This week I’ve been mostly moving stones around. I was pretty pleased with how the first wall came together. I’ve only done drystone walling once before, right back when I was a trainee, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make anything particularly solid. We didn’t want huge walls, just something to define the garden boundaries, so luckily I didn’t have to go too high.

Drystone walls are usually capped with larger stones on top to stablise them, but instead we want to grow alpine plants on top, the roots of which should also hold the walls together, so I added a good bit of soil too.

With my first wall completed I moved on to the wall beside the path. Here part of the old wall was still standing at the base, so I removed the loose rock and built up from what remained. It was very pleasing to see a solitary bee, possibly a red mason bee, checking out the wall as a potential nesting spot even as it was being built.

And finally I cleared the soil off the old garden path. This would once have been the path to the front door, when there’d been two houses, but it has long since been covered over. Chris couldn’t see the point of a path to nowhere, but I like the history and think it’s nice to be able to wonder down through the plants.

We need to go shopping for suitable plants for the wall but first I raided our potted plants, many of which have self-seeded plants growing around them. From these ‘weeds’ I got some strawberries, violets, mullein, geranium and oxeye daisies to start the planting. I even got enough young oxeye daisies to scatter them throughout the meadow area.

There’s a few more walls to go but the garden is starting to look a little less chaotic.

In the side garden Chris found a spot for our cherry and plum trees, their terracotta pots having broken apart in the frost.

Chris has been itching to start building a shed in the garden, however he noticed some badger holes where he wanted to build it. Badger dens can be abandoned or rarely used, but we obviously didn’t want to cover them up if they were active, so he set out a trail camera. The good news is we definitely have badgers, which is exciting. They don’t seem to be using the dens much, so they’re probably temporary dens they use now and then. To avoid any damage to them however we’re moving the location of the shed and hopefully we can co-exist peacefully.

For more conventional, and boring, DIY Chris added another coat to the stairs ceiling and another section of plasterboard to the back before filling the gaps and holes. Unfortunately, once the last piece of board is added we won’t be able to balance the scaffolding planks across the top of the stairs, making it harder to reach the high ceiling and walls.

His final job was to add a splashback to the bathroom sink, a job that’s needed doing for a while.

With the sun shining and the birds singing, I mostly want to spend my time in the garden, but there’s lots of to do inside still, so perhaps next week I get back to sanding filler… Perhaps.