Diggety-Dig

I’ve been working on the paved seating area plus water feature project all weekend. I’ve dug several big holes and removed a chunk of lawn. Getting rid of lawn is good, but the damage it does to the soil is appalling. I have to keep reminding myself that sometimes a hole needs to be dug and this isn’t tilling the soil or creating neat sterile flowerbeds. It still feels wrong though, so I’ll accept that I’ve done damage and what follows next should make things better than they were (no grass, more variety, an actual pond type thing). The birds were thrilled at the damage though, it was (and is) quite the bonanza for them.

Digging is hard though. I ache. My watch tells me I’ve done workouts worth over 3000 calories this weekend. I think it’s a lot more than that.

Sorting the actual water feature has turned into the project of endless dependencies. I’ve discovered I need to drill a hole in a tub and it’s bigger than the bits I’ve got and smaller than the hole cutter things I’ve got and here we go trying to figure out what damn thing will do the thing I want and ooh will it be in fractions of an inch or millimetres or some random scale? Annoying is what it is.

That isn’t a hornet. It’s a Hornet-Mimic Hoverfly. As you can see, it’s well named. It’s also huge, about 5cm long. It scared the shit out of me the other day when I was watering the garden and I was very glad to find out what it was. Crikey.