It’s time for some Gardening.

Having already started to clear the weeds from the gravel in the side garden, the English Parents wanted to finish the job.  We spent the whole day in the garden and it was very productive; it is looking pretty tidy now.

The English Parent replanting the green tuft (middle, bottom).

While digging away the weeds we unearthed old stepping stones:

The original garden design was re-appearing.  It all made sense now; the large stepping stones in the gravel continue all the way to the steps leading to the river.  The separate areas of the garden had been carefully defined.  We felt like archeologists or geologists or myxomycetemists and it was lovely to be uncovering all this stuff.

The gravel has been completely de-weeded (except the Japanese Knotweed which will always be there, underground, growing) so the English Parent is doing a little Scottish celebration jig (above).

Between the freshly unearthed stone path and the main garden is a concrete drainage ditch that takes water away from the bathroom sink and dumps it into the main drainage channel between us and the woodshop next door.  This drainage ditch had to be cleared (which we did) and we had to think of some way to stop leaves getting back into the ditch and cloggin it up.  We decided to put stones from the river over it but this proved to be very difficult.  Matching the stones for shape and style and placement is a real art.  The sheer variety available as well as the physical weight of this beautiful blue Japanese Tokushima stone makes things pretty delicate.  Lifting a massive flat stone off the river bank is out of the question: my body would simply shatter into porridge muck, so we had to figure out a way to do it with what we got and what we could carry.  It still needs a bit of work:

Gallons  of tea.

As the sun settles behind the trees the temperature drops quickly and the working day is almost over.  Just time to resurrect a dead tree I found under the weeds:

It’ll be our Christmas tree this year!  We’ll decorate it soon enough.