4.09.2022 More compost.

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Sunday 4th 55F/13C. A bright and breezy start with pinky-orange clouds. A sunny morning is promised. The trees are all moving to the variable, easterly wind. Up at 5.30. The same, circular thoughts about my wife. I have to get up.

 6.50 The low sun is glowing warmly on my wife's towering willows. It is quite a theatrical backdrop again. Following the removal of the huge chestnut. 

  The rotary clothes airer has been replanted in front of the chestnut stump. The far side of the parking space is the more obvious site but not yet established. I don't want to be traipsing compost mud into the house. 

 I keep thinking I need to press the compost down before I sew the grass. It is still just as I spread it from a shovel. It can't be raked. I tried that and the compost is too thin. Even the back of the rake just exposed the sandy gravel underneath. 

 A garden roller might have worked while the compost was dry. I have no idea what happened to our old roller. A home made thing using concrete in a steel pipe. I thought of making a simple stamper. A 10" square of 2" thick timber on a length of batten.

 7.00. Time for a walk. And now for something completely different. The drought had dried up the marsh. So somebody had mowed tracks all over it. Presumably to allow easy access for the hunters. The new season has just been marked by gunfire. 

 Too good a chance to miss. So I walked the entire length of the marsh on the rough tracks without even seeing the lake. Though I could hear the ducks laughing nearby. 

 The vapour trails were rather persistent this morning. I stopped to admire a sunlit plane passing directly overhead. Its vapour trail was being widened and blown against the wind at high speed relative to the clouds. This might easily have been an illusion. Until I let a tall tree act as a reference to fix the actual movement. The vapour trails really were moving rapidly upwind relative to the ground and the clouds. A clear and visible example of wind shear. I was gone for exactly an hour.

 I spent the rest of the morning in the observatory. With a short shopping trip and fetching more compost when it clouded over.

 I spread another trailer full of compost on the enlarged parking space. [5mx15m or 16'x50'] Then I ran back and forth with the car to flatten it. I found the broad snow shovel was quite efficient at smoothing out the compost. The shovel didn't dig in like the rake. 

 Rain is still promised for Thursday. So I am holding off sewing the grass. I may bring back more compost to deepen the soil bed further. A trailer load doesn't go far over such a large area.

 13.00 70F/21C. Breezy and rather cloudy at times. Lunch.

 Dinner was baked fish fingers with frozen, organic peas and pasta cooked together. [To save washing another saucepan or finding one I don't own] Followed by tomato soup and a bread roll.

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