Month: March 2025

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Tree protectors

As part of the work I do for the local Parish Council I put lots of effort into keeping some woodlands that we own in good condition. One of the things that’s been bothering me for a while is a bunch of plastic tree protectors on trees that the council planted before we bought the land off them.

So I rallied the troops from my Facebook group and off we set one Saturday morning and took down about 400 tree protectors. A week or so later Oli, Amelia, Violet, Jace and I went down to do a little tidying of the tubes. Jace had to shoot off so he didn’t quite make it into the photo.

A month later and the tubes are still on the floor of the woods as recycling them is proving to be a bit tricky – but I have a new lead.

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Shoe Rack

Many years ago we bought a shoe rack basket type thing. Over time it fell apart and I did a patch up job on it with a few screws. It didn’t work very well and started falling apart again. The final straw came when Amelia fell onto it and the whole thing just crumbled and and fell apart. Emma wanted to put it in the bin. I wanted to do a proper fix up job on it.

Bits missing, wood snapped – this will not do

Starting to put it back together. Glued and dowelled. No screws whatsoever…well, except to hold the wicker seats on.

Almost back together. Undercoat being applied.

The finished piece. You can sit on it and everything.

Quite proud of myself.

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The mole saga rumbleth on

The moles that I mentioned in a previous post made a proper mess of my garden. Like a proper turn-your-ankle-on-the-unevenness mess. I considered hiring a roller from Hodgsons to try and fix it but they only had the ones that you have to pull by hand.

Screw that

So I bought one.

It’s about a metre wide and weighs about 80kg when full of water and fastens perfectly onto the back of Old Faithful.

It’s made a difference – not to the extent that the garden can be used as a putting green but it’s definitely better. However, we’ve not had a really good downpour since I bought it [ you’re all welcome ] so I reckon next time it properly lashes it down and ground is properly soaked I’ll be out there driving around the garden with an umbrella.

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Jet washing

It’s that time of year again when life focuses on preparing the garden and the associated outdoor furniture for the coming Summer.

Just look at the difference!

There are few things in life more satisfying than attacking an algae covered piece of furniture with Karcher’s finest jet washer.

Then came time to jet wash the patio. It’s quite a big patio and it was pretty badly covered in algae so it took a while. The other problem is that the jet washer is so powerful it started ripping up all the grouting so I’m going to have to do something about that 🙁

I don’t think I’ll jet wash the patio again though – I’ll use my funky Ryobi battery powered knapsack sprayer which is an absolutely beautiful piece of kit. If you’ve ever had to use a knapsack sprayer with the pumpy handle thing then you’ll know what a pain it is. Battery powered knapsack sprayers are the future kids. Hmmmm, went off on a bit of a tangent there – anyway – into my knapsack sprayer I’ll put some “wet and forget” and spray the patio every 3 months which should keep the algae at bay. We’ll see.