Busy, Busy, Busy.

Long time since the last update, so lots to tell.
We finally finished fencing the veggy garden, it looks so easy when you see professional contractors doing it, by hand it's nowhere near as easy as it looks, but we're there. The wire is buried, the gate is on and one of the beds is dug over ready to start planting as soon as the weather improves.
We ordered loads of seeds in a fit of enthusiasm, now we have to find room to plant them all and I have a feeling 2 beds aren't going to be enough, especially as we need one as a seedbed, so more digging is in the pipeline. Speaking of pipes, the water trough has to come out and a tap put in it's place, this should be a simple job, but we've already had a mini-flood in the annexe when the washing machine plumbing ('expertly' fitted by me) decided to leak all over the place, so we're not going to take it lightly, especially as the water supply comes from George's farm next door, and he's lambing at the moment so a major water leak at our end might not go down too well....
Anyway, as you can see, the garden looks like it's getting there;


In other news, Kate bought plans for a DIY chicken house which arrived the other day, so we went out to buy the wood for me to make it, I haven't done much more than simple DIY since school, but hopefully 'Luggy' Proud, my woodwork teacher instilled the basics into me between throwing chisels around the woodwork room at school so that I'll be able to make something the chickens will be proud of. Or at least unfussy enough to live in and not get squashed by as it collapses around them.
We also decided to do a bit of work in the big wood this week. Although we don't plan to use it for pigs for a year or two, it runs along the banks of the river, and seeing as we have river frontage we thought we ought to make somewhere for us to go and get away from our livestock responsibilities every once in a while.
The problem is that the wood is chock-a-block with gorse and bramble, and the best bit of the river access is (naturally) at the end of the wood, so we've set to work with the brush cutter (now officially Kate's favourite purchase since the last pair of shoes), a lethal petrol strimmer with what appears to be a 3 bladed ninja star at one end that tears through the undergrowth like a knife through butter. We set to work and shortly after we had the beginnings of a path. If you look at the gorse on the left, that's what it looked like before we set to work, half an hour later there was a path there. Kate loves using this thing and likes to pretend she's Darth Vader, humming his theme tune from Star Wars as ahe hacks away at the undergrowth - I can lose her for hours with this thing, no plant is safe.

We also cleared an area to sit by the river, again covered in bramble and gorse, again dispatched in minutes by 'Darth' Page and her new toy. It overlooks what we have begun to call our 'beach' at the corner of the river where sandy deposits have been left. After sliding down the bank on our backsides all too often, I got a few rocks from the river and made some steps down to the water so now parents and old people (ie. me) can get down to the bank of the river safely.
As usual, click on the small images to make them bigger;