Spring - sprunging all over the place; lighting design

We don't have any frogspawn in the pond yet but I can tell you it's not for want of froggy business happening.  I think I've also seen a newt scurrying out of sight (if you can scurry underwater).

Today it's been glorious - February traditionally delivers at least one day of shorts weather and that's been today. 

Lunch outside in the sunshine, listening to bees buzzing, birds tweeting, woodpeckers woodpecking, rooks cawing whilst carrying twigs, nature generally doing its stuff all around.

Grass has been cut, edges edged (mostly) and general tidying has been occurring.

The crocuses are enjoying the sunshine, and bumblebees bigger than the crocus flowers have been fighting their way in and topping up.












Here are dogwoods, birch and crocus in the winter garden - daffs are just starting to come through but not really visible in this pic.  The intention is to wood-chip this area, I have a huge pile of twigs which I'm not chipping yet pending hopefully getting some tree-work done next month and being able to use an industrial chipper rather than my own rather slow one.





The hedge roses in the foreground were transplanted here as part of the general shuffling over the winter, their buds are swelling now so hopefully we'll have a bit of a thicket here in another couple of months.







Meanwhile indoors, we have finally designed. built and installed the over-table lighting fixture and it looks like this...  Alan's fitted a clever remote-dimmable switch to drive it, thus getting round the fact that the switch wiring as fitted in the build was actually nowhere near where the light fitting needed to be - ie in the middle of the void above the stairs.  It was a bit ticklish installing it, as you can imagine...

Before and after x 2

You will recall (keep up!!) that in the daisy etc border we have apples in the course of being espaliered, and that I was reserving a space on each side for an ornamental of some sort.  So the last pic you saw had plant / no plant as shown here.

But that was 'before'...






'After'
...with my birthday money from Judy and Pat, I have bought a coral-bark maple to go at the shady end of the border. Isn't it absolutely lovely?  Amusingly, it came with a label saying "Plants do not look their best at this time of year".  It's going to have to go some to look better than this - although it is also supposed to do spectacular spring and autumn colour, so maybe they are right.  V pleased - thank you Pat and Judy!



The next 'before' and 'after' requires a reprise of a post from December 2014 when we had just gone out to quote for the project.  We finished the year with a pic of our Christmas tree in the bungalow

<< and it looked like this...  What a little cutie!


>>>four years later, here it is again - an inch short of the ceiling :)

Meanwhile, further east...

The grass-and-daisy-and-fruit borders...

...in concept design in February...

...in April when the fruit fence was first installed and fitted with apples...

You can hardly see the grasses hiding behind the osteospermum in the foreground












In June with the everything starting to grow on...



...but then I was away rather a lot so there are no pics of it with osteospermums, anthemis, zinnias etc flowering away like billy-oh until...

...Late October when we were well into Michaelmas daisy season.  The largest grasses are the splendid miscanthus sinensis Malepartus (far end of near bed) and stipa gigantea (closer to house).  Miscanthus nepalensis is the one to the left of the daisy with weeping flowerheads - said to be less hardy but spectacularly elegant in huge clumps down at Hilliers so we're giving them a go.  They've certainly suffered in the very sharp frosts in November - we'll see if they make it through.
And yes, the wiggly wires WILL be replaced during the winter.

Interlude

You know they used to have 'Interludes' on the telly, like that film of someone turning something on a potter's wheel.  This post is that sort of thing - nothing to do with the build or the garden, but very pleasing (to me at least!) none-the-less.

It's about cheese. 

There, I told you it would be good.

Nearly a year ago, John and Paula gave us a cheese-making kit which we've been so busy we haven't got round to doing anything with.  Until yesterday!



Here is the inaugural cheese batch on the brew:

And here it is once the curds have formed and the first run of whey drained off...










And now - after some time under pressure to form the cheese properly - Ta Da!!! - here is some cheese!!

I thank you.

The tasting panel convenes tomorrow when Nikki and Brian arrive :)

The winter garden

This is a  bit of a sneaky reprise of two of the pics from the previous post, but here we go:

Before












During












After.  Sorry there has been no sunshine this weekend to take the pic 😒

But we think it looks rather good - and it looks as if the Neigh-bours approve....  All the crocus which were saved/lifted when we stripped the turf are in pots pending replacement once I've dealt with the worst of the dandelions / couch regrowing, there are snakesheads somewhere in there and there are also daffs on order which will go in as soon as they arrive.  The plan is to bark-chip the area, but that requires our village tree-surgeon to have another load of surplus chippings...

Turf wars and odd horses

When we had to take cost out of the house build, one of the things that went was the underground water collection tank.  We made do with a blagged old split IBC container which I sprayed black to reduce algae formation, but there was always a plan to do something better.  So we borrowed Carol's horsebox to take delivery of these rather odd looking horses...




...which as you can see are now stabled on the north end of the stable block.  We get 2000l of rainwater storage for about £100 rather than several £K.  Of course, this guaranteed that once Alan completed the installation, it didn't rain for several months - so we were back to topping up the pond with tapwater which is far from ideal.

And now for the copse in the top rear corner of the garden - the long-term plan was for there to be autumn and winter colour - euonymus, cornus, daffs -  planted under the birch trees. We tried long grass this summer and it didn't really look good, so it was time for the turf war...






...and now there is room to underplant the aforementioned.  Whilst stripping the turf, we had to watch out for the crocuses and snakeshead fritillaries that were naturalised under the trees - I have dug up and potted several pots of crocus pending the rest of the replanting but hopefully the snakesheads are all a bit further down and have survived the turfstripping unmolested.


Stand by for the next thrilling instalment where we'll catch up with how the new grass-daisy-and-fruit beds got on through the summer.

Update

It's now late October and the last post was in April, which is an indication of what a busy summer it's been.  However, we've been living in Cumulus for nearly three years now, so it's not really a build diary any more.  I know we have a number of eager readers who are watching the garden grow, so as soon as I have a moment I'll catch up with some pics of how it's all going. Watch this space...