Fruit Trees Planted

We finally finished digging the hole for the apple tree today: I was nearly there last week, and once I'd regained some strength, I was able to drag out the large stone (which, it transpires, is a slab of reinforced concrete), and clear up. Plenty of compost and topsoil later, and the apple tree is planted.

Surprisingly, when we then dug the hole for the cherry, it was almost easy. No massive boulders or sheets of metal lurked below the surface, and the tree was quite quickly at home. You never can tell. While Liz dug the hole, I finished cutting turves to mark the edge of the pond, this time marking the edge of the contiguous bog garden. This has let me take up the sticks and string, so I can mow the lawn right up to the lifted turf, and the pond will remain clearly marked until we're ready to dig.

It's been extremely hot, so we had to take a couple of breaks to sit and cool down, but before we collapsed at the end of the day, we measured up the strawberry/rhubarb bed, which we'd like to make a start on this week. It has the potential to be quite large, depending on how many of the overgrown shrubs we take out—it'll probably be about 4.5m, and we'll remove an unhappy looking hebe, as well as a cotoneaster and a patch of deadnettles. The cotoneaster is, in principle, quite an attractive one, with variegated leaves. Unfortunately, like the (also pretty, and purple-tinted) hebe, it's leggy, dead in the centre, and doomed.

Our supply of half-pigs looks unable to supply us imminently, so we also spent some time looking at the alternatives, and working out what we'd require this time. We're tempted to try making our own sausages, and—ideally—our own black pudding, though this is logistically tricky. One requires fresh blood, really (although frozen is possible, if the abattoir or butcher will start the preparation of it), but the pig itself usually arrives two to three days after slaughter, by which point the blood would hardly be fresh. It can also be tricky for the abattoir to separate the blood from 'your' pig from that of all the other slaughtered animals, and seeing as we're particular about the origin of our meat, that undermines the point. Fortunately, we've found a smallholding that might be able to supply a half pig, and we're enquiring about whether they can meet our (ahem) particular demands. And, admittedly, spent some time browsing mincers/sausage machines.