Sunday 1st April – Happy Easter to Yew

We have now identified the issue that prevented me adding any images to last week’s blog.  It seems that we had reached our storage limit on WordPress and so couldn’t add any more pics.  Having spent a day during the week doing some cleaning up and archiving we are now able to add this week’s photos.  However, I thought I’d start with some of the images that I wanted to share last Sunday.

These are the garage bays that I managed to complete with the volige cladding on the inside – no additional progress made this week on the last.

Garage Bay Cladding Finished 1

Garage Bay Cladding Finished 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the 3rd of our cherry trees now planted  We can’t wait to see them blossom as, we hope, we have bought a variety which should be especially floriferous:

Cherry Orchard

 

 

And this is the ginkgo which we had put in the ground.  No sign of life yet but with this weather we are not overly surprised!

Ginkgo Biloa

 

This week actually began with more garden work as the weather was dry for the first couple of days.  I managed to do something that we have wanted to do for weeks and have planted the jungle bed.  We think it looks great, and hopefully will be even better when we add some capping stones on the front wall and a gravel mulch at some point, certainly we hope you’ll agree that it looks rather better now than it did a few weeks ago!  We have chosen some plants that we hope will get quite large and dramatic, although a number do seem to have been knocked back by the really cold weather we had a few weeks ago but we hope they will recover – all their roots looked pretty healthy when we planted them.

Jungle Bed Planted

Tuesday was a little wetter but we managed to do couple more outside things including removing another of the old apple tree stumps that were in the orchard lawn.  This tree had fallen down before we arrived and the stump was a little taller but I cut it down in our first year.  As the ground is so soft and wet now, thought it was a good time to remove it – makes the lawn mowing so much easier!

Stump Removal

 

Our electrician came back on Wednesday and Grange is now fully wired in.  For the first time there is no electrical umbilical between Grange and my man-shed.  Another small but useful step!

Then from Thursday it has been much more what we are used to this year – wet, cold and breezy.  Our focus shifted back inside Grange and we are now making really good progress to completion of the first floor at least.

It took a couple of days to finish the storeroom which, I am excited to say, is now actually starting to store stuff.  We think this will be a revelation for us and make a significant to our lives.  Since living here we have ‘stored’ things just about anywhere we could find space which was predominantly the top floor of our own house or above Dave’s gym.  This meant that the former became a pretty chaotic dumping ground, and the latter a less accessible but equally disorganised state.  Now we can at last put things in a proper place where we can find them when we need them, less is likely to get lost / damaged / forgotten and we get our own house back.  It’s really appealing to my OCD side!

Storage Room Ready to Store

Store Room Ready to Store

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have also started to lay the floor in the Games Room end which I wasn’t expecting to do. At present it does all seem like pine overload – a bit Swedish sauna chic – but when the floor is varnished it will be a darker colour and we have a plan to wash the walls and ceiling at some point but probably not until the end of the year.

Laying floor in the Games Room

Floor being laid in the Games Room

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are very fortunate to have a couple of families staying with us for Easter in Priory and Granary.  It has meant Dave had had a very busy day as he has cooked one of his 3-course meals for Granary at lunchtime and is cooking another for Priory this evening – as well as us having an Easter meal – busy day.

Sadly however, the weather has meant that we have had to postpone the Easter Egg hunt we had promised our guests and we hope that the weather may allow us to do it tomorrow.  Worst case we will give the eggs to the parents and they can have a hunt within the gîtes!

Tomorrow is the annual Marché sur l’eau at the Lac du Drennec barrage.  It is always a good event and an opportunity to catch up with friends and neighbours.

The forecast for the rest of the week, thankfully, looks like an improving picture with maybe some rarely seen (for 2018) sun on Wednesday.  This will allow me to start to plant the yews that we ordered this week around the boundary of Kergudon.

Yew Hedging to be planted

Since we arrived we have wanted to establish a half-decent hedge on our perimeter as it is very open and exposed in places.  In our first winter I ‘acquired’ a number of hollies and yews from the forest and planted them around the back lawn.  Most seem to have survived but they are all still very small and very slow growing so, unless you look carefully, you can’t really see anything there.  This proved the case when the commune cleared the ditch alongside Stréat al Louarn behind us and threw all of the debris onto our bank covering some of those slow growing plants.  Thankfully none were snapped and I managed to clear them off in time so they seem to have survived the ordeal.

We decided that we would buy 100 small yews to add to the plants on the boundary which will not only make a thicker hedge (eventually) but, as they are slightly taller already, should be evident that we’re trying to grow things there other than bramble!

Lots to carry on with in the coming week!

À bientôt.