Summer Slam Part I

It seems strange to be writing about Summer when there's hailstones smashing off the roof, but here goes. It has been a tremendous season of gardening with amazing one liners flying from all directions: 'C'wor look at this slug! It looks like a dog shit / a burger!' 'Dig in and mong out!' 'I'm sweating like a pre-abattoir pig!' We have been so busy at our various schemes, I have quite let the time escape me and sadly neglected the blog. No mo'.

We have moved an oak tree and possibly killed it. We have laid down a path round the back of the solar dome, which involved car loads of brick transportation on the sly, a lot of swearing and complete whingeing on my part...OU THUNDER!..real time writing at its best here people; we have shaved down a huge part of the privet at the back of the garden, which involved any amount of jousting, eye-sweat-in-the-goggles and python testing. We have laughed at Alan in full woodcutter mode smooshing logs with his log splitter. I tried it and completely failed. Haaaaa.

Tragically one of the apple trees at Rue Albert gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and completely snapped at the base. I had to saw it down then using a panoply of tools hack it into small pieces to be taken away. Two full trugs of apples went into the compost bin after being sliced and diced by my trusty Spear and Jackson spade a.k.a Samson. Let me tell you that compost dalek is kicking off a hell of a stink right now!

Parsley and I made a huge push on our garden thereafter. We trimmed back the dead or decayed branches of the second apple tree - which is much larger and superabundant, although it lists to the right terribly. We completely cut back a part of the elder tree as it was rotting from the base, then had a go at the security hedge (name escapes me), the hawthorn and another branch which came right across from Sam's garden. Using a bow saw and the unmitigated power of combined pythonage we razzed through branches, logs, twigs, getting loads of scratches like they were merit marks. 'Ed, you look tired, you should take a break,' 'I will, I just gotta razz through this last bit here,' etc. Nothing to do with Razy Gogonea, honest. As if that wasn't enough we later razzed down a huge part of the buddleia tree in order to make it more bushy for next year. It was the hardest I'd worked all year, finishing only at around nine p.m with somewhere in the region of fifteen or sixteen gardening bags all lined up. Whew!