A couple of weeks ago we had landscapers here. They removed the rest of the tennis court surface.
They removed our old rotting sleeper wall and the brick drain below it, and cleared the weeds and dead plants in the garden bed.
That’s my kind of weeding.
And they built a new rock retaining wall at the edge of the court slab. Some of the rocks were pretty big:
The final result looks amazing.
Though a visitor decided it needed an extra little something:
We now have a pile of bricks to clean…
And a garage to build.
On the gardening front, this ticks off most of the items in the first part of the to-do list – “A Garden With No Structural Issues”. We’re in the process of digging swales into the courtside garden bed, which is the last item.
The second part of the to-do list is “An Easily Maintained Garden”. We’ve covered the poolside garden with plastic in the hopes of solarising all the weeds before the mulch goes on, including hundreds of little blackberry seedlings coming up. I’m hoping well have this and the courtside bed covered in mulch by December. Then the garden goes into summer mode: watering and weeding only. It’ll be too hot and dry to do anything else.
A great foundation for the new garden! Don’t forget I have plants to spare…
On your reading list I see you have read a fair few Tanith Lee and are now reading The Birthgrave. That’s the only book of hers I’ve read, and I thought it was vile. I’d be interested to know what you think when you finish it, and how it compares with her other books. It certainly stopped me trying any others.
I haven’t forgotten!
I didn’t get much into Birthgrave. It was her first novel, and you can tell. There’s a ‘making this stuff up as I go’ feel to it. She is one of my favourite authors, yet with the knowledge that her work is variable. Some I’ve loved, some I’ve loathed. But I kinda admire that she was no one-note player. She had many styles.
It wasn’t the style I objected to – I’ve read much, much worse. It was that the purpose of having a forever-regenerating amnesiac main character seemed to be so she could be raped and murdered over and over again and still keep coming back for more. The master-race ending didn’t improve matters.