Its definitely spring now

Its definitely spring now, I've cut the grass, or rather the flymo has.

Suzanne (currently in the north east with her mum for a week) was very impressed when I told her on the phone, I very rarely do the lawn cutting, I prefer to plant plants in tubs and stuff, so she was very impressed when I said I'd cut the back lawn.

She wouldn't be so impressed if she could see it though.

You see the one downside of having a dog is that it has to poo somewhere. Some people take their dogs for walks and let them poo on other peoples space, some take little plastic bags out with them to pick up the dog poo and bring it home to bin it, we let Jake poo all over our back lawn and then when Suzanne needs to cut the grass she goes out with a big plastic bag and collects the poo up.

I have another way...

I just cut the grass, poo and all.

You see, I reckon that poo is bio-degradeable, what the hell, I know poo is bio-degradeable, it just is. And so I don't understand why I should need to pick it up and throw it in the bin, why not, as an alternative, just let it bio-degrade on the lawn ?

I'll tell you right here and now, we've got a beautiful lawn when its cut, my brother came around this afternoon and commented on how thick and lush our lawn was compared to his, I told him my secret, its dog poo, Jakes poo to be specific, I told him the next time Suzanne cuts the grass she'll pick it allup and put it in a big bag and he can have the big bag to smear all over his lawn.

So I just zoomed the flymo all over the long grass (its been a long winter) and the flymo blade did its stuff, mulched the poo and the grass all together, it didn't pick much of it up though like its supposed to and so the back lawn looks a bit dishevelled now with piles of grass and reconstituted dog food scattered all over it, the magpies seem to be enjoying it though, they're walking all over it now turning over the big piles of as yet unbroken-down compost material, probably tutting away at each other saying things like "can you believe this, he never picked the poo up first".

I didn't do the strimmer bit around the edges either because I forgot, I've already told you, I don't do the grass cutting very often.

What I did do though was empty two of the barrels of their stagnant waterlogged soil - last summer I bought four quarter barrels and filled them with soil and planted them up. I was told that they were old oak whisky maturing barrels and bugger me so they were, of course I forgot that to be whisky barrels they'd have to be watertight and so they've stood out in the garden all winter and just filled up with water, killing the plants that were in them and going awfully stagnant.

I emptied two of them this afternoon and was almost overcome with the fumes, refilled them and have put them at the front of the house - I've got a southern hemisphere thing going on in one of the barrels, bought two flax plants, one of Australian origin and one from New Zealand, so we'll see which one is the toughest over the summer.

And finally, the pond is full of a half million tadpoles, they've all hatched out now and so I can't do anything with the pond until they all die or hop away as frogs, I leave the pond over the winter, apart from letting the filter run, as the fish need lots of vegetation cover to hibernate properly, but in a few weeks time the weeds will all be raked out and I'll find out if the carp have all over-wintered again.

I'm a proper little Alan Titcharsh me.

She'd kill me if she could see the back lawn though :)