What to do on a wet weekend?

Thanks to the regular deluges recently it's been getting a little hard to find outdoor jobs that can be done but it's actually made some jobs easier. Soft ground certainly helped us to get a couple of "weeds" out on Saturday!

Some of our older stock beds  had most of the perennials removed from them some time ago as the time taken to maintain (ie. weed) simply wasn't available 3-4 years ago.  For some reason we left the woody plants in them though...

We are now starting to clear the remaining, unwanted, vegetation away so that we can get the perennial weeds under control before considering whether to plant new stock beds or not in the future.  In the case of one bed, the unwanted vegatation consisted of a sycamore seedling about 4-5m high and a nearly  all reverted Acer campestre 'Carnival' (which is meant to have a finely speckled white variegation) about the same height but quite a bit wider.

Sally managed to get the tops cut off and down to a manageable 1.5m a week or two ago but we waited for a cooler period to dig the stumps out - it can be quite warm work!  So, a lot of spade, mattock and Chillington hoe work later and the sycamore was out of the way, but the ex. 'Carnival' wouldn't budge despite a deep trench all the way round it and a lot of roots cut through!

We both decided that the tractor was needed to lend a bit of extra power.  It really is amazing what can happen inside 5 mintues with the right equipment!  Just need to get them to the bonfire and for everything to dry out enough to try and burn now...