New Forest & Dorset Bike Hire

Today, children also learnt how to use secateurs and loppers to cut larger pieces of wood before turning these into bows and arrows using whittling knives. Apparently it is the type that is used in Japanese Temple gardens – perhaps the only authentic part of the whole thing! I then tried to start a rose garden but it didn’t work – too dry and too much shade.

Glitter Bomb – Courtesy of ~ Teresa Johnson @ Archery360This is a popular activity at novelty shoots, and it’s no wonder why. Fruit Game – Courtesy of ~ Teresa Johnson @ Archery360There’s nothing like the satisfaction of splitting an apple – or thumping a pumpkin, or just about any kind of fruit – with an arrow! Then it’s a straight head-to-head nearest to the printed number 5 on the target. Keep going until there are only two archers left with arrows. At the end, any archer who gets the wrong colour has that arrow removed and placed under the target.

Pub Beer Garden

Fortunately with our woods between us and the coast, the house and garden have been protected from the worst of the easterlies and the snow didn’t drift too much (not that drifts stopped Lola when we were out on walks – seeing them more as hurdles to be leaped). The plants are pretty standard garden fare – Rudbeckia, Thalictrum, Artichoke, Hemerocalis, Agapanthus, Rosemary, various Euphorbia, Eryngium, Lilies – but hopefully over time I will add some more unusual plants. Wherever possible I have also grown from seed (with limited success I have to be honest) or transplanted self-sown seedlings from other parts of the garden. First the grass had to be lifted (manually of course – absolutely no point rotavating it all into the ground only for it to reappear in a few weeks), barrow and distribute play forrest arrow about twelve bulk bags of gravel and of course plant the plants. Of course it was much more time-consuming than I expected, taking the best part of four or five months and it’s not quite finished even now. This summer I finally embarked on the main project – to create a larger gravel garden that would also house a BBQ, fire pit and eating area away from the house (partly to provide a new space but also to ensure that any flames are as far away from the house as possible – especially after some guests decided to use a throw away BBQ on the room five deck and set it alight).

• Driveway – this is the most recent addition to the garden. There are limits to how dry a dry garden can be if the plants haven’t had enough time to bed in For a long while it was a narrow strip leading to nowhere. • Gravel Garden – this was the first part of the garden that we planted – because it was a long way from the house and the building work. • Japanese Inspired garden – this has only partly been completed. I didn’t realise how hard it was to maintain this kind of the garden through the seasons.

At the garden’s centre would be a raked, gravel ‘sea’ with a mossy mountainous island rising from it…. As it turned out we had more time on our hands in 2020 then we expected and that meant that we could create the next part – our take on a Zen garden. It’s almost a year since we dug the pond – the first stage of a Japanese-inspired garden.

E-Bike Fun in the New Forest

Have you ever made your own sword or bow and arrow?

Board Games

• Cottage garden – this is a riot of blues, pinks and white. • White garden – we initially said that this was influenced by Sissinghurst but after a guest told us that she was the archivist here we stopped saying it (that’s where we got the idea but in no way do we think that we are on a par with them). So not unusually for such a large garden, we have created some separate rooms to provide some variety. Initially I pretty much threw in whatever I could find in the garden centre. It’s not fancy (it’s still made of plastic) but it really helps with growing from seeds (though this year I hardly managed to germinate a single one – no idea what I was doing wrong. Fortunately Bruce has had more success with his veggies).

However, not all animals went straight to the arena. The second and more popular method was the use of the net, since this could be deployed for the capture of animals in bulk. During the imperial age, the main supply of animals for the arena appears to have been from the Near East and Egypt. However, this was merely part of life in a society where animals were regularly slaughtered in public. To the modern world, such wholesale slaughter of animals seems both cruel and unacceptable.