Being an apple tree

Thank you, everyone, for your kind comments yesterday.

I had roped Firstborn and A into helping me choose the apple tree to plant today, then plant it. I showed them the hole I'd dug and the criss-crossed bricklayers' line I'd used to assess levels. Then A completely threw me by saying she thought the tree should be on the other side of the garden, hiding the shed rather than blocking the sightline to the end of the garden where the shed isn't. I went through all the reasons I'd allocated it to the other side and they didn't hold up.

A is good at garden design. She has worked wonders with the tiny space she and Firstborn have behind their home in Bristol, and she was right.

This is Firstborn and A (both wearing shirts of mine for gardening in) pretending to be an apple tree hiding the shed so that I could see what I thought of the position from upstairs and downstairs windows.

We dug a new hole, we chose the tree, we planted it. Then, while Firstborn went to see Chris's friends again (see yesterday), A and I worked extremely hard in the garden for the rest of the day: levelling soil, thinning and moving plants, rescuing all the displaced strawberry plants and replanting them, and starting to fill the new bed at the back left of the picture.

The progress today is immense and, once again, I was too immersed to take before and after pictures.

Meanwhile, a Freecycler had asked whether anyone local had any spare hardcore, and came and collected the sacks that were going to be my next three cycle rides to the dump.

Firstborn has now gone via Bristol to Avalon Equinox Festival where he is billed to perform at 2 tomorrow morning (the scheduling trials of being a very minor star). A has gone to London for work tomorrow. And I am at home, enormously grateful for all today's help, admiring my garden in the dark, glad to be retired, glad not to be a performer, and looking forward to a long hot bath and an early night.