The end is nigh

It's a scorching day in Kerridge. David the owner agrees to let us fill the car boot for £15 - BONUS.



He was hovering around while I started picking out a few suitable flat bits (think he was going to bump the price up for nicking all his 'crazy paving') but I was taking so long that he decided to go back to his house, letting me have a good rummage.



Filling up nicely, should make finishing off the last course a breeze.



Nick turns up and decides to get a quick bit of yoga in.



Empty the mind...



...and HUP



This is what it would look like if Kickboxer had been filmed in Macclesfield.



We decide that while we're here, we may as well pick up the end bits for the coping, we need 14" square bases and search the whole quarry for some tasty specimens.



I'm not sure if the car is going to have any suspension or exhaust by the time I get down the quarry path.



Just as we're about to make an exit, the owner comes back and rumbles us. I think we were being a bit cheeky with a 'car boot full' but he lets us have the lot for £25. I can't believe that I bought a boot-liner to 'protect the car interior'.



When the wall is a little bit older and asks 'where did I come from Daddy?' I can show him this photo.



I dream of having one of these one day!



Time to stick a couple of the big ones in Nick's boot to save what's left of the suspension on the way home.



Quick check of the map and we're off.



In a repeat of day one of MegaGarden we had to cart all that stone up the hill round the side of the house and launch it over the back wall. Luckily this time Mike next door lent us his wheelbarrow but it was still a case of drinking a pint of water after each journey there and back. One of the big stones cracked when it got chucked onto what was left of the concrete floor, but there should be enough left of it to work with.



First piece going on! Ideal platform for putting brews on to. Looks great from this side too.




Not quite right from the front though, where it has been sawn...



15 minutes of whacking with a hammer later and some carefully placed moss and it almost looks like it will fit in. David #2 at the quarry (the one who does all the work) suggests chucking yoghurt onto stones to speed up the weathering process, but he didn't say what flavour.



Got all my new stones nicely laid out to finish off the right hand side of the wall. It does feel a bit like cheating at this point as there's no lumpy ones to deal with but I think I deserve a bit of a treat.



We struck gold!



Nick's putting the final touches to his coping and i'm about half way through. The weather is amazing today and the end is in sight so i'm really beginning to enjoy myself now. The other corner stone looks perfect too.



Ta-dah! I'm dying to get the coping finished on the other side, but it's forecast rain tomrrow, just going to have to do it one night next week...



When this wall is finished, so will be these pants.

Cheshire Demolition

I've got the ever cheerful quarry owner to agree to open up especially for us tomorrow morning to grab half a ton of nice flat walling rubble. Also on the shopping list is a slab to make the 3rd step up to the garden plus 4 big square bottomed stones to use as the bookends of the coping. I'm hoping to pick up a slab of some sort (and maybe the end stones) from the always-exciting CHESHIRE DEMOLITION.



This place has got stones for miles as well as tons of other weird and wonderful reclaimed building stuff.



This seems to be some sort of Victorian hot-tub - a candidate for the central feature of MegaGarden if I decide to create a turn of the century swingers vibe.



Hmmm, here's some likely candiadates, there's too many to choose from.



This one's the ideal size but I think it would feel a little creepy every time you step on it.



I nearly went for this one but i'm going to be worrying about tripping up on that hinge all the time.



Another nice one, but 'tripping hazard' pops into my mind again. So I just went for a nice semi-knobbly piece with no major lumps and bumps.



They have a lot of stone suitable for the coping end-pieces, but at a fiver each I think i'm going to take my chances at the quarry tomorrow.



I've got a plan to get one of these old beams to turn into a bench, probably along the back wall. That's going to have to wait though.

Coping Hypothesis

I'd been keeping Nick up to date with the coping idea via picture messages from Ireland and he thought it was a go-er. Before we got started, we had a surprise visit from the newest addition to the Kaill walling crew - the super-cute PATMAN.



While we were messing about with Pat, Nick got started with the coping experiment. By the time I'd come up to join him, it was already taking shape beautifully.



Another landmark event - NO STRINGS ATTACHED - and the wall is still standing! Unfortunately there are no decent stones left to finish the final couple of courses on the left hand side, so we're going to need another trip to the quarry.

Skull Harbour - Coping inspiration

During a week in and around the lovely Irish village of SKULL, there was plenty of walling to get inspiration from, even though they tend to use mortar, the lazy rascals!



About 90% of the walls around this corner of the emerald isle use a sort of double-faced coping which i'd not seen anywhere round the UK, it's giving me an idea though...



Looks great from the outside faces, shame they're always filled with concrete. I wonder why they don't plant them up?



Hello... High on the hill above the harbour, I finally found somebody who had got some alpine plants on the go in their gateposts. This is definitely going to work, the question is, can we get the double-faced coping to stay in place without the mortar?



On the lookout for some alpiney / trailing plants that would like to live in the wall.



I'm not sure what this stuff is, but it would look great trailing down the front of the wall.



More nice trailers.



Sweet. If anybody knows what any of these plants are, please let me know. Should really have taken some home with me.



This wall has the opposite effect of what i'm going for (bedding plants plopped into a concrete hole rather than alpine plants that look like they've found their way the wall naturally) - but i'm a sucker for pansies.

Day 2 of 2010

Okay, that's the front done then = Nick is shredding.



Schuh-wheet.



My side is not quite so straight because I decided to do the good thing and try to use up all the big lumpy bits. I should be able to finish it off with another thin course to get it all level and then we're done! Still not sure what to do about the coping though. There are still all those massive bits that we could dress into some sort of half-round shape but it seems like it'll waste a lot of stone, and we've not got enough to go all the way round either.



The weather had been really hot all day which means one thing. BBQ. I think we were watching this.

Oops missed a year

Well, that's a year missed out since there was any work on MegaGarden, lets get the gardening fleeces on and get the hammers out. The pile of stone in the front is pretty much all we have left to use up. The red stone in the back is from the fireplace and next to it are some unused mushroom logs, but more about them later...



Tighten up the guidelines, I think we're just going to work up to here and then get the coping on. The front face only needs one course but the side is a bit wonky and will need 2-3 courses to get up to height. Not sure how we got so far out of wack but at least the end is nigh.



Nick whips through with some super-fast precision walling as usual. I was shocked at how much progress we made, could have been something to do with not stopping for a 3-hour full English break like we used to.



On Saturday I had a bit of a play with my Christmas present from Nick. He'd got me a few bags of mycelleum impregnated wooden dowels, that i've had in the fridge since December. The second part of the present was a boot-full of freshly-cut birch logs which got the chop on Wednesday. Working for Trafford council has its perks, when you can pick the trees to be removed that aren't quite right for that park (and need a new home all full o' mushies). I had to drill about 30 holes in each log, knock the dowels in, and then seal them all with sizzlin' mushroom wax.



I've got Oyster, Shiitake and Lion's Mane logs all plugged up and waxed - next thing to do is cover them in black bin bags and either bury them or leave them in the shade (behind my dad's shed). All you have to do then is wait 18 months for the fungus to spread throughout the log, then you leave it out for another year and hopefully the critters will sprout. This is not a hobby for the impatient.



I couldn't help feeling that it looked a bit dodgy to be loading up a red Golf with limb-sized, bin-bag covered packages. Hopefully my mum won't get stopped by Operation Ringmaster on the way home.