Spring 2014 - Making a Start

Thank you to Bridget Foy who writes a beautiful blog about their cottage, Bridget is with Andy Beach and together they do wonderful things to their cottage in their cottage and garden and go on interesting jaunt around the country. Bridget writes about this and shares.

So this is the inspiration behind my Carrowcrory Cottage blog here, as my other blogs do not cover what I actually do at home and near home.

I am just home so this was the first day for me here in this wonderful warm spring weather. My intent was to do maintenance work on our native tree labyrinth here but I soon got fed up with the sogginess still around and my weeding rug was not doing the trick. I needed a new weeding rug.

There is an unsightly pile, well now was an unsightly pile, of some kind of material that was once our temporary roof until the thatcher came along. Down memory road, here's the thatcher.

and here's a side of the thatch

After I cut out two rugs from the temporary roof material, sorry forgot to take a pic of the messy pile it made, I realised the rest could help out another problem.

Various people have suggested using scrap material to suppress weeds, such as cardboard, but in Florida I used something like this temp roof material and it worked well. Perhsps not the most eco, but it is using up material rather than wasting it. So I cut it up into strips and piled it up like so ....

It will not do all of the labyrinth, co waste card will be used too. Also I will not have the blue looking up but the other surface that looks like this ...

As I put the strips around the trees I have loads of wind blown branches to mulch up to put on top to hide this stuff ...

This is just some of it. i have a mulching machine that does a good job. Maybe tomorrows job ???

I was also looking at the masses of new alder tree plants that have sprung up in wilderness parts of the garden.

 

I have grown to really love the alder tree. They, along with willow, have done wonders to drain our once very boggy land, plus I love those burgundy coloured catkins and little dark brown cones on the branches

Maybe tomorrow's job will be to dig up some of those strays as I do have hedging gaps and labyrinth gaps ... and its still good for tree planting.

Another eyesore is my palette raised bed garden. It has served us well for a few years, but a lot of planks are rotten so I started lifting and stacking some and then will take the best to rebuild some raised beds again as I do not have the cash for lumber ... so why not make the best use of what we have?

Well perhaps not the most romantic of cottage garden days as I know folks like to see pics of plants, blossoms, fruits and abundance ... but these clear ups and preparations feel like a good start

... and writing this blog about it may be a good discipline for me to get something done this year as I let a lot go into a mess last year. Mainly due to being very busy with visitors after being delayed by an extended cold wind winter. This year climate seems more normal despite the extra rain.

So I had a good day really and it closed with a hazy pastely evening ...

Oh, for Bridget's abundant cottage blog click here