Well, not to London, and not to see the Queen either. I've been making the most of the mild (meaning; just above freezing, occasionally into the giddy heights of 4°C) weather by doing ground work in the garden. January & February are usually the best times to do laborious jobs like digging over beds, path laying & site clearance, before March & the sudden tidal wave of seeds to be sown, pricked out & potted on, potatoes to chit, plant out & shore up, cuttings, prunings & propagation's and let us not forget the endless bloody weeding.
It took a solid week of digging, put I managed to pull up 3 concrete fence posts, and the lumps of cement they were embedded in, which were added to the big pile of rubble I had unearthed from the garden in the autumn.
Then I got myself a 5 cubic yard skip. Woo!
For those of you not in the UK, I don't mean the method of getting about by repeatedly almost falling over that is so popular with small girls, or skipping rope, which is also popular with small girls (and, a little unsettlingly, wrestlers*), I'm on about skips, large metals containers that you hire out & fill with rubbish (usually from house renovations, but occasionally from moving bloody great piles of crap from the garden), which then get taken away, and the contents sorted through & recycled (the contents of my skip will become hard core, and used in the foundations of a road or building somewhere in Lincolnshire, which is a better use than sitting in a heap in my garden where I'd rather have a few fruit trees).
The cleared ground then got dug over & all the nettle roots removed, and is all ready for the chickenproof fence to go up, which will have an edible hedge planted in front of that (more on the edible hedge another time). There's still a fair amount of clearing to do, and no doubt plenty more rubble just under the soil (along with more nettles), but it feels like less of an impossible task.
I'd say that it will be done by the end of the month, but there's nothing like announcing your plans to make the gods start gut-laughing (and send rain. Lots of rain).
Then there's the path to lay down, and Tomato Mile needs digging over, and ten thousand other things to do before spring finally gets here. But for now there's 5 cubic yards less of problematic crap in my garden, and seed potatoes to be chitted.
Small pleasures, my friends. They're what makes the world worth all that spinning.
*Though it's not certain whether wrestlers also sing about teddy bears going upstairs.
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