Back home

After a rather long trip, I am back home now. Fortunately, traffic wasn't too dense so the voyage was uneventful. We have spend the last two weeks in France with my in laws, and have been lucky enough to spend a couple of days here and then at their country side farm. It is quite remote and I truly love being there and doing the odd jobs that need doing.

Since the current sole inhabitant is in her mid eighties, the last couple of years we have cut back on the size of the garden and live stock. There used to be sheep, rabbits, geese, chickens and even further back one or two milking cows. Currently, there are some geese -- not too much work and the rewards in form of a dozen or so geese eggs per year and the main part of the Christmas dinners.

Apart from cutting down two dead trees in our small forest, most of the weekend was spend hauling sheep manure from one of the outlying pastures and spreading it over the garden. As we do not need the pasture currently one of the local farmers uses it occasionally and put a 'bit' of sheep manure there for our garden about three years ago. We used a bit last year, since it was already nicely rotten then, but this year we made a serious attempt.



This is the state of the pile after we we took about 60 barrow loads to the garden. Fortunately we have a small tractor, so that we didn't have to use real wheelbarrows.



Here is an image of the manure in the garden. We managed to get a 100 barrow loads into the garden, and then had the 'joy' of spreading it evenly around. Although it was -5 °C (25 °F) we had to take of some layers of clothing!


I made quite a few more images and will be posting them over the next couple of days, with the associated explanations and stories.