Week Three, Burtown House, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland

The home stretch of our time in the veg garden started with some torrential rain on Monday morning which made it nearly impossible to weed the grass in between the rows of cabbage and lettuce.  Yay!  Instead we applied ourselves to a series of odd jobs in neglected corners of the garden.

The castle/tool shed and a future greenhouse, recently reclaimed from several years of weeds (by us).  All that remains is a magnificent old fig tree.

Before

After

Another task was picking up stones in a field. Any stones big enough to damage the lawn mower blade went in the wheelbarrow.

Seriously? Picking up stones, in Ireland where there is such an abundance of rock that everything is built out of it and soil is scarce. This is what I imagine Hell might be like - the endless task of picking up rocks from one pile and moving them to another pile. I'm not even kidding.

Another task, that seemed sort of ridiculous but turned into an alright time was forking cut grass into a trailer.  A few days before a neighbor showed up with his tractor and a strange attachment that looked like a bunch of combs which spun around and kind of whipped the grass out of the ground.  It left long piles of grass, which sat in the rain. On this particular day, we waited until after a massive downpour before going out and forking the soggy piles into the back of this tractor-trailer.

Somehow Donica ended up with a supervisory role.  "Not really," she says right now with a hint of indignation in her voice.

Donica couldn't resist jumping and flopping in the huge pile!

Soon the girls joined to play in the grass clippings.

And took a ride to the dump spot.

On our last night we had a big curry dinner with the whole crew: four generations of Fennells, two au pairs and us.  This group shot was right before the dance party started and before great grandma dozed off in her chair by the fire.

From left: Wendy, Bella, Jo, William, Yara, James, Michael, Mimi, Donica, Lesley and Lindsay