Wednesday, 16.05.2007

The truck load of dirt turned up soon after the last entry. That was put to use around the grass out back and to make the new garden in the front.

Dirt, lots of dirt.   More lawn to cut   More garden to weed.

The grass and flower seeds were planted about two weeks ago and the grass is already growing and the flowers are coming up quite well. The remaining land out the front still needs cleaned up and brick edging put in place, but that can wait a while longer.

The next thing on the schedule was to replace the rough netting we put up to protect the new fruit trees last autumn. After a winter they looked pretty bad, so we bought some plastic coated wire fencing and put up new fences around each tree. The fence is definitely needed. The rabbits peeled off the bark completely around one of our neighbours adult apple trees during the winter. The new ones look quite a bit better too. The trees have come out in leaf quite nicely and in the last few days some are even coming out in flower.

Lets see those rabbits get through that.   Pear tree.   Plum tree.   Apple tree.

After that came the greenhouse. We ordered it early last month and it turned up a few weeks ago. Since the last entry we have cleared the ground where it was going to sit, dug holes for the foundation, poured some concrete piles, set the foundation in place and assembled the whole thing. Putting it together took the whole of last weekend and was an exercise in patience. Being the typical product of that type all the instructions consisted of just pictures with numbered parts. Unfortunately few of the parts themselves were actually numbered and many of the steps needed were skipped over in the diagrams. And of course, Sunday evening, when it came time to finish the whole thing by fitting the doors we found out that a couple of parts for the second door were wrong. So now we have a greenhouse that we can’t close… grrrr!!

Perfectly level too!   Lots of little pieces.   #&?%! Thats all there is to say about that part.   Sitting in the sun.

The greenhouse itself is aluminium framing with some kind of polycarbonate sheeting like corrugated cardboard. Supposedly it keeps it a bit warmer and stops the sun burning the plants. We will see. We also got some automatic window openers. Bit hard to fit, but they seem to work.

Lots of holes.   Hopefully not like a sauna in here.

Since the ground where we put it is full of tree roots we put plastic around the sides and water permeable matting across the bottom. Hopefully that will keep the willow roots out. Now we just need dirt, lots of dirt…

Thats a lot of wheelbarrows full.