Part One – Spring
My second post of 2021 seems an apt time to take stock of the jobs we’ve tackled at Foxglove Farm over the past year. It goes without saying that it was an extremely difficult year for people the world over and whilst a few types of businesses thrived under the new conditions (I can’t have been the only one wishing I’d had the foresight to invest in a company that made PPE), most didn’t. Owning a boarding cattery that mainly depends on people going on holiday, it goes without saying that we did not prosper because our clients drastically reduced their holiday travel or stopped travelling entirely. Nevertheless, we determined to keep going in the hope that better times will come soon. We were beginning to gain regular customers and we are sure that they will return once healthier times are here again.
Once lockdown began, we decided to use the enforced ‘holiday’ to tackle a project in the kitchen garden, namely removal of the old, raised beds which had rotted so badly that they were no longer able to be patched up. We hired a mini digger to move the timber and relocate the compost. The project is still not finished but will be continued in 2021.
There was a circular flower bed in front of the house which served as the central point of a turning circle. Created by the previous owners, it looked great for the first couple of years after we moved in but as the hebes on it matured they grew outwards, moving out of the bed and onto the gravel. Eventually, it became difficult to drive round it, so the builders removed it with their digger when the cattery was being built and George and Tony put up a fountain instead. We had the drive re-gravelled at the same time because, no matter how hard you try to keep gravel looking smart it invariably wears thin and starts to look shabby.
George’s skills as an electrician came into force once again when I asked him to put some spotlights into the base of the fountain to light it up at night.
Finally, the old central bed had contained a lot of pieces of decorative slate so, rather than waste these Annie picked them all up by hand and used them to cover the adjacent flowerbed. It looks much smarter now and the rhododendrons appreciate the fact that the soil stays damp underneath the slate rather than running off the sloping bed as it used to do.
Foxglove Farm 