The Mingary Castle restoration blog was written by Jon Haylett, who lives in the local village of Kilchoan. Now that restoration is almost complete Holly and Chris Bull will take over to report on bringing the Castle back to life.

Friday 26 February 2016

Mud, mud, glorious mud!!

So the garden has been slow and hard progress but looking back we can now see that we are getting there. Back in October the soil was placed in the garden and Chris started the task of levelling, stone picking and weeding this.
He even managed to get it looking pretty level and seeded before the weather turned in November.
And the seed actually grew (We used Mingary Mix from Watson seed - it only seemed right!) How ever once the grass started growing it soon became clear we had a problem.....
As you can just make out here there are still lots of LARGE stones that have worked there way up and the soil sunk in lots of unhelpful ways leaving us with a terrible lawn. So we started again and took the rotavator to the lot of it and created a monster.
It might not seem that bad but the stone in the middle is a big as a red house brick! So we set about hand rotavating it next...
We have been very lucky this week not only because it is dry!! but because we have had the help of two work-aways called Norma and Alex. They are all the way from Mexico which means they are still getting use to the lack of heat from the sun but have been amazing!
Once we hand rotavate we roll, then we rake one way, then we roll again in the other direction, crisscrossing the bed to try and create a level lawn. The next stage is to go across it again and pick out more stones and more weeds, making holes again in the lawn :-(

Then we raked it to try and level out the holes. Next comes the treddling trying to squeeze all the air out of the soil so that it won't sink once its seeded. This helped warm us all up today as the breeze was pretty nippy! Norma was pleased to be warm.

Then...........now you may have guessed it by now.......we raked and rolled it in both directions so it is ready for it FINAL rake tomorrow before putting seed down.
There is still a huge amount to do but when it is finished you will find me (Holly) sat with a G&T in hand admiring it and telling anyone that will listen about all the different processes of making a lawn!
PS anyone wanting to volunteer and be part of the castle garden process please email enquiries@mingarycastle.com I can promise coffee, biscuits and our eternal thanks!

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