I thought there were more inspiring things to be found, with our beautiful Lion's mane sunflowers right up there.
At last, Dave agreed to my concept of sweet little lambikins for the pony paddock and started out on making the fence. This required a whole new area of expertise and it is amazing how much more interesting a walk in the country can be when you have to check out the finer points of the fencing. Dave certainly rose to the challenge, made slightly more difficult by the fact that we bought some second hand fencing from one of the neighbours. Anyway it was soon well on the way...
... when we found more wood available down by the river and just had to collect it. And then it had to be chopped up, and then there was not enough room to store it, so he found some free pallets from the local hardware store and some discarded bits of piles from the house being built over the road, and set to making a rather unsightly new wood store.
Mmmmm, structurally fine probably, and definitely cheap, but aesthetically pleasing? I don't think so!
And then it was back to the fence! He'd completed the stretch along the top of the hill and then put in 2 stretches down the slope. This proved a bit more difficult ...
... as the reclaimed fencing had all its battens attached and not only were they in the wrong place, they were being put across a steep and irregular slope and just didn't fit.
So he decided to remove all the battens (quite a job in itself) and start again. But soon it was all good, the wires were all in place and we even had some gates. The battens would have to wait till another month, but the the lambikins wouldn't be available until spring.
And then there were the brambles! I decided I needed a project in the garden as Dave made all the major advances and I thought I could tackle a bit of the slope near the willow hut and clear the gorse and blackberry so that we could plant our natives seedlings there in the winter. It was a bit of a jungle ...
... but I thought I could manage it a bit at a time. And that's how it went ...
... and fortunately Dave was happy to remove the cuttings for me, making use of the very handy bonfire site on the next section.
And gradually I got down to a sort of entrance to the native bush on the slope, which might allow us to make a bush track at some stage in the future.
And yay! I made it! Now doesn't that look better!
Trouble is I made the mistake of looking down the slope further, and, well, our section does narrow off, and it only goes as far as that tree in the centre, and we have got lots of seedlings in our nursery ready to be planted out, and well, it doesn't hurt my back too much. So that's right, I decided to clear the lot! Watch this space!
Meanwhile, I also finally finished my patchwork bedspread turned wall hanging and am very pleased with it on the wall of our bedroom. The colours are a bit difficult to photograph but are closest to the top part of the close-up below.
Oh yes and the vege patch was doing its thing rather too prolifically and we processed and froze about 50 heads of sweetcorn. We decided to strip them from their kernels before freezing them this year, which was quite a long process and we ended up with sweetcorn spattered just about everywhere!
