The big event this week was the arrival of two tons of well-rotted stable manure which was delivered by truck to the end of Honeywood Walk. The red route rules prevented it being off-loaded on the corner by The Greyhound. It had to be barrowed across the front of Honeywood, through the garden door and then across the lawn to the north bed. I thought it was going to be the job from hell, but it turned out to be much easier. It was done in an hour and dug in the following day. The bed should be ready for planting in the spring.
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We also continued work on the clearance of the big raised bed at the back of the garden. We cut down a lot of snowberry and spent several hours chopping it up to take it off site. The end result doesn’t look that much but it is a bit misleading as a lot of the stuff was cut out from behind other plants. This is a job that will continue for some time.

The garden has two ponds in it one small and oval, the other rectangular and large. They were heavily overgrown with ivy and brambles. We have been waiting for the springs to dry up. This usually happens in early summer but the wet weather this year has kept the flow going and it doesn’t look like it will stop. So work has started. The mud in the bottom of the oval pond was damp and sticky and not too bad: the floor of the rectangular pond was a swamp. However, a large part of the overgrowth has been cleared so the ponds are visible again. The oval pond is shown on the 1868 Ordnance Survey map and is probably Victorian in origin. The rectangular pond is older and has a much more complicated, and not very well understood, history, dating back to the 18th or perhaps even the late 17th century.
 
Work also resumed on the clearance of the raised beds along the back of the garden. These have got a lot snowberry and elm suckers. Clearance is going to be a slow job.