Wintry May

The view over my garden

Well, I think Spring lasted for about a fortnight before we were plunged back into wintry weather!

I planted my potatoes on Good Friday (the traditional day for planting spuds) and they cautiously peeped their heads above the parapet a few weeks later, only to have their leaves burned by a ferociously cold wind. They will grow through it OK, but it stopped them in their tracks for a bit. Many of my gardening clients had plants that were burned by that same wind, hydrangeas seem to have come off worst from the encounter, with some very sick specimens around at the moment – hopefully they will all recover.

At the moment I have no idea what to wear when I set out of a morning to go gardening – I usually start off in three or four layers and gradually shed them if the day warms up. If the weather deteriorates, I have shower-proof trousers and jacket in the car, plus full waterproofs if necessary and several hats! At least I’m prepared for whatever our crazy climate throws at me, although some warm, dry weather would be nice, preferably with a soft breeze blowing to keep the temperature just right – I am heartily sick of working in gale-force winds, as it tires me out and makes me very irritable. Someone once told me that the reason that I hate the wind is because I am a Fire Sign and it extinguishes my flame!

I’m afraid that I have not been ‘up close and personal’ with Nature recently, so cannot give you a full update on what is about at the moment, although the Hawthorn is all in bloom and the beautiful Queen Anne’s Lace and Campion are filling the hedge bottoms. There are still splashes of bluebells and also the pretty lilac-coloured Lady’s Smock or Cuckoo Flower, on the roadsides round here and in the woods the Wild Garlic reigns supreme. I am eagerly awaiting the blooming of the Elders as I have run out of Elderflower Cordial and need to replenish my stocks for the year ahead.

My new home

The main reason that I have not been out and about as much during this last month (apart from the inclement weather!) is that on 7^th May I got the keys to my new home and have been busy trying to get it sorted before I move in. I have not lived in my own space for eleven years – the first five were spent ‘on the road’ WWOOFing and the last six I have been renting my friend’s annexe. The house is a two bedroomed, ex-Local Authority house built in the 1950s and not at all what I had expected to buy when I first started looking several years ago, but the West Country has become a rather popular destination for city dwellers looking to escape and the prices have risen quite a lot in the last year. Having said that, the house is very light with a sitting room and dining room linked by an archway and the most glorious views towards the Mendips – in fact it’s pretty much the reverse of the view that I used to have from my cottage in Draycott which, with a powerful set of binoculars I could probably see from my dining room window! More to the point I will finally have my own garden again, although it is more like a jungle at the moment, and will take a lot of hard work to get under control.

Jeni stripping wallpaper

Since the beginning of May I have spent most of my free time, between gardening jobs, to-ing and fro-ing between Pylle and Glastonbury, getting the decorating underway and trying to sort out the order in which the messier jobs need to be tackled. Upstairs only really needs a painting job done on the bedrooms and bathroom with the odd bit of wall-drilling to reposition the wonky curtain rails, but downstairs needs a bit more done. I had hoped to have the Artexed ceilings in the sitting and dining room skimmed to create flat ceilings but the plasterer that came to look at the job was rather pessimistic about the strength of the plasterboard fixings to hold up an extra weight of plaster and obviously didn’t really want to do the job. On reflection I decided that I would save myself the £600+ and learn to live with them! The next messy job was opening up the blocked-in fireplaces to enable me to have a multi-fuel stove installed. Having removed the ghastly mock-vintage wallpaper from the chimney breast and removed the piece of board covering up the hole where a fireplace should be, I was presented with a much smaller orifice than I was expecting as the original fireplace had been reduced in size by the insertion of some rubble and copious amounts of concrete. I knocked a bit of it out with the aid of a bolster and lump hammer but then lost my nerve – it wouldn’t be the best way to introduce yourself to the next-door neighbour would it, through the back of his fireplace!! I now await the arrival of the stove guy who is coming to view the job on Wednesday afternoon and will, no doubt, tell me how much more brickwork I need to remove.

The sitting room fireplace

I’m not going to install a fire in the dining room, as the two rooms are linked, but may leave the aperture as a feature. There were two pieces of plasterboard hiding this fireplace and its adjoining alcove, but they had been badly put up in that there was at least a half inch gap between the plasterboard and the ceiling and another gap all down the length from floor to ceiling, so they had to come off. However, they had been stuck to the existing plasterwork with ridiculous amounts of glue, so have taken a fair bit of plaster off the chimney breast as well – another job for me to try and fix.

Dining room wall before...

... and after!

The only other really messy job that needs sorting before I move in, is the removal of a strange feature wall constructed (very badly!) as a fill-in in the triangular space formed by the staircase. Whoever put it there obviously felt inspired by the large ammonite that they had acquired, but it is so awful that it is not a thing of beauty and needs to go! I can’t decide whether to hire a skip or build a rockery!

The 'feature wall'!

I had hoped to have done all of these jobs before any furniture was moved in, but the timing did not quite work out, as I was offered a 3-seater sofa and an armchair that had to be removed by the end of May so, last Saturday, Jeni and I met up with her friend Aaron and his long-wheelbase Transit van to collect the furniture and a double divan bed. The bed was destined for Jeni’s house in Shepton Mallet so we drove there first, in an absolute cloudburst, unloaded the bed, loaded her old bed, which I am having in my spare bedroom, and set off for Glastonbury. Everything was going well (apart from the appalling weather) until we came to take the sofa in through the front door – it wouldn’t fit! The sofa is seven foot long and the porch ceiling is about six foot eight inches high, and you have to turn through 90 degrees to get through the internal front door into the sitting room. We put the sofa back in the van while we thought about the problem.

At this point I should mention that there is no rear access to my property. What had obviously once been a free-standing storeroom with a passageway running from front to back between it and the house, has been converted into an attached,  flat-roofed single-storey extension housing the kitchen. We thought we could probably get the sofa through the back door, into the kitchen and then into the dining/sitting room but how to get it there? The only answer was across the flat roof! Aaron and Jeni got the sofa so that it was balanced on the edge of the roof and then Aaron climbed up my step ladder and heaved himself onto the roof where he proceeded to push the sofa across the roof whilst Jeni and I took the stepladder round to the other side and repeated the manoeuvre in reverse. Unfortunately, I was so busy doing this that I didn’t get the chance to take a photo! I don’t think that sofa is going anywhere for a long time and when it does, it will be in manageable pieces! I will be carefully measuring any other furniture before taking it to the new house to make sure that it fits through the front door.

Today (Friday, 21^st May) I have driven across the Mendips to do a weekend farmsit for my friends at Dundry. It is the first farmsit that I have done since September, so I hope it all goes well. The weather always seems to be blustery when I head for this exposed hillside just outside Bristol, but today was worse than usual with high winds and lashing rain! I felt a little nervous as I drove along under the dead and dying ash trees! Before the leaves came out on the trees, it was easy to kid yourself that ash dieback was not really such a big problem, but now the devastation is blindingly obvious and tragic in its enormity. Last year you could see that some of the trees didn’t look very healthy but now they are dead, bare branches clawing the sky in their death throes, and it seems to have happened so fast. All the ash trees, whatever their age and size, have been affected and there are stands of trees with not a leaf on at all and many more with tiny, wispy leaves at branch ends. The look of our countryside, particularly on Mendip, is going to be dramatically changed as these ubiquitous giants are gradually felled, leaving huge gaps in hedgerows and shadeless fields. I am going to nurture my tiny ash sapling that I brought back from Shropshire, where I pulled up hundreds in the years that I WWOOFed there, in the hope that it will prove to be immune – I feel it’s the least I can do!

A sunny corner for breakfast