Sunny days are here again (praise be)

After a parky start which featured me pressing snooze repeatedly, I zoomed up the A396 like a bat out of hell (well, as much as is possible in an aged Peugeot 106, so more like a bat out of Bournemouth), enjoying the sunshine lighting up the Exe valley. This is the first time in months that it's been decent weather for my Tuesday foray to Bolham, and what a difference it makes.

Today's first task was to finish off my hazel hurdle rose training efforts, so I wandered down to the hazels in the copse to find some nice long and straight branches to chop down. I am suffering from chilblains at the moment and so my attempts to saw were punctuated with swearing, which hopefully nobody heard. Finally I had my three choice branches and dragged them back through to the terraces. I was pretty pleased with my hazel hurdles, and once I'd won the battle with the last one (they put up a damn good fight against being bent into the ground) and tied in the last rose stem, the effect was rather pleasing.



Once I'd (re-)covered my tracks with manure, I was tasked with digging over the rosebeds where Lucy and Christina had been pruning the day before. This is fairly back-breaking stuff, even with the short forks we were using, and I was glad when the call to tea came. No respite after break, however, and so we carried on clearing up the prunings and pulling out bastard bindweed and rose suckers, digging over where we'd been and disentangling ourselves from rosebushes as we went.

Lunch was a shorter affair today; because it was colder everyone was a bit quicker to get up and at 'em outside again to warm up, which we did pretty quickly with our next job: clearing woodland beds of leaf litter and helping the bulbs show through better. We tamed roses that had got ideas above their station, and cursed badgers for chewing shrubs. There was a fair bit of apologising to bulbs for treading on them, too. I have to say I was thoroughly fed up at having to leave everyone to go to work.

The snowdrops are well and truly out now, and are a beautiful sight in their clumps and swathes throughout the gardens. They are being joined by crocuses now, and the odd daffodil here and there (though these last are being somewhat reticent). The birds are everywhere, fighting for territory and singing as if their lives depended on it. Good to see a lot of Goldfinches and Long-tailed Tits in the gardens today.

Kay has found a task for me for next Tuesday: chopping down a climbing rose that went off to meet its maker many years ago and which is just hanging around the base of a lovely Scots Pine.

5 hours