The next phase of developing our lovely new site was trying to clear all the nettles, weeds, brambles and overgrown bushes which under near perfect growing conditions (sun > rain > repeat) had more or less taken control of the area. Getting through them was no mean feat as some were over 5 foot high and I nearly lost my husband to them at one point (see piccy below). We persevered however and managed to clear a path right the way through them. This enabled us to plan out the areas for our tyre swing, rope swing, fire pit and mud kitchen whilst giving some thought to the location of our forthcoming dry change area.
Keep an eye out for more updates soon...
This is the sort of stuff we had to battle through.
It's much taller & tougher than it looks - honest!
My husband disappeared for a while, lost to the wilds of SE3 but we found him again a short while after, more or less intact but mumbling something about 'never again..' (although I have a sneaking suspicion he rather enjoyed mucking about with the petrol strimmer).
Early picture of our fantastic mud kitchen (thanks so much to Rob, one of our fantastic dads, for making it for us. The children absolutely love it!). You can also just see a bit of the fire pit sneaking into the picture to the right.
Canvas for rainy days and rope swing for any day.
This gives you some idea of the size of the plot we had to clear!
It all ended happily ever after though so we thought we'd put up a little symbol signifying how fond we are of our new woodland setting :)
