Slightly hard day. So I had to stop at a garden centre and buy an expensive, mature wisteria to cheer myself up. I will build a pergola for it to be trained across, in an arch across the steps down from the drive to the garden.
But of course buying it meant I had to plant it. And the place I had in mind was quite a wet spot, which Swami Google said was not a good idea. So I decided to put it at the top of the steps, which is, of course, backfilled centuries since with large rocks and other crap. So there was a lot of difficult digging to be done.
Jorge (a volunteer from Spain, recently arrived) and I struggled down through the strata. Stone after stone after stone came out, along with bits of broken pottery and just generally sandy soil. But I found a fair number of worms as well, so perhaps that bodes well.
Having made a very deep and wide hole, we backfilled it with good soil mixed with compost from the lovely, lovely humanure compost pile that’s been maturing for a year or so. It’s good stuff, full of happy worms.
I’m certainly sold on this composting toilet thing. It was easy, not too unpleasant and the result is about the best compost I could imagine.
And in other news…
We finished putting the (horribly unpleasant) insulation in the roof of the new sleeping hut, and put the ceiling up (not pictured) (yet).
And started constructing the bed frames, just in time for me to win two ebay auctions for king size foam mattresses which I can cut in half to make decent size single beds. I hope to have all this finished by next weekend when a bunch of volunteer turn up.
And while we were digging around in the compost, we did a bit more planting of annuals in pots. Tomorrow my engineer is coming by with his wife and a couple of friends who are interested in the straw-bale-ness of my little cabin, so I want the place to look at least not neglected… a tall order some weeks. I am a slob.
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