Spring is in the air...

... the solar panel occasionally kicking into life seems to have replaced the buds on the trees as the first sign that winter is coming to an end!

I do need it to heat up as my compost bin is almost completely full. This will only be a temporary problem as I have five pallets in my garden from the drystone wall, and I'm going to replace my single bay garden heap with a double bay model (which it originally was but the builders needed to cut it down to get scaffolding in some years ago, but that's another story).

The next big job in our garden is to lift the old concrete drive and replace it with a lawn. This is going against the current trend of concreting over front gardens to provide off street parking. This has been blamed for flooding problems as the water shoots off the surface into the drain and thus into rivers, rather than soaking into the soil and percolating through slowly.

Dry Stone Walling

Over the last, erm, 15 months, I've been building this dry stone retaining wall in the garden. I didn't think of it as an eco-option at first as stone is non-renewable, but then I compared it to its brick equivalent and realised:

1. stone has a lower embodied energy than brick

2. no mortar = less energy intensive cement manufacture

3. the gaps provide refuge for wildlife

The bonus is the source of the stone - Ladycross Quarry near Hexham. The stone is quarried by hand and the already quarried areas are converted into a nature reserve as they go along. It is a truly beautiful development - I have never heard or seen so many birds in one place in this country.