The hand tools basket

On my way through the outhouse—which is the entrance we usually use to the house—I knocked over my garden hand tools basket that was balanced on top of a bucket (because Toad is, at least in theory, painting the walls so everything is at six and seven). Turned out this was probably a good thing as it made me sort stuff out.

Gunk in the bottom included one of Toadlet's socks (another sock hiding place!) as well as the broken bits of basket and dried grasses that one might expect.

My favourite tool in this pile is probably the little wooden "man tool", so called apparently because in periodically using it to scrape mud off your spade while you are digging you are saving yourself a man's-worth of energy—by not constantly lifting the extra weight, I suppose. It's certainly a consideration when you have claggy soil.

An old shed door that the tide brought

Some years ago I 'beachcombed' a good deal of an old shed that had drifted in on the sea loch tide, including this shed door that is about to be used as a lawnmower ramp for our serviced and repaired machine. It's the one Toad uses. I use it occasionally but it's really too heavy for me on our never horizontal, bumpy lawns. Watching Toad push it, unpowered by its engine, up to the shed through lush wet grass that hasn't been mowed for at least six weeks, confirmed its heaviness–he was finding it tough going.

The other main use of the shed door has been to shelter the lower part of the wood pile from rain, at which job it has been very effective. Much of the rest of the shed has helped a few garden bonfires along.

Once the mower was put away (no mowing today), Toad buzzed off to his Saturday drawing group.

We had the mower serviced at Fraser C Robb, by Drymen. This is currently my favourite shop. It's an Aladdin's cave of Useful Stuff. I came away with a new scythe sharpening stone and WOLF-Garten window washer and squeegee. The shop is going to post me an extendable long handle next week. Up till now I've used a ladder to get at our downstairs outside windows whose sills are at my eye-level. I fell off the ladder last time. Apart from a few bruises, only my dignity was injured but future outdoor window cleanings will be sans ladder. Our upstairs windows open inwards to improve their get-at-ability; the downstairs ones don't.

I dead-headed the woodshed rose and what I call the truck buddleia and then had a wee welly damp shoe wander to see how the two new heathers and last year's tall lobelia were doing. The lobelia has had to be protected from deer munching if it was to flower at all.

Erica x darleyensis 'Ghost Hills'

Calluna vulgaris 'Hammondii Aureifolia'

I was pleased to see that the yellow loosestrife is finally looking less anaemic, and I really like the dying heads of the marguerites that a friend gave me.

New brush cutter and chanterelles

First go with my new brush cutter in the morning cool. I like it and it will make a big difference to how much I can get done in a given time. The only trouble is that I couldn't start the engine. I had to get Toad to do it. I was thinking maybe I would have to buy a more expensive Stihl machine with an "ergo" starter cord. Then, thinking "what have we missed?", I did a quick google and learnt what we'd missed from this young lad.

We'd missed the whojimmyflippy squeezy button thing (fuel pump priming button?). I've just followed young lad's instructions and the strimmer engine started. Woohoo!

The strimmer came with a single shoulder strap. I've ordered a better two-shoulder harness but in the meantime, thinking about how DerbyshireDaughter tied her babies on her back with a long piece of strong fabric, I reckoned there must be something I could cobble together. I found an old strap (the blue one) that had hook attachments on the ends and, though it looks odd from the front, having a strap over each shoulder and crossed over at the back does spread the weight satisfactorily and comfortably. The only drawback is that the blue strap is a fraction too short if I want the business end of the machine to get closer to the ground. It'll do fine for the tall rough stuff till the harness arrives.






In other news, on Thursday I rang the farmer who has the field next to us on lease about a dead sheep. For the last four weeks or so there has been a flock of sheep, ewes and big lambs, in the field. This has meant I can ease off my attacks on the Himalayan Balsam that was thriving just over the fence and also that the bracken has been trampled down by the farmer's quad bike when he checked the sheep-proof-ness of the fence. We wouldn't mind a few sheep in the garden (they could do some much needed grass and weed munching) but there's no gate into the lane and they could would wander off down to the road.

The dead sheep looked as if something had attacked it by the throat. Big dog on the loose?

I had to tell an adventurous lamb to get back in the field just the other day after I saw it in the lane. I wasn't sure how it would work when I walked towards it along the boggy lane, but it just squeezed under the gate using one of the deep ruts.

Yesterday someone came for the carcass and the rest of the sheep vanished very quickly without my noticing how. The only way this could happen is if they were driven over the broken bridge across the burn at the back. The stream runs parallel to our back fence inside the wood above us and then does a turn down hill where it falls steeply down to the loch along with another burn coming straight down the hill. There is an old bridge made of wooden railway sleepers after the streams join.





The bridge used to be strong enough for a tractor or a herd of cattle but five or six years ago I had to ring the farmer because Toadlet and her friend had casually told me that there was a dead cow in the burn when they came in for tea!

I hope it was a quick death for the poor animal. I think we would have heard it if it had been lowing in distress. Presumably a couple of the old sleepers gave way under its weight, or it lost its footing on the slippery surface. Fortunately other heifers didn't follow it but went back the way they'd come.


It would seem that the couple of remaining sleepers, which are strong enough for people to cross, are also allright for sheep.

The farmer brought a small digger when he came to collect the cow but it wasn't big enough to reach into the ravine so he had to go for a bigger one. This ended with my seeing at our front gate the bizarre scene of a cow hoisted by a rope being transferred from big digger to small digger before it was taken away.

On the other side of the bridge (in the photo on the left I'm looking back towards our back garden fence) the farmer had cut back some rhododendron (the muddy patch) and stacked it in such a way as to guide the sheep the way he wanted them to go. The space between our back and the bridge had been used as a holding area a couple of times and the sheep had chomped all the vegetation so my way to collect chanterelle mushrooms just before the bridge was well clear. It's chanterelle mushrooms in a creamy pasta sauce for tea tonight. Yumtastic.

Last September the lane between our back fence
and the forest looked liked this: a single file roe
deer and chanterelle hunter's path.

Making, cooking, looking

Yesterday I made
<<< this, with the help of instructions creatively translated from Chinese (well done, whoever! it's not as if I could do it t'other way!) and a YouTube video by MO3MINI...

...into this,

a necessity because what with the lawnmower Toad uses conking out and being now at the menders, and scything not being suitable for some places, I need a tool with more power. It has a blade as well for stuff the strimmer wire can't deal with. I haven't used it yet because the single shoulder strap isn't enough and we need 2-stroke oil. Toad offered to pick some up today.

While the tool assembly was going on
<<< this bowl of egg whites, having been made into meringue, was cooking in a slow oven.

And very nice they were too for afternoon tea.
It's always good to have an excuse to eat thick cream ;)

The yolks, by the way, had gone into a cabbage carbonara sauce the day before.

Meanwhile in the garden, apart from a lot of lush grass, late summer flowers are blossoming and, in the case of wild angelica, being taken advantage of by Sphlex maxillosus wasps. I think that' what they are anyway.







Irrepressible Rose is doing what it does best after being chewed down to the ground earlier in the year. I hope it will flower next year. I'm going to try and tie it on the inside of its trellis to see if that keeps the deer off it. Some chicken wire might also be deployed.

Oh, and I made a pie with my benchmark pastry :)

Scythe ditch blade

I changed the blade on my scythe yesterday to the ditch blade. It makes cutting verbage on a steep slope easier having a slightly shorter blade. Also the ditch blade, designed to deal with tougher stuff than grass and meadow flowers and more awkward surfaces, has a reinforced point.

I shoved a wedge between the scythe shaft and the blade to steepen the angle of the cut too. It's a very well designed tool.

Yes, that's an H on my scythe shaft. Toad has his own. We decided to get two because, although they are eminently adjustable for different users' requirements (height, arm length, etc), we thought it would be a bit of a chore having to make adjustments all the time. Toad also tends to use a longer grass blade than I do so between us we have two scythe shafts and three blades. His has the initial A. H for Nelly and A for Toad. Simple and straightforward ;)

Unfortunately, while I was faffing around with an Allen key making blade adjustments, my sharpening stone rolled off the wheelie bin I'd plonked it on and smashed into four pieces. I thought I'd put it in a wheelie bin lid 'ditch' that would stop it rolling. It wasn't a deep enough ditch. Live and learn, eh?

I've ordered a new one but did manage to use the largest bit to do some sharpening, rather less nonchalantly than usual as I value my fingers!

Gardening Boggy Brae style

It began by with just some serious pruning of a cotoneaster that was getting far too big, that was producing far too many seedling cotoneasters elsewhere, and that was blocking access to steps and the side of a hedge I need to get at. Then I decided to try and hoik the whole thing out, along with the dead heather, ferns various, and two small holly trees that were growing in the three breeze blocks on the north-west terrace. Cotoneasters, hollies, and ferns grow with cheerful abandon all over the Boggy Brae and would soon turn into a forest, along with the birches, beeches, oaks and rowans that do the same. When they appear in the right places I encourage them. That is, I leave them to get on with their lives in peace. This cotoneaster and the hollies have outlived their welcome.

I don't know how long the breeze blocks have been there, certainly as long as we have and they, or rather the plants in them, already looked well established ten years ago. A heather plant that was alive then has since died. It was time for a change.

The soil inside the blocks was nice crumbly stuff and, just beyond, towards the rhododendron hedge, I found a fair bit of fireplace clinker. I guess people used to empty the ash pan down there once upon a time.

The first two blocks were relatively easy to shift and to empty of soil and roots. I'd left some of the cotoneaster and holly trunks to use as levers but the third block was rather more challenging.

block 3

The force of Nature helped with half of it because the cotoneaster trunk had split the block in half in its expansive Boggy Brae takeover bid for dominance so, with a bit of shoving, the holly half could be pushed over and the holly roots grubbed out and cut.

holly root ball from inside breeze block

A black tom cat sat in the drive and watched my toings and froings for more tools out of the shed. I've no idea whose cat it is. Last year it was a black and white cat that used to supervise happenings.

I ran out of energy at this point so I'm still left with a cotoneaster stump. Later I remembered my Darlac pocket chain saw. If the rain holds off today, I'll see if I can saw off the trunk at ground level with this.

Otherwise it'll be a case of recruiting some more brute force in the shape of Toad.

Alligator teeth and hares' feet

On my jobs list today was tighten alligator teeth and oil its jaws. This alligator:

Then I made some more sawdust cutting these lengths of old rhododendron branches

and swept the sawdust onto this bit

to encourage more Hare's-foot Inkcaps to appear there. I hadn't seen any of the actual hare's-foot stage yet, but I did today. However, that comes later in the story.

When I'd angled them against a rock and stamped on the thinner branches to break them and had chopped the thicker ones that stamping didn't work on, I stood on the eucalyptus bench to view the spider webs in the still uncut bit of lawn. From there I began an anticlockwise circumnavigation of the upper garden just observing what is new and how things are and what I need to do next.

Behind the shrub and fern in the top right corner of that pic is a new patch of yarrow flowering away between yet more branches of rhododendron and buddleia that I haven't got round to yet. There's a lot of yarrow leaf all over the upper lawn but it hasn't flowered before so I'm going to leave this pile until after the flowers have set seed.

Up from the yarrow was a new crop of small toadstools. I shal go and collect one or two to have a closer look at later.

Across the top and under the falling down cypress tree there is an outcrop of what I think is the same fungus that was growing around the trunks of what I call the halfway trees–a clump of wild cherry, rowan, holly and flowering currant plus, recently, a self-seeded downy birch. I should say another self-seeded downy birch; there are dozens; I just have to decide which, if any, to let grow.

Still haven't managed to identify this species of fungus (nor several others, come to that!)

Down a step or two from that recumbent branch is the old rowan beset with what looks like the Root Rot fungus (the cypress has it too, which is probably why it's falling over).

Glistening Inkcaps have started to reappear on the rowan as well. The trunk was half covered with these last year.

Down a little from the old rowan is a flowering currant bush. I stuck a pruned branch of it in the ground eight years ago and it is now at least two metres tall with a similar diameter. It has a lot of fruit this year. Bird food.

Now comes the surprise! Down again from the flowering currant is an old compost heap which I'm leaving alone because five little plants have appeared. Last year there were dahlias. Could this be them again?

Also on that compost heap, the biggest Hare's-foot Inkcap yet! The pink bits are Himalayan Balsam flowers falling over the fence from the field. My circumnavigations also have the purpose of hoiking out HBs that are growing within the garden. The bees can have the ones in the field.

And, after I gently pushed away that bit of grass at the bottom of the inkcap stem, a little "hare's-foot" appeared.

Grintastic! Below you can see the furriness inside the 'cup' of the curled open inkcap.

Making my way back across to the shed, I enjoyed this seed head of Common Cat's-ear,

the only remaining African daisy

and a tiny fungus of which we get quite a few but whose name I still know not! For scale, that is a Self-heal seedhead behind it. It has a delicacy similar to the Hare's-foot but on a smaller scale.

By which time I had wet feet and soggy socks. Should 'a worn me wellies.