It’s just gone four in the morning, the birds are awakening and I’m stuck in an office in Leicestershire awaiting my next call out of this long night shift.
Despite weather reports being favourable it has been heaving down with rain for the past few hours , and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to let off at any time today.
This is pretty much a post about gardening, another activity I like to get involved in, and at the moment I have a project underway that was pretty much weather dependent.
I have begun the digging out of a small part of the garden in preparation for laying a small patio area. Our garden is pretty much clay based under the grass and to be honest as a result of that drainage is not brilliant. We never used to have issues with drainage due to there being 12 trees in situ that the previous owner had planted, he never looked after them and they became diseased. These sucked every bit of moisture from the garden and never gave us any issues with pooling water.
Fast forward a couple of years and those trees had to be removed due to the aforementioned disease, right down to the roots. Now during the normal British rain season ( most of the year ) we have pools developing around the garden. We are replanting a number of smaller trees but it’s going to be some time before they are drinking the quantities of rain water we usually get here in the East Midlands.
I chose this week to do my digging as it was forecast to be the driest week in a while and there was a sufficient chance of me getting all the digging done and getting the sub base in place before any inclement weather arrived.
I sit here this morning cursing so called weather forecasts.
I have been doing work between night shifts spreading it out and was so pleased with progress thus far. I removed all turf yesterday and today started digging out to about 15 c/m and started to level the area out. All excess soil was being spread around the flower beds of the front and rear garden so nothing was going to waste at all.
I stopped work on the garden at about 4 pm yesterday, well happy with progress telling the wife I had about another 2 days of work to do on levelling before we could start to get the sub base in place and compacted prior to paving, hopefully the job would be completed by next Sunday.
That’s not going to happen.
Looking at my security camera in the garden I can see that the patio area has now taken on the look of a pond and later today I half expect to see a couple of ducks taking residence.
The moral of this story is , weather forecasts don’t work. It’s not yet an art despite all the technological advances over the years.
Check progress here: The best laid plans and all that…Pt2
And don’t tell the wife when the job will be finished as she’s now got me tied to that timescale and I know now that is not going to be achieved.
I am a fool
Stay happy people. You are so special.
Foxes Den 
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