'Primrose Path' and our daffs are starting to turn down prior to showing the first colour. The buds on the cutting dogwood from Vendor Anna are opening and plenty of other plants have signs of expanding buds.

Our rabbits in the big run had grazed their grass down to the clay and were running to the fence to 'ask' me for food as soon as I appeared in the garden. They were gobbling up cabbage leaves and broccoli stalks, carrots, feed wheat and the last remaining 'Fast Lamb Crunch' mixture like it was going out of fashion. They have now been moved to their new runs and the front lawn, where they will graze the whole of their 1 m by 2.5 m area in one day and we are moving them on to new grass each morning. They are leaving a snooker-table-like baize with a few pellets of poo in their wake as they proceed across the lawn.

We nipped out to beyond Carrick to a place we had heard sold poly-tunnel plastic sheet by the yard and bought enough to produce the Mark 2 version of my raised-bed cloche. The Mk 1 was only made out of an old bit of plastic wrapping and had been shredded by the first decent gale. You will know from reading the job list a few posts back that I had in mind to create a 'greenhouse' using a wooden frame and corrugated transparent plastic, maybe fibre-glass. Mentor Anne (who had played this game before!) suggested  that while we were out at the poly tunnel place (North West Tool Hire, Kilclare, Co. Lietrim) we ask the guy for a price on the corrugated. She was suggesting that it might be very expensive and was steering us in the direction of poly-tunnel plastic, at least for sections, if not a poly-tunnel itself.

 Well, Anne, you will not be surprised to know that the corrugated sheet plan is now withdrawn. The plastic alone was going to come to €1400+ and that was without wood, screws and so on. Instead we have been persuaded that the way to go is actually a poly-tunnel, so we have ordered one measuring 20 feet long by 14 feet wide (and 7'6" tall) which will fit in the same space. It was only €700 all in and is being delivered, we hope, this weekend. We have spent part of today clearing the site which is, you will recall, the western bay of the former hay barn. Liz is now planning all manner of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and basil to cram it with.

With the soil nicely drying out in the DROUGHT (did I tell you we were nearly in a drought?) I have got back into pond digging. It is pure pleasure. The shovel-fulls are so much lighter when not weighed down like a sodden sponge and the barrow loads bounce across the firm ground. The plan for this is to not need an expensive rubber liner (estimate €860) as two 'spits' down, we hit yellow Roscommon clay. I have nearly taken the first 'spit' off so you can clearly see the shape of the pond now. I will then come in a bit all round and start on the next level. When we get down to clay I am hoping that we will be able to 'puddle' the clay into a waterproof layer or at least. waterproof enough that the replenishment from the rain (when we are not in DROUGHT) would keep up with any seepage.

I have just noticed that the picture above appears to show a headless chicken. This is just William preening his right side out of sight. The strange grey cloud which you can just see rising to the left of me (as you look) turns out to be because one of his daft hens decided that the old bonfire ash would be a good place for a dust bathe. She got well involved in this and was there for half an hour at least rolling and writhing about getting completely covered in the grey ash and sending up plumes of dust into the windless air. She got up, shook herself and was obviously well satisfied with the result but spent the rest of today looking decidedly grubby compared to her sisters and with very grey wattles and comb. If we'd not seen her bathing we would have been very concerned for her health. Oooh. She does look poorly!

Meanwhile we have started planting some of the Wispy's and Ardcarne plant purchases. We are trying out a new sort of raised bed as an experiment.  This is Liz's cunning method. We make a circle of stones to mark the patch out from the grass, drop a layer of well rotted straw-bale onto the grass and then shovel on a mound of spare soil from the pond. The chickens and rooster inspect this for worms and grubs and then sign it over to Liz for planting, in this case with foxgloves, Ismene (Hymenocallis = "Peruvian Daffodil") and geraniums. It then gets a chicken-wire cover to deter the geese for the first few days while the plants get established. The picture is the first ever one, a Pilot Project. There!

Did I tell you we might have a drought? Oh yes, so I did.

A Kind of Inheritance

My previous post describes the unearthing of a tractor-mounted fertilizer spinner / spreader from the bank at the west end of the (now) Pond Garden and way back I have spoken of a horse drawn hay rake found in the same bank and hedge. These are all part of the charm and interest we have obtained by buying this place, an abandoned farmhouse and surrounding fields. It is our inheritance, if you like, and we have both been very struck by the fact that we have taken custody of a piece of history. We both feel very strongly that we must treat the house and land with respect, keeping it and improving it till we eventually hand it on ourselves to the next custodian(s).

The house, particularly, feels in a way which is hard to define, as if it has a soul or a spirit which we must try to make feel secure and to please. We hope that we have completely gutted the place and renovated in a sensitive way, somehow bringing it new life and warmth. This might all sound a bit weird and spiritual compared to my normal shallow, superficial warblings and I may not be describing it very well, but as we lit the first fires and sent our first warmth and smoke up the chimneys and started to see the rooms and walls dry out, we were both saying things like 'There! That's better, isn't it, house?' and we always wished it well as we went off for the weekends during the build and tried to re-assure it that we were not abandoning it again.

Too weird? Ah well. The previous owner and dweller we have called TK Min in this blog, TK being his initials; 'Min' for him being the son. This farm has been owned and run by the K family going back generations; they were definitely here in the 1901 census, and Dad (TK Max) and Grand-dad, along with Mum and Grandma are all buried in the fine family grave along in the local village cemetery. Grand-dad and Grandma died 1955 and 1963 respectively, TK Max in 1987 and his wife in 1962. 'Our man', TK min died just over 3 years ago on the 18th Feb 2010 although he had moved out of the farm around 10 years ago and the farm has been out of use and not lived in since then.

We never met any of these people. We know a bit about them from talking to local folk and have read the exciting newspaper stories of their instant fame when having their car hi-jacked by the robbers in a local bank raid in which 2 policemen were shot and killed. Our dealings have been with TK Min's sister, our 'Vendor Anna' who was involved with selling us the place on behalf of the estate following TK's passing. We have since become firm friends. There are two other sisters, hence the 'Three Sisters' described in this blog during the conveyancing, but we have yet to meet them also.

So, it was in this way that we came to 'inherit' our beautiful house and the wonderful grounds - the fields, walls, trees, the yard, the 'Secret Garden', the cattle race, the Tígín and milking/calf sheds that we love so much. In terms of physical contents, naturally most of it had been cleared away for the sale, but we also inherited a few bits and pieces and tools - a kitchen knife and an enamel, cream-coloured roasting dish, a couple of pitch forks and the hay rake. A rather nice plate and some personal papers including TK Max's "An Garda Síochána" (The Irish Police Force) membership card and newspaper cuttings, we have passed to Vendor Anna.

Until last week, that was about it. Then we were talking to Anna's Paul about the fact that I had fried my chain saw engine and needed a new one. Paul very generously volunteered the machine in his shed, a nearly new Stihl which originally belonged to none other than our own TK Min! The little we know of TK Min does have him as rather a nervous guy and no-one can actually imagine him using a chain saw. Paul is also not a great fan of these tools, so he has not used it either; nor did he intend to start, so this one is probably about 6 years old (says our man at Stihl Main Dealer, East Brothers of Boyle) and will not have turned a crank for most of those 6 years.

We are delighted of course and very grateful to Anna and Paul as it saves me buying a new one for €370+. I have whizzed it straight round to our chainsaw genius, Felix-the-Fix to check it over, service it and (mainly) re-assure me that it is safe to use. It even came with the instruction book. I have used some of the saved money to treat myself to a pair of those kevlar, chain-saw safety trousers as, in general, I prefer life with both legs.

There you have it then; our inheritance and our plans for its custody and enjoyment.

In Planning Mode

We have always meant to create a garden on this site alongside the productive, small-holder bits but had only vaguely formed fluffy notions that it might be here and it might contain this or that plant. We have started last year with a nice flower bed 'out front' using seed salvaged from the Kent garden - hollyhocks, Erigeron (Spanish daisy), love-in-a-mist, Welsh poppy and Californian poppy and Granny's Bonnets - and we'd started to accumulate bits and pieces in pots in the yard, but it was all very late by the time we finished builder-ing and things did not really get cracking.

Not a bother. Gardening, to us, is always a long term project, never an instant-gratification, weekend make-over fix. We tend to happily plant things 'this year' knowing they will look good 'next spring' or even a decade or more away. In Faversham we had been gardening for 19 years and had the 100' by 24' strip crammed with perennials, shrubs, the (very crowded) orchard with the 'woodland garden' under it. I took a separate allotment to give me some veg' growing space but we were, by the time we'd 'finished' lost for space and unable to buy any plants because of not having anywhere to plant them. What we did buy had to be small and stay small. Here, on our 2.5 acres, we have the opposite problem. Small plants would be lost in the space, so we need to be talking 'drifts' of colour and bigger shrubs and trees.

Both Liz and I are keen and (if I can say this modestly enough!) quite knowledgeable gardeners by now but as spring starts to move and give us parachutist's "ground-rush" we were still dithering even as to which bit of the site to do the gardening in. I have started digging a pond in the space between the hay barn and the orchard, so one candidate was the (as yet only gleam-in-the-eye) "Pond Garden" but most of the decisions had been up to now, NOT to garden in places. We like the front lawn as an expanse of green so this is only likely to get drive edges of ox-eye daisy and Gypsophilia. Up the left hand side of the barn has the ex-Steak-Lady offerings in it but is probably just a holding area.

Things were given a boost by local Aladdin's Cave shop Wispy's who suddenly launched their garden centre display stocked with an amazing rage of plants at silly prices - 3 for €5, €1.99 and so on. Liz and I fell upon the display and filled a bag, climbing rose, mock orange, Convallaria, Echinops, red hot poker, Echinacia, almost-black hollyhocks..... Driving home we got to talking that NOW we'd need to start the garden to have somewhere to house this bounty.

We love this stage and have a good team method. I go striding about in the frost with my gloves on and my biro sputtering in the freezing air to create a rough plan. Liz converts this into a sensible scale map with 1 m squares with the software package 'MS-Visio'. It is a joy to watch her. She borrows Visio's pre-prepared cloud shapes and squishes them long and thin to represent hedges. She draws lines and pulls them out of shape to make bits of pond shore-line, re-sizes stuff and colours in boxes for 'the'allotment' or adds circles to represent trees in the orchard.

The Visio map we can then print several copies of to allow for some quick 'concept' scratchings as we dream up a path here or a gentle bank there, a trellis to hide the caravan or a willow 'igloo' over there. Things get rubbed out as many times as they get created. The many gardening books come out as we start to home in on what might go into the space - Monty Don, Geoff Hamilton, Bob Flowerdew, Penelope Hobhouse, Hessayon's 'expert' series all get gleaned for bits on damp gardens, damp shade, structure, colour. The umpteenth version will be the one that gets kept. Liz jokes that she will preserve that so that in ten years time we can look back and say "Well, that is what we were going to do, but we never did ANY of that!". That is the way of gardening.

Things evolve and move on. Some of the plants we plan, we never actually find for sale so other things slot in. Some bits work and others don't. Some plants take off like mad things. You get given donations by generous gardener friends. We like that here because space is what we have for the moment, so "invasive", "rampant" and "thug" can be good words. Well, I wake up this morning to find that Liz was at it well into the wee small hours and the 'umpteenth' map is well peopled with Achillea, Regal Lilies, Rudbeckia, Hostas, lavender, foxgloves, lilac and Potentilla  and Crocosmia.

Now we just have to go out there and 'do' it. The pond itself needs finishing so that the spoil can be shaped into the landscaping and the stones can become the edges of mini raised-beds for the less wet-tolerant species. The bank on the west side needs clearing of its fallen elder, grown-up-through nettles and stoloniferous grasses and , it turns out, we need to unearth the buried 'treasure', in this case a tractor mounted fertilizer spreader; we could only see the rim sticking up and had thought it might be an oil drum. Thank you Mr Farmer for that nice surprise!

All the fine-tuning, digging, raking, preparing seed beds and planting holes is a bit of a way away, but the future beckons and we have 'The Vision Thing'. We can see ourselves sitting in our Darby and Joan chairs watching the sun go down over the pond as the geese splash about in the evening light. The leafless winter dogwood stems glow crimson and the happy perennials sleep beneath their mulch of compost. We'll get there.

Things To Do

When Liz and I were working, both of us had the kind of jobs where your working day was made up of a hotch-potch of different bits from a broad range of types of task. In my case, being IT based I'd have hardware assembly and moves going on, users to 'create' and manage, projects to manage, management information to compile for periodical and one-off reports and at some stages also a warehouse assembly team to plan, deploy, rotate, control holidays and absence for and so on. They were the sort of jobs where you needed a "To-Do" list or you'd lose track. Sometimes this would just be on a pad or note book but if we were feeling tired, under-manned and over-worked (quite often!) this would go onto the dry-wipe board on the office wall and if somebody came in to give you more work who you didn't feel like co-operating with in any kind of a shiny, enthusiastic way, you could stride theatrically over to the board and write his job somewhere way down the list to make sure he understood that it might not happen any time soon. To-do lists also give you the satisfaction of crossing out or highlightering jobs when they are complete.

Well, I am back into 'To-Do' lists now in my not-so-as-you'd-recognise-it 'leisured' retirement. Mentally it is in three parts - REAL jobs which will actually get done, Jobs that will happen (Projects which will start) if we get any small financial windfall (e.g. an endowment ripening) and then jobs that we'd love to do if we win the lottery. The latter list is unlikely given that we very rarely do the lottery, but it includes major works like "Build conservatory on end of kitchen and incorporate Tígín building into house". The latter two bits are just mental lists and we can ignore them for the purposes of this blog. The REAL list 'lives' in my bound note book and just out of interest I thought I'd share the current list with you to give you some idea what I am meant to be up to over the next few days and weeks. I have added explanatory notes where you might need some fleshing out of the raw statement.

Things to do as at 22nd Feb 2013

• Dog-proof fences and gates round yard
• Clear up 'sneddings' on Vendor Anna's land (Sneddings are the thin branch ends left when you cut out all the decent sized logs from a tree. This rubbish is still lying in the field where Bob and I felled the ash tree and need tidying into the hedge)
• Dig Pond
• Hanging-garment rod in Utility Room ceiling
• Hedge trimming in East field (see picture - we are currently most of the way round and can nearly tick off this job)
• Cat flap on Utility Room door
• New canopy on raised bed mini-poly-tunnel cloche
• New doors on chicken house and calf house.
• Work top in kitchen where 6 foot fridge-freezer used to be
• Fireplace (hearth) in Living Room (This is the only incomplete bit of the original house-build project)
• Stainless steel anti-cat panel on kitchen wall. (Cats are messing up the wall scrabbling up to the window-sill)
• Car-port over caravan
• 'Greenhouse' in 3rd bay of former hay barn, to be built out of corrugated transparent plastic
• Gut 'shower room' and galley out of caravan
• Build 4th berth in caravan
• Stand caravan on blocks with wheels off ground
• Close-able doors on rabbit run 'bedrooms'
• Pallet sized water tank plumbed to sheep drinker in orchard
• Pallet sized water tank plumbed to sheep drinker in east field
• Drinker in east field
• Burn hedge trimmings in east field
• Fencing east field (sheep proof)
• Clean outside of caravan (algae etc)
• Brambles on road edge of front lawn
• Mow round outsides of allotment and orchard, under larches and along both sides of lawn hedge.

That's it for the moment, unless we can think of any more. Should keep me out of mischief. You never get bored, anyway!