"Heavy" gardening

Nature seems at a gallop right now, every day there is new and vigorous growth, more blossom, more blooms, it's impossible to keep up with it all.  I'm trying to concentrate on tidying up and digging out nasty weeds which are hampering the growth of favourite plants.

In the duck world the boys are very full of themselves, trying to gather their own little harem around them and fighting with each other.  The black drake Jay is still "top dog", but fawn&white Ben has been throwing his weight around recently, leaving black/white Tuts lowest in the ranking.


These photos illustrate how the boys like to gather "their" girls around them, Jay and his group right at the top and the other two well down in the field.
 


Severely handicapped Dotty has delighted me the last five days by getting herself into her hut in the evenings well before the others gather for bedtime, it used to be such a bother trying to urge her out of the pond when all others were ready.

In the process of tidying up the conservatory I came across a tin with lots of seed packets of a great variety of flowers, some half used, some unopened.  A snap decision made me empty all of them into a bowl, mix in some sand, and scatter them over this patch of prepared ground near the big pond.  I'm hoping for a riot of colour in there!

 

Look what I found when weeding the centre square in the formal bit of the garden, some lady pheasant has been very busy:

The old horse fence separating fields from the garden has been rotting away and falling down for some time, and wherever it was loose I've been breaking it out of the ground and piling the broken pieces at the edge of this overgrown patch of ground:

There was one of John's compost bins rotting away, a huge pile of horse muck on top of a blue plastic plane, and the section of fence there was leaning so heavily it was almost on the ground.  It was thickly covered in brambles, wild roses and nettles, and several self-seeded young cherry trees had grown right through it.  Two days ago I started to tackle it, burning all rotten wood and overgrown vegetation on a huge fire which kept going all day.  In the evening my arms were so scratched up and bleeding that I gave that corner a rest yesterday and today. There is still a vast amount of rubbish lying underall those brambles and nettles and ivy, like old window panes, tyres and bricks.