Shall we go?

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging. In my case 'life' consist of Lyme, a manky internet connection (it took me two days to make this post) and a garden. You have to believe me on my word concerning the first two 'parts of life', but, By The Powers Of Canon, I can actually show you the third one.

Would you like to follow me on a tour through our garden? So you know where I am when I'm not here. Then I'm there. (We'll skip the parts where I haven't been much lately.)

Welcome to our garden.

Please close the gate behind you.

Yes, yes... I know the gate needs a lick of paint. Relax! It's on the 'things-to-do-but-not-now-list'. Now... we'll just follow this path, past the small and very sunny patio and around the corner you'll see...

...our fantastic and most experienced (well, oldest at least) guard dog Phoebe. "Phoebe! PHOEBE! Wake up! We have a visitor." That building in the back? The stables.

Our mostly unused sunloungers. If you click on this photo, you can perhaps just see the statue of the naked lady hiding in the hedge (I thought that might get your attention). And can you spot the chickens playing hide-and-seek?

We can choose which way we go now. One option is to take this small path, guarded by another naked lady, but that takes us to a very narrow path through the trees. Not very interesting and only for the more adventureous types who don't mind wrestling a couple of dead trees. But we will take the easier way, the 'hosta-path' that is behind us.

This path takes us to the 'side garden', which I will not show you because it hasn't had much attention lately. But if we turn right, we can follow a much wider path that leads all the way down to the back of the garden, where the small pasture for our horses is.

But first we turn around and look back down the 'hosta-path'.

Nice view eh?

Now we turn back again and go to our right. This leads us past the pond...

and if we turn right here, we'll get to the stables. But we will walk further down this path, past the manege....

and then we take the next sort of path to our right that leads to 'Villa Piggysty', where my little vegetable garden is. To the left is the meadow where the horses are grazing.

We'll walk all the way down this grass path and go into the woods....

...and there is Biggles...

we can follow him...

...until we get to the bench and the weird structure that we've inherited from the former owners of our house and we still haven't decided if we should remove it. Or not. We could lead some climbers over it. If we decide to leave it. But it has taken us about 10 years to not make our minds up and it will probably be here for another 10 years.

We can take a seat here and enjoy the view of the horses...

with the manege and the stables at the far end there.

Ahh, it's nice here. But onwards and upwards we go...

.....and at the end of this small path we return to the wider path again...

....where we keep our tiny tractor. It's under that temporary structure that needs replacing, but we are not sure by what. Another one of those things-to-do-but-not-now. The metal thing in the foreground is a 'weidesleep', something that we can attach to the tractor and drag over the grass in the meadow. It opens up the ground a little and tickles the little grass-roots, which apparently encourages the grass to grow. We also use it to drag over the sand in the manege to even the surface.

Does anyone know what the English word for 'weidesleep' is? Pasture drag perhaps?

Shall we go back to the house, take a seat on the patio and have a nice cool drink? Or would you rather have a coffee? Tea?