A new toy

At last the piece of kit that I have really been waiting for arrived to day, a 1.5 tonne digger. Now I can get on with some gardening on an industrial scale. So much clearing up still to be done around the chateau but now it will be so much easier and cheaper! First job is the area next to the windmill. When we bought the chateau 18 months ago the first thing that we did was clear all of the trees and bushes from this area. We could not get the stumps out and ever since they have been sprouting new growths. 

Finally I can get them all out and level the area. Having never used a digger before it was a steep learning curve but I have watched a few youtube vids lately so I had some idea of what to do! The first two stumps were quite small and came out easily. But the third one, boy was it big. About an hour of digging all around it until finally I could move it and pull it out! It was such a great feeling to have beaten it!

Next came the hard bit, clearing up. It would have been easy to just shove everything back into the large hole that I had made, but not a good idea. There are so many roots, weeds and rocks so I set about making a fire of the weeds and roots and then sieving all of the soil to remove the rocks and hard lumps. Big rocks went into a pile, small ones with the hard lumps of soil went into the bottom of the hole. The nice fine topsoil I am piling up to spread evenly over the area when everything is cleared!