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Cathy Winsor

26th February

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An early start this morning, I wanted to get to the post office before a long queue formed. It was interesting to see the few others ahead of me had been doing online shopping too; we all had our boxes with return labels. In my case it was a complete Boden order, none of the items I ordered in their sale looked right, which is probably why they were in the sale.

We spent most of the day in the garden. The new trees are now all planted and staked, though we need to protect them from the deer that have already ripped much of the bark from the young fruit trees we planted two years ago. We’d admired the huge cedar trees we’d seen in various gardens and decided we really should have one in ours. It was a major task; we bought a well established cedrus libani in a huge pot which required the digging of a hole about a metre across. We positioned it where I uprooted a sickly magnolia last year, which the previous occupant had planted in memory of his third wife, I did feel a little guilty, but magnolias don’t grow well in heavy clay and it is unlikely he’ll ever visit his old house, wife number four was so happy to sell it. Now we just have to wait 50 years to see our cedar tree at its best. The afternoon was spent sitting on a garden chair next to the incinerator, reading Brazzaville beach and adding garden debris to the fire, there is a huge pile of twigs from the felled sycamore which aren’t stackable. The incinerator was my idea, our garden bonfires in the past have set light to overhead branches and left huge patches in the lawn which take ages to reseed, I thought it would be more controllable. In fact the heat it was giving off was frightening and I managed to singe my hair as I added twigs, as you can’t toss things into the incinerator from afar, so it probably isn’t such a good idea. I didn’t seem to make much impact on the pile of twigs, so next week I’ll fill the van and take them to the dump in several trips.

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