A clean slate

image from Magnific.com

It's taken a whole lot of the proverbial blood, sweat and tears but we eventually got the old wildlife area cleared.  Well, not "blood" exactly but I did manage to pull muscles I didn't even know I had 😉 I made myself take a break because I didn't want to make things worse ~ it's been like having a "stitch" just under my ribs on the right-hand, and under my shoulder blade on the same side at the back 😖

I suspect what did it was raking the soil over the area to try to make it more level ~ perhaps I was a bit too gung-ho 😏  Anyhoo, we got to this stage in a shorter time than we thought we would which was a nice surprise as we've had a fair few rainy days.  The raked soil disappeared into the hole where the old pond had been but will need some more added from the soil mountain out the back in due course.  What we've put in there needs to be tamped down as it's very soft ~ every time we forget ourselves and step in the area our feet sink in!

The next job on the list is to get the raised bed built ~ or to be more accurate "beds" as to make life a tad easier, it's going to be made in two sections which will then be joined together.  Luckily we had enough wood stored away to build it, just having to buy in some posts for the corners and more screws.  Whilst Adrian is occupied with that I'll clean off the wooden retaining wall and give it a couple more coats of stain, which will be easier to do before we get the bed installed.  The bed is only going to be two boards high, but will eventually be planted up with shrubs relocated from elsewhere in the garden to create a visual barrier from the patio as it's higher than the wildlife area.  I'm also considering fixing some trellis along the back of the new raised beds, but haven't quite made up my mind yet.  As I've said many times before, the joys of living on a hill, eh 😳

Once the raised beds are in place, we will be laying out an L-shaped path running in front of them and continuing down alongside the stone wall.  There's still a helluva lot of manual labour to get done before we reach the stage of building the new wildlife pond area!

And to finish off this post I thought I'd share a photo I took the other day, when I was sitting on the patio bench having a little break ~ it really does show just how out of line the other half of the garden wall is!