John (next door) kindly offered to give us a tonne of his well-rotted horse manure. For some reason he had a Bobcat, which although looks great fun to drive, didn’t prove to be be very accurate at dropping tonne scoops of poo into tonne builders bags. On the bright side, about 1/2 of the poo missed the bag and spread itself across the drive.

One very happy boy…

A big day today – the work on the retaining walls is done, and it’s time to move many tonnes of earch and rubble (and a few hundred blocks from the previous retaining wall), and shape out the new garden landscape. Selwyn is a bit of local legent on diggers and progress is fast and accurate! Time to order some turf, but first, a wee gap in progress with a two week break in Scotland…

Darling Fiery cat left us this week. Her heart gave up after a long healthy life. She is resting under the apple tree now, her favorite summer spot in the short time she has been in the new house.

The lovely lady coming up with the garden design sketch pointed out this amazing product – grassfelt – like turf, but in one section, so it can be moulded to shape until the grass takes root. Perfect for our curvaceous grass scheme. Not sure I want to know the price mind you…

http://www.allturf.co.uk/products/grassfelt/

Eryl, the chap next door lent me the framed version of this airborne photo of the house as it used to be. I think this is late 1960′s. The house and ‘garden’ used to be very different. In a way we are going back to a modern version of this original garden.

Some amazing dry stone wall work is underway on top of the local hill range. Really neat work with turf on top. Lots of ideas…

This is getting sand delivered in style! A local farmer has a huge mound of it and was happy to drop a couple of tonnes into the foundation of the garage for a very small fee and at one hours notice! Today officially marks the start of the garage build. Hurrah! Builders starting a couple of weeks…