I really, really want to finish the hedges this season, and I’m starting to feel a bit of time pressure. I intend to get the digging done by end of September, so I can plant in October.

This third and last section of the hedge has the hardest soil of them all. The first 20 centimetres is soft and light, partly because of the digging that was done last year for the wall. Below that, it’s all heavy clay. It’s slow going. Some parts feel like concrete, especially where it’s really dry. I aim to dig for about an hour every evening. This corner has been so hard that I’ve barely made any progress in the first days.

Almost every evening, Adrian is there to keep me company. Digging in this hard soil is no fun for him, so instead he just plays nearby. Currently he is building a small army from some plastic flowerpots. Each size is a different creature, strongly inspired by Kingdom Rush. There are goblins, and orcs, and some other thing… it may have been trolls; I forget the details. Some monster or other, in any case.

They all climb around on the wall and the mounds of earth and occasionally chase or attack each other. But their fighting appears to be good-natured: when a goblin fell off the bridge into the ravine, an orc quickly came to the rescue.