Wood-store

As autumn deepens and the trees and bushes are stripped of their leaves, the flocks of greenfinch take refuge in the highest canopy, flitting from tree to tree and darting down to refresh themselves in the bird baths and ponds.

The weather is decidedly cool at times and in readiness for cool evenings we have been organising the wood-store. This has been a lot of hard work this year for a couple of reasons. Firstly we had to move all the wood we had in store to enable the painters to paint the studio and garage; the wood-store runs the full length of the rear wall (10m). Secondly, we also had cut and split many of the pieces we had in store. Many were far too big; the wood-man brought the wrong size earlier on in the year. Looking on the bright side, reducing the size of the stock gave us plenty of wood for the log burner we have in the studio which is much smaller than the one in the house.

It doesn't take long really, we cut with a chainsaw and split with an axe but it does let your muscles know they have done a bit of hard work. We have a good selection of oak, ash, eucalyptus and beech. This year we have just enough small kindling wood to start the fires but may need to collect more before the end of the season.

Luis is on a tour of mosaics exhibitions and installation in Ravenna, Italy at the moment so I am busy catching up with all the little admin type jobs that seem to mount up over time and pottering about the garden tidying up and cutting back. You can catch up with his travels here on his mosaic blog, he is posting daily.

Use Google translate if you want to hear what he has to say or just enjoy the photos. Ciao ....