The Dead Pool comes to life

It's been exactly a year since I wrote my sad tale about the frogs we were "losing" in our pond, which I'd started referring to as the Dead Pool.

Since then the rate of loss has decreased, but the reason for the deaths has become graphically clear. It's a bit of a give-away when you look out of your study window to see the heron stood atop the lych-gate with a pair of frog's legs sticking out of its beak.

It was too late for that one, but I did rush out flapping my arms and yelling when I saw the damn bird hoik another out of the pond. This second frog was luckier, as the heron dropped it and flew off in a fright. The dazed frog managed to hop away into the bushes so I like to think it survived. At least for the time being.

The really good news is that the pond is presently full of tadpoles. Not as full as it was - when they first hatched it looked as though there were thousands; the water was black with them. Well, OK, it always looks black, what with having a black pond liner at the bottom, but you know what I mean. But fuller than it might have been had Nikki not come running in to fetch me after one of the local cats had pulled a massive blob of spawn out of the water and was proceeding to munch through it.  I tipped it back in. I don't think we lost much.

Having thousands (OK, hundreds) of tadpoles wriggling about in the pond has been a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand we love having them, and waiting for all the little froglets to come hopping out. On the other hand we don't really like having the pond totally submerged under a carpet of pondweed, but we haven't been able to do anything about it because each handful of pondweed removed comes complete with half-a-dozen little wrigglers, all caught up in the tendrils. So we've left it, mostly. Not sure if the lack of light is slowing their development though. Online resources suggest they should start growing legs 6-9 weeks after hatching. This lot hatched at the beginning of May and are only now starting to show signs of legginess. We continue to wait for the first hopper.

At which point I probably won't be able to cut the grass for a couple of weeks O_O.

Croaking Frogs

One of the features of our new garden that surprised me when we first saw the design on paper was the pond.

I don't remember explicitly asking our designer to include one, yet once I saw it on the plan I quite liked the idea. We had a pond here when we moved in, but it was a sad little effort. Hidden under the large acer planted in the border between us and our semi-detached neighbour, it had clearly suffered some damage to its liner as it never filled up beyond half-way and the half that did fill was always choked with weed. Notable mainly for its brief occupation by a drunken party guest on the evening of our housewarming, the pond nevertheless proved to be home to a small population of frogs. When we dug it out and filled in the hole in April 2009 the frogs disappeared, only to reappear again one by one whenever we moved a large rock, wooden sleeper, or pile of twigs anywhere in the garden.

So I had great hopes that once garden construction was complete and the pond had become established it would attract back some of our original colony. As we moved into Spring and the water lost its winter chill this did indeed prove to be the case. We caught the occasional glimpse of a pair of eyes gazing at us from just above the still surface, and while watering the garden early one morning during the recent hot spell I disturbed four adult frogs with the hose as they slept in the damp patches under the leafier shrubs and bushes. It appeared we had succeeded not only in attracting back the originals but adding to the numbers. Until things took a turn for the worse.

We began to find bodies. One or two only at first - a dried-up husk on the path and a pale, mottled corpse lying on its back in the shallows near the pond edge - but having disposed of these they were soon replaced by others. The area is occasionally visited by a heron, so initially we wondered if this had been attacking the frogs. Or maybe one of the many local cats was to blame? But in all cases the frogs appear not to have been injured and in the majority of cases they die in the pond itself, their ghostly pale bodies often floating upright with their back legs resting on the bottom so they appear to be standing up under the water. One awful weekend morning I fetched four bodies out of the water.

These aren't pets, of course, but I must admit to feeling sad at their demise, along with a nagging feeling of guilt in case we're somehow responsible for the deaths. It's nice to have somewhere for the frogs to live, but I didn't expect or want it to become a death trap. I've started mentally referring to it as the Dead Pool.

The sides of the pond are fairly steep, and the exposed liner is slippery when wet. Added to this the recent hot spell meant water levels became quite low, so it occurred to me that the frogs may not be able to get out once they'd jumped in. Is it possible for frogs to drown? Amphibians breathe, at least in part, through their skin, so I guessed that if they were trapped in water that had a low oxygen concentration (which our pond almost certainly has, with no submerged oxygenating plants or other means of replenishing the levels) it could be possible they were effectively asphyxiating. As you will have noticed from the photo, I've added a rudimentary "frog ladder" to the pond to help them get out. They're still dying.

Brief research online suggests the problem may be a slow-release fertiliser in the baskets of the pond plants that is toxic to frogs. I don't remember seeing any dead frogs before the plants were installed, so this is a possible cause, but there again the plants arrived fairly early in the year, so I don't remember seeing any live ones before then either.

My research also pointed up that, since amphibians absorb much more than oxygen through their delicate skins, they are a kind of "environmental indicator" species that will be affected by any chemical pollution. So maybe it's that. Discussions with neighbours who also have a pond have revealed they too are suffering from frogs that croak in the less traditional sense. I don't take much comfort from the knowledge that we're not the only ones this is happening to.

The Great Outdoors

After the transformation of our back garden at the end of last year from tattered wilderness to outdoor designer living space, we've watched with eager anticipation as the lengthening days have worked their magic on the dormant twigs and anonymous clumps of leaves that were planted last November. By yesterday, when we gave our new barbecue and patio furniture their first trial run, it was looking like this:

Neither of us is, by any stretch of the imagination, a plant expert, but even so there are some instantly recognisable and welcome plants in the borders. Two varieties of poppy (I love poppies) - one a deep orange with single flowers; the other redder with frilly edges to the blooms. By request we have several rhododendrons, yet to come into their full glory, a couple of clematis beginning their long climb up a pair of obelisks (out of picture to the left in the shot above) and two roses - a pink bush beside the bird feeder and this one:

which will eventually trail over the lych gate at the bottom of the garden. These were joined last week by a new specimen whose buds are currently holding on tightly to the secret of their colour. It's planted on the right of the arbour seat (behind the camera in the first shot above but visible in the pond shot below) and will eventually frame the whole structure with colour.

Since the main garden work was completed too late to plant up the pond, it remained barren until last week when another truck load of plants arrived for the front garden. At long last the frogs who have taken up residence in the intervening months will have somewhere to hide from the marauding heron who occasionally visits to check whether the pond has developed any fish.

At present these new plants are still on the sparse side, but it won't be long before they've filled out a bit. We've started with three or four dwarf rushes and two small lilies and we'll see how we get on with those before adding more. I always think a pond should have some water visible as well as the plants.

As for the rest of the garden, well much of it is still a mystery since apart from a few requests, we gave the designer and the landscaper free rein. We're hoping to recognise more favourites as the year wears on and other things come into bloom.

On the other side of the house, the front garden has been a work in progress for much of this year, since we had an early hiccup with the design. But now it's almost complete, bar the pyramid capstones on the new front gate pillars. Planting was only completed on Friday so everything is still looking very new, young, and unestablished, but this photo gives a hint of what it will be like.

It's North facing, so we were limited with plant selection. Our designer recommended a "green and cream" theme, both because cream and white flowers will lift the gloom of the almost sunless garden, and also because they're the ones that do best in positions with low sun. We did insist on a ceanothus though, having seen a fabulous specimen on a recent trip to Oxford, and we've positioned it where it catches what bit of sun the front garden gets, but where we can still see it from the house.

Finishing off at the back

Last time anyone on here saw a photo of our imminent new deck, it looked like the last photo in this post, which was the position after three days' work. Unbelievably, the next ten working days saw the whole job finished, including laying circular patios (two of them) and linking path, fitting a pond, casting a base for a greenhouse, (re)building the entire garden wall at the back, erecting about 50 metres of new fence, lining the old fence to match the new wood, installing a water feature, cabling everything up including various lights, laying a lawn, building two new gates, an arbour seat and two sets of pyramid-shaped trellis, and planting.

At the end of which, the new deck looks like this:
In the almost two months since it was built, I think it's been dry for something like five hours. I'm hopeful that we have chance to enjoy it once or twice this year, but at present it's covered in frost.

You should just be able to make out in that picture the clever planters that the garden designer included on the left and right borders. On the "attached" side, the planter is also backed up with a 5-foot screen so that we get some privacy on the deck. On the other side, the planter forms the edge of the deck, next to the path.

I'll save more photos for now, while the planting gets established and the year gets a little older.

Changes to the Landscape

It's been a long time coming. Procrastination before approaching a landscaping company, changes to the design, holiday absences for everyone concerned (us, the designer, the landscaper) none of which were coordinated, and enforced delays on account of the bad weather, but finally, today, work started on what will be a radical change to our back garden.

It began like this:

At the beginning of October there were still leaves on the trees and the grass, in anticipation of being ripped up any time soon, hadn't been cut for several weeks. The old ratty hydrangea was still gamely hanging on to some fading blooms, but the camellia bush and most of the crocosmia had already been collected by a grateful neighbour.

The conservatory was long gone, having been demolished by the crew who fitted our bifold doors back in June, leaving behind a rather odd fragment of deck that was soon to meet its maker. Well, our neighbour actually, who requested it so that she can make planters out of it.

The site where the old garage stood has been a dumping ground ever since it was taken down in June 2009. It had also become extremely overgrown with brambles, some as thick as my wrist (I kid you not) which wove in and out of the flowering currant and around the bits of old skirting board and whatnot that littered the area. You can also see the rotting remains of the garden benches created from railway sleepers by the previous owners.

So, 8am last Wednesday morning dawned (just) and within three-and-a-half hours a team of three guys had chain-sawed everything flat, cleared the site, taken down the back wall and were making a start with the side wall:

A couple of dozen lengths of tannelised decking framework rested on a pair of trestles and all in all the site was unrecognisable from what it had been the day before. I was already well impressed with progress, but the following day things reached a whole new level with the arrival of a little yellow digger :0)

With the aid of this and the dumpy little turf cutter (just visible at the bottom of the photograph), the entire bottom half of the garden was stripped down to mud and all remaining tree stumps and large bushes removed. The digger then created trenches for the footings of the replacement walls and path. They also dug out the pond, being careful to save all of the rich loam that covered the whole site to a depth of... oooh... at least half an inch.

On Friday, the team changed slightly and split into sub-teams. Joined by a deck construction expert, two of them set to work creating the foundation framework for our new curved deck, while the third concentrated on building walls. By the end of the week the new deck was already taking shape with the framework in place for the apron and one of the steps emerging from the front.

Bee hive yourself

Amazing what you can learn while ripping up privet. Yesterday, on my return from carrying a chunky stump to the discard pile, I found a bumble bee sitting quietly on the soil beside a bumble-bee-sized hole.

She looked pretty dopey. I thought how lucky she had been to avoid being squashed while I was yanking the privet stump back and forth to dislodge its roots, but until then I hadn't realised that bumble bees hibernate (a fact later confirmed by our resident Keeper of the Zoological Knowledge - aka Nat).

Their post-hibernation warm-up routine was fascinating to watch too. A few minutes of abdominal exercises (a slight pumping action visible) followed by a couple of tentative - and very short - hovers, only a few millimetres above the ground, to warm up the flying muscles. And then a lazy figure-of-eight flight, gradually increasing in both height and area as the long-unused wings remember their skill and strength, until eventually sufficient altitude was gained to make it over the low wall (see photo on previous blog entry) and cross the lane to the conifer hedge on the other side which at that time of day was in full sun.

The bee sat on that hedge for well over half an hour, soaking up the rays. Clearly a much easier way of warming up than all that tiring flying, especially when you're running on the food reserves that have brought you successfully through a few months hibernation.

Nature in the raw - in our front garden! Brilliant.

Getting preprandial with privet

The brilliant forecast for this weekend turned into a gorgeous reality, and after months of being cooped up in the house and the almost endless decorating it was good to be outside, making a start with the traditional first gardening jobs of Spring.

But our small lawn takes less than 15 minute to mow, so it wasn't long before I was casting around for something else to do.

The remnants of next door's raspberry canes were starting to make themselves known again around the roots of our copper beech hedge, in various parts of the border, and popping up in the middle of the lawn, so I spent an hour or so trying to tease their roots out from around all the other roots. I managed accidentally to bring up a chunk of the lupin that had become totally enveloped by raspberry tendrils, but 80% of the lupin remained, so not too much damage done.

I was in the mood for a larger challenge than this though. Like digging up the privet in the front garden. I'd cut this back in late summer last year as it was up to about 15 feet, and starving all the trees of light. Cutting them back revealed the size of the main stumps. Comparing them to the trunks that I'd helped my Dad pull out of the front garden in Nottingham 30 years ago, I reckon that hedge must have been there as long as the house. But, you know, privet? It's a bit 1950s isn't it? So we wanted rid.

I didn't feel like breaking my back on the privet trunks back then, but I was up for the task now. It's funny how those jobs that you dread tackling, and put off for the longest time, usually turn out to be nowhere near as bad as you expect. The first three stumps were so shallowly rooted that all I had to do was grab them and pull, and they came up in my hand. Admittedly it began to get tougher after that. The further away the privet stretched towards the road, the deeper the soil in the bed, and consequently the deeper the roots. Some of them even headed off under the wall, requiring the application of a bow saw.

Even so the whole job took a lot less time than I'd expected, and left behind quite a wide bed, filled with lovely rich loam, that I'll be able to fill with some nice dwarf rhododendrons once I've dug in a few bags of peat.

Peachy

The Red Pearl cocktail from our recent Celebrity Night proved very popular with the family so I deployed the cocktail shaker again on Saturday night to use up the left over ingredients - peach vodka (not the "proper" kind according to the recipe but a good compromise as it turned out I couldn't find any red pomegranate vodka over here), peach liqueur, cranberry juice and pineapple juice, topped with a splash of champagne.

The result was slightly heavy on the champagne (we had an entire bottle left over) but still very tasty.

Even better, we took a break from gardening on Sunday afternoon to enjoy a glass of peach-flavoured iced tea that Nikki had knocked up with the short measure of peach liqueur left over from cocktail making. This was only a small glimpse of the life we'd *like* to lead in the garden - one of total indolence and relaxation - which is still some years of undergrowth-hacking, deck-building, and shrub-planting in the future!

Just a quick job

In an attempt to beat the rain which had been forecast for 10am, I went out early today to cut the lawn. While I was out there I thought I'd finish trimming the edge of the grass. There was still a big "peninsula" of grass sticking out into the border where the pond had been, and in her marvellously non-nagging way, Nikki's been gently suggesting I get rid of it for the past few weekends.

An hour and a half later, sweating profusely and with my breath coming in huge panting gulps, I came in for breakfast having finally succeeded in removing that patch of grass, which couldn't have covered more than a couple of square feet.

Only it wasn't just grass, was it? It was full of bloody bamboo roots left behind from the patch beside the pond. Snaking their way inexorably along the edge of the grass, held in check only by the lethally sharp pieces of slate tile with which the previous owner had edged his lawn, and occasionally breaking through the slate and heading off across the grass for a new life on the other side of the lawn.

One patch of roots was easily as thick as my arm. A tangled mass of eight individual rhizomes travelling together for a foot or more and then taking off in different directions. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever be rid of this stuff!

Special offer

If you've been reading regularly you may have picked up on the fact that we've paid a few visits recently to our not-so-local garden centre, principally to buy an incinerator and a bird feeder.

Whoever is in charge of marketing at this place - or at least, whoever came up with the "membership" scheme - is a genius. For a tenner a year gardeners can become "friends of the garden centre" which guarantees them 10% off all purchases, year round, two free coffees in the restaurant per month (you get one of those Café-Ritazza-esque stamp cards for this) and "privileged" access to a few events throughout the year, such as the summer special, where the discount is raised to 15%, and the Christmas event where, presumably on account of there being not much doing gardenwise, the discount reaches an eye-watering 20%.

Now even for a tightwad like me, the prospect of a couple of free coffees isn't going to provide sufficient incentive to make the 20-minute car journey to the other side of town, but it does sit there on your shoulder, whispering in your ear like the cartoon devil from Tom & Jerry. "If we're going to the garden centre we may as well stop for coffee," can easily turn, as it did on our last visit to "we could have breakfast there."

Which is where the marketing genius comes in. Because when "two free coffees" turns into "breakfast for three" the restaurant finds themselves almost twenty quid better off, and I'm left thinking something's not quite right. As I mentioned in the incinerator post, £5.25 for a bacon bap is taking the piss somewhat. Free coffee my arse.

So after that experience, why were we fooled into trekking over there tonight for their "Summer Special" event? 15% discount and the offer of a free drink and some nibbles aside, there was in fact nothing we needed for the garden. So why go to a garden centre? But we did. Exhibiting astonishingly lemming-like behaviour we drove over there after dinner, arriving 30 minutes after the posted start time of 6 o'clock. There, by the door, a low table was adorned with half-a-dozen plastic wine glasses, stacked near the front with their few remaining drops of wine clinging to their immaculately smooth surfaces, and a plate containing a few crumbs along with three pieces of french bread spread with sweet chilli hummus (or something).

They really pushed the boat out, huh? Oh... yeah... the counter held a few pots of olives too, along with a cocktail stick dispenser.

We wandered around the indoor part for a few minutes, marvelling at how similar it all looked to the last time we were there, picked up a couple of pieces of french bread spread with paté (the first plate had been replaced, but the wine hadn't) and... umm... left.

For the first of the July Wednesdays (*) we agreed it had been a total waste of time. But from a garden centre profit perspective? Genius.

(*) In a rare explosion of sociability, all my Wednesdays are occupied for the rest of July. Next week I've been invited to the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award ceremony at the BBC, the week after drinks and a curry in celebration of an ex-colleague's forthcoming wedding, followed by a week where our normal recording session has been brought forward a day on account of a diary clash, and the last Wednesday of the month is, as always, book club. Never mind "nearly famous" - I'm almost popular!

Choked

Had hoped to finish the burning today in between showers. Unfortunately I ran into the same problem as last week - the incinerator became choked. The embers just weren't burning down fast enough to make space for any more fuel - only this time I'd only been going a couple of hours.

Maybe chopping the boards into four pieces instead of three wasn't such a good idea? Or maybe the wood was still damp from the rain. Whatever the reason I was left with about another hour or two's burning to do so I guess I'll be back out there tomorrow.

Found a load more bricks too, buried around the site. No idea what I'll do with 'em, but the stock now numbers around a hundred so there's easily enough to repair the wall and probably build a couple of gate pillars to close off what was the entrance to the garage.

The next conundrum is what to do with the four rusting poles that were lying under the floor. Look like they were once part of a garden swing. Now they're so flaky that every time I move them they shower me with rust. I won't be able to get them to the tip without wrapping them in something (or making a helluva mess inside the car!). Perhaps I should just bury them and let the rusting process continue!

Burn, baby, burn

It was too wet to continue the incineration of our erstwhile garage floor yesterday, but I made an early start this morning. Well, early for a Sunday. I had the fire going by 9.30. Took a while to get going - it required a great deal of wafting - but after a lifetime of barbecuing I'm an expert wafter, and pretty soon the fire was crackling and spitting nicely.

The remains of fire #1 had charred their way down to a two-inch layer of reddish brown ash inside the incinerator, so having thought I'd need to tip out a whole pile of ash in the end all I had to do was shake the bin around a bit until about half of it had fallen through.

What's left of the floor consists mainly of larger boards - some of them eight or ten feet long - which all need cutting down before burning. On the positive side, this makes them easier to fit inside the bin, reduces the number of dropouts and general sped the process up quite a bit. In between loading the fire and sawing more planks, I continued retrieving bricks from the sub-floor space and began deconstructing the footings which had been left behind by the demolition crew. It didn't take me long to discover that each wall had been supported by a double line of bricks, so I started a second brick stack with a slightly larger footprint than the first. By the end of today's burning session this new stack was 12 courses high, each course having 8 bricks. At this rate I'll be able to build another garden wall.

I had to call a halt to proceedings after a little over four hours. The glowing embers in the bin had reached handle level and made it almost impossible to add more wood without it falling out, or risking tipping the incinerator over. I let it burn down to the point where the chimney-lid would fit back on, and left it to do its thing. I reckon there's another day's burning left in the stack so I'll be sending off my request for good weather next weekend!

We're baffled

As I mentioned yesterday, on our trip to the garden centre we had intended to buy a fat snax holder. These little balls of goodness come in their own nylon mesh bags, but with a warning that small birds' claws can become trapped. They shouldn't really be hung up in these bags, but rather in a specially-designed holder. Perhaps more frustrating for us was the constant attention of the squirrels, who found the bags altogether too easy to lift off their hooks. The sight of several fat snax balls being dragged away across the lawn had made up our minds that we needed to protect them behind a strong wire cage.

Imagine our delight then, while perusing the various fat snax holders on offer, along with other garden-bird-feeding equipment, to discover the existence of a specially-designed Squirrel Baffle. For only a fiver, this clear plastic dome is attached to the feeding station pole, preventing Tufty from ascending to the banquet above. A bargain! They've already cost us more than that in stolen fat snax!

The baffle, even easier to assemble than the incinerator, was in place in minutes, and so far today each of us - Nikki, Natalie and myself - has witnessed its efficacy in foiling Tufty's attempts at purloining our avian comestibles.

The squirrels still climb the pole. They can see the food, hanging temptingly, through the baffle. On reaching the underneath of the baffle they adopt a confused look, glance right and left hoping to find a way through, or past, or over. Finding none they slide dejectedly back down the pole and slink off across the garden in search of alternative aliment. Result!

Incinerate!

With several things on our garden-related shopping list today and Mr Weatherman promising heavy rain later, we made an early start and took breakfast at the garden centre this morning. The bacon baps and toasted teacakes were excellent, so this may become a semi-regular thing (constrained only by the slight ache in the wallet caused by paying £5.25 for a bacon bap).

No visit to Woodford is complete without a full tour of the grounds, so along with the planned purchases of an incinerator, a fat snax holder for the bird feeder, and some rooting compound, we ended up with a trolley full of goodies including this rather attractive dianthus which now graces the deck, and a compact patio clematis (down there on the right) whose colour might have been especially bred to match the tub vacated by our dogwood, which we planted out in the border the weekend before last.

I left all the planting and arranging to Nikki. My attention was focused on man things. Assembling the incinerator (a rather grand title for the simple task of screwing its three feet on) and getting started with the burning.

I've had a lifelong fascination with fire, almost to the point of pyromania. It explains the large, strangely shaped scar on my right hand, and manifested itself when I was a child in hours spent in the woods collecting fallen branches, building bonfires and watching them burn. And then returning to the embers the following Saturday to rake them back into life and begin the whole process over again.

Using a garden incinerator isn't quite as satisfying as that - having to wait until the wood has burned down before adding more slows the whole process down too much - but it comes a close second. In the end the promised rain didn't arrive and I was able to keep the fire going from noon until late afternoon, reducing the stack of oily floorboards by about a third and seeing off the various lengths of pruned tree completely.

In the intervals between loading wood into the bin, and picking up the odd smoking remnant that fell out, I busied myself collecting bricks from the site and stacking them by the wall, along with sorting the multitude of detritus that litters the area into piles of keepers and chuckers.

After four hours the air holes in our shiny new incinerator were totally blocked with ash, which had built up to more than half fill the bin. This slowed down the rate of burn considerably. It wasn't shiny any more either. The galvanising, or whatever had given it that shiny appearance, had all burned off within the first five minutes. I waited until the fuel level dropped below the rim, slotted the chimneyed lid into place, and left the rest of the burning for another day.

Floor found to be fire fodder

Weather forecast was good for today; not so good for tomorrow, so I was determined to make a start on lifting the garage floor.

Expecting at least some of it to be salvageable, I spent the first hour or so moving our collection of dried logs and tree stumps (which would be ideal for log fires, if we ever lit one in the dining room any more) from the shed to the wood store. Funny how a pile of wood looks fairly small until you try to move it. I adopted my usual mental approach to tasks of this kind: "each piece moved is one piece less to move" and sure enough when I surfaced from that self-imposed mental idle, the job was done and the shed looked considerably more capacious.

Nikki retrieved my crowbar and hammer from the study, and I set to lifting the boards, starting at the door end and working towards the house.

It soon became clear that not a single piece of floor could be rescued. Those two planks that had looked so promising were both too thin to support a man's weight (well, THIS man anyway) and too rotten underneath to be used for anything else. Indeed all the boards, including the ones that looked OK from above, hid a total mess underneath. Whether they'd been chewed up by the hundreds of woodlice living in the sub-floor space, or rotted with the damp, or been turned into dust by woodworm and mould, they were all only good for one thing: burning.

The main reason? None of the floor had been protected from damp. I don't know who built that garage, or when, but they had a pretty strange idea of construction technique. The boards were carried on joists that rested on... earth. Yep, directly on the soil. In many cases these joists had rotted away to nothing - as you can see from the photo. When I tried to pick them up, they would fall apart leaving a trail of dust in the soil. Or they'd split in half, leaving the rotten half behind and me holding the chewed-up top half of damp, spongy timber.

These central joists had transferred their moisture to the floorboards, which were also in various stages of rot. Only at the edges, where the joists rested on a couple of courses of brick, made level with small pieces of slate, had the wood remained dry, but this had only stopped the rot - not the ravages of worm, beetle, and louse.

The patched section, as predicted, had suffered years of oil damage and had in fact given way, the boards beneath split and crumbled. Putting a positive spin on all this - at least the job went quickly. Only the first five or six boards had been nailed down, the rest simply laid loosely on their joists. With the boards neatly stacked against the wall, and having uncovered a couple of 2x2 flagstones, we're all set to have a cracking good fire so we'll be off to the garden centre tomorrow to buy an incinerator. Those oil-soaked boards should burn a treat!

Flawed floor

We dodged the showers yesterday to take a quick peek at that mysterious garage floor. It's built more like a floor you'd find in a house rather than a garage. Every garage I've ever seen has a huge slab of concrete for a floor, not floorboards.

Most of it, I should say, is made of boards. In one small area - which looks in the right position to have been beneath the old MGC's sump for most of the time - the boards have been reinforced with additional timbers laid perpendicular to the run and screwed into place. Presumably the wood beneath had softened under the influence of countless oil drips. It certainly feels spongy to the tread.

Closer to where the door was, the boards give way to more substantial planking - pieces of timber stretching the whole width of the building but more than an inch thick and a good six inches wide or more. If these are in good condition when I lift them, they can supplant the rather too large and heavy planks which I originally bought for decorating. Even closer to the door the whole mess dissolves into small offcuts, bits of pine and whatnot which would make good kindling should we ever again have a fire in the dining room.

About three-quarters of the way across the floor, one of the boards is loose and gives a hint of What Lies Beneath: eight or so 2x4 joists supporting the boards and which themselves are resting on what looks like a mishmash of brick, concrete, and old tarmac. I don't think I can be entirely certain what it is until I start digging it up. At the moment it's covered in a film of white dust. I'll be ignoring discomfort and my long-time hatred of the damn things, and wearing a mask when I tackle this. There is a chance this dust is years of slough from the cement asbestos walls and I don't fancy keeling over with mesothelioma in twenty years.

This is turning into yet another example of how one job leads to another. The demolition was just the start!

Garage Sale

Not so much a "sale", to be fair, more a giveaway.

Looking more like a Second World War Nissen hut, our "garage" has blighted the bottom of our garden since before it was our garden. Since the very first day we came to view, and sat at the picnic table enjoying a cup of tea with the previous owners.

I can't remember if we decided then and there it had to go, but if not it wasn't long after. Barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest car (it used to house an MGC GT) and accessible only down a lane that is itself barely wide enough for a car to pass (our neighbour used to drive a Reliant Robin, which was OK, but anything larger? Dicey.) it was a garage in name only as far as we were concerned.

Various options were discussed and discarded over the years. Its cement asbestos construction allegedly meant that extreme care had to be taken in any demolition. Panels were not to be broken, and afterward had supposedly to be wrapped in heavy-duty polythene sheet and taken to the councip tip, which required 24-hours notice. Although not mandatory, it was also recommended to wear protective clothing - a mask at least and preferably a disposable cover-all.

Imagine my surprise then, when our two-man demolition crew arrived in shorts/jeans and t-shirts and proceeded to take the erection apart piece by piece, apparently unconcerned as they broke panels in half and barrowed them out to the road (the lane having proven to be too narrow for their Transit tipper).

I had intended to take "progress" shots on-site, but having witnessed their method from the study window I decided it would be more prudent to remain out of range of the dustclouds surrounding them. Progress, unhampered by protective suits, masks, or the desire not to disturb the integrity of the panels, was impressively rapid. The crew arrived at 9am and within an hour had removed the asbestos sheet, membrane and wooden boards comprising the roof structure, completely exposing the trusses.

Half an hour later the entire roof had disappeared.

After a further half-hour the lane-side wall and door end were down, and the garden side wall can be seen here leaning drunkenly inwards. By noon, the final wall - the gable end nearest the house - had fallen and the garage was, effectively, no more. The men had been on-site less than three hours.

After a quick tea break and the first trip to the tip to dispose of all the timber, they returned to bag up the cement panels and sweep up.

Taken from the same position as the first photo above, this is how the garden looks now. A little less like a 1950's throwback and a little more like the 21st century suburban haven we want it to be. Admittedly the flowering currant stuck apparently haphazardly in the middle of the plot gives it a slightly bizarre aspect, but the plan is to take back-up cuttings from this before trying to transplant the mature tree to a more sensible location.

We have been left with one final interesting task. The disposal of the garage floor.

Not, as for modern constructs, a concrete float, but instead what appears to be a suspended wood floor made up of various gash pieces of timber, off-cuts of floorboard and whatnot, all resting on a low course of bricks. Some of this flooring timber can, I hope, be rescued and used to repair some of the more chewed-up boards inside the house (although they will need sanding and treating). The rest will have to be burned. Probably the first use of the new space, once we've purchased a traditional garden incinerator.

Last day

Last day of May, and the last day of our holiday sadly. We spent another few hours in the garden clearing the border, which is now looking pretty darn good and makes the garden appear much wider. There's a couple of metres of clearance still to do - probably another day's work - at which point the whole of the left-hand side will be done.

Since this represents our entire plan for the garden this year I think it's safe to say we're ahead of schedule and we might start thinking about clearing the bottom border, building a raised bed, or even planting some rhododendrons (all in the plan for Year 2), and the discovery that New Plumber knows someone who can demolish cement asbestos garages, introduced the possibility of bringing that item forward from Year 3!

Still not quite Capability Brown standard but for two non-gardeners we've surprised ourselves with how much fun it's been.

With the hottest part of the day approaching we decamped to our nice cool lounge to watch the last five episodes of The Wire (Season 2). Even better than the first, and it's now easy to see why this is such a cult programme. Season 3 starts on BBC Two on June 15 and we can't wait.

A-hedging we will go

Rain was forecast for lunchtime today, but we figured if we pulled out our collective fingers we'd be able to at least plant *some* of our nice new copper beech hedge plants - which arrived on Wednesday - before the shower started, and having achieved something in the garden I'd feel less guilty about taking time out to see the new Star Trek movie later.

The morning was deceptively sunny as we stepped out immediately after breakfast, and sized up the task. Starting at the furthest cleared point (where the pond used to be) and working back towards the house, the line of the hedge was pretty obvious to start with, demarked as it is by the large acer that sat behind the pond, and an old dead tree stump.

With three bags of well-rotted manure to give the plants a head start, mixed with the soil from the trench, we dug in (haha!) and got on with the task, which went surprisingly smoothly with me digging and planting, and Nikki fetching the trees, taking away the empty pots and making sure I had a ready supply of manure. We reached the acer in record time (trench one) and filled the gap between acer and stump inside the first hour (trench two).

We decided to press on, and strung some string between the tree stump and a random piece of breeze block beside the conservatory to give us the line to hedge to for the latter half of the job. Just as the string was tied and I'd dug trench three, a few spots of rain made their presence felt. Not wanting to leave a newly-dug trench to fill with water, we ignored the rain and carried on planting. A good move as it turned out, because the short shower had stopped by the time we reached the Camelia that marked the end of trench three.

So on we went with trench four - the final frontier - completing the whole job in a little over two hours, which greatly surprised me as I'd expected to have to do it over two days. Feeling very pleased with the end result, which looks for the time being like a thin row of plants but will hopefully grow into a hedge much quicker than the forlorn row of dead sticks that represent my previous experience of beech hedging, we set off for the afternoon showing of Star Trek.

Stop Press: feeding the birds costs a lot more than tuppence a bag

After extensive online research into various hedging options, we decided to make the most of the Bank Holiday weather (supposedly at its best today) and take a tour of various local garden centres and hedge suppliers. Partly to check out the deals and partly to get a look at the hedge plants on offer. The last time I planted any copper beech it was bare root stock, mail order, and they arrived looking like a bunch of dead twigs.

Worse, a year after planting, around 25% of them remained looking like dead twigs. Mainly because they were dead twigs. The rest came slowly to life over a period of several years, but even after five years they still didn't resemble a hedge so much as a line of leafy sticks stretching the length of the garden.

Bugger that. I want it to look like a hedge from the off this time, so we'll be going for plants in pots. 2 litre pots at least.

It proved a productive trip as we discovered a fantastic garden centre in Woodford. Massive, it is, with an extensive range of... well... just about everything you'd imagine a garden centre should carry plus a substantial amount of stuff you wouldn't expect and quite a few things I didn't even know existed.

One of the things Nikki was keen to find was a bird feeder. Partly because she's always wanted one, and partly because Nat wants to study feeding habits of urban birds. As you'll no doubt realise in view of my comments above, this place had a fair selection of bird feeding equipment. About 500 square feet of it to be precise. We ummed and ahhed about exactly what we wanted, but as I always tend to the more esoteric and expensive end of the market, as soon as I saw a feeder marked "Deluxe" I knew that was the one for me. And then we needed the clever little pots to hang off it. And the grub to stuff the pots with. By the time we added it all up we'd spent about ninety quid. Looks nice though, dunnit? Nobody needs to mention the fact that it's crooked. I'd spotted that, thanks. After I'd assembled everything.

These things are supposed to be moved every two months, so I'll straighten it up then, OK?