Woodland Path - Almost

Mrs SoL has been saying for a couple of years that she would like a woodland path to run behind the poplar trees in the garden. Trouble is, it was completely overgrown with weeds, brambles, old dumped stones, huge concrete fence posts, metalwork and other detritus (left there from before we owned the house, so over 30 years now). A combined effort (Mrs SoL with the weeding and detailed slow removal of roots, stones and whatever she could extract from the ground). My job was to use as many of my ‘Man-tools’ as possible to brush-cut, dig out old 3-ft metposts, chain saw, remove stonework, lay membrane, collect impossibly heavy stones from another part of the garden and lay them as the border to stop it moving. This is the pic of that almost finished. We have a metre cube of wood chipped tree (that I cut down a week or so ago). That will be going down on the membrane. Mrs SoL has already started planting the borders with plants from other parts of the garden, cuttings she has been cultivating and anything she fancies putting down to stop the weeds from coming back. We have moved the ‘border’ of the area back by about 3 metres, gaining some 100m2 of space that Mrs SoL wants to put to lawn (easier maintenance afterwards). Still need to work the weedy area on the farmer’s side of the fence (he is happy for us to do it against our land and even helps when he can).

Its US Thanksgiving today, we are not American, but lived there for a while, so we have now stopped to have a cup of tea and pumpkin pie from the pumkins that we grew this year. Time to be thankful for things that we have at this difficult time.