The bricks I mentioned last time arrived the other day and today we got about 3 cubic metres of sand as well.

There were two types of bricks, one for the raised garden and the others are paving stones for the patio. The brick for the garden are joined together in pairs and must be cracked in half to make the rough front face. I’m certain that the guy at the cement works where we ordered the bricks miscalculated the amount when I gave him the measurements. But we should have enough brick for at least one of the gardens we planned. The other one will probably have to wait a while. There seems to be plenty of the paving stones on the other hand, so hopefully we have enough of them.

We had a bit of help during the weekend, with Pia’s brother and his flatmate visiting. Unfortunately we didn’t have the sand yet, so doing the patio was out of the question. But we did get all the garden bricks split in half. They also cleared the small willow and birch trees growing around the driveway and helped plant our new fruit trees. The front looks a bit naked at the moment, but definitely a lot tidier. They also helped put the concrete ring and lid around the well head.

To plant the fruit trees we had to clear away some of the birch trees that were growing in the yard. We had tried to save several around the house when doing the building, but several of them had either died or were getting that way. Probably it was the increased ground level around the house that did it. But anyway, we cut them down and turned them all into firewood and mulched up all the branches. The holes for the fruit trees provided the dirt and grass to fill in the other holes. So the end result is that the yard looks a bit strange now and the fruit trees look tiny. It’ll probably be a few years before we get anything off them. That’s if the wildlife doesn’t eat them first.