Mud, mud, glorious mud..…

As you’d probably expect, there’s a lot of mud, thick, claggy clay that sticks to everything when its wet (apart from the pond where its supposed to stick… but that’s another story). And when it’s dry, it creates impenetrable clumps like mini boulders, not great in any garden let alone when you’re starting one from scratch.

I think what surprised me most was the amount of rubbish. There’s an awful lot of rubbish, mountains of it!!

I can’t say my Dad was a hoarder but like many of his generation, he never liked getting rid of things in case they came in handy.

So far, there’s been 12 lorry loads of scrap metal collected, courtesy of John the scrap man and probably the same number of general waste skips.

And then there’s the baths, there must have been 11 or 12 in the end, not including the ones used as water troughs for the cattle, there’s still a few of them around.

Don’t even get me started on the baler twine!! What is it with that stuff? It’s everywhere… Patching up fences, tying up gates. I think it even got used as a belt from time to time. We’re still digging it up by the bucket load and thats going to be ongoing for a long time yet.

But, bit by bit we’re clearing the rubbish, fixing pathways, replacing fences, planting flowers and starting to bring it all back to life.

There’s a lot more laughter around the place these days and not just from “Laughing Jonny”