Making a splash!

......and then it was done, in time for the summer, and we hope, worth the wait. The box hedge will take a year or two to mature, and until then the central beds will be kept empty, with planting just in the beds to the side and back. So the fountain hold centre stage for now!

Parterre

.....by way of an update on the garden featured in the December posting 'Enough is Enough' the bad weather continued to make itself felt for quite sometime on that project. Good progress was made during the milder spells and soon the main paths were in place and the garden taking shape. Fibre-glassing (watyerproofing) the fountain required something a little more drastic though - a 6m x 6m marque and gas heater to be precise. Well we certainly weren't having a party inside! but it was worth the effort......

Pizza alfresco (continued)

Pizza alfresco

If its the good-life you're after then a pizza oven in the garden should be high on your list of priorities. Having undertaken a course a couple of years ago in how to construct a 'cob' oven, we have finally had the chance to install one in a garden for real. The basic principle of cob is very simple. It is a combination of clay, grit and straw and has been used in the construction of buildings and ovens all over the world for thousands of years. In this case the clay came out the post holes dug in the same garden, for grit we used sharp sand and the straw was bought from a local farmer.

The oven itself consists of two layers of cob, with the outer one containing the straw to give tensil strength i.e to hold it all together, and the floor of oven consists of fire or engineering bricks laid on a solid base. A well made cob oven will have excellent thermal properties, reaching temperatures of over 600 degrees celsius and cooking a pizza perfectly in 2-3 minutes. So just make sure you have plenty of tomatoes and herbs growing nearby. Here are some photos of construction underway and we will follow them up later in the summer with some 'action' shots, in other words the important task of cooking and eating pizza!