On 11/8/06 06:58, in article
, "Farm1"
please@askifyouwannaknow wrote:
snip
I suspect tatht he lakes may have been dug
using horses and a hand guided scoop. I'm sure I've sen pics of this
somewhere. Ocassionally one sees these scoops in old farm yards but
they really only held as much dirt as a good sized brickeys barrow
does today.
We're going to Knightshayes today if we have enough time, so I'll see what I
can find out!
My husband is 73 and still does a full day's work on the
nursery or digs in the garden etc. and I doubt he'll ever stop.
He's a lot
fitter than I am! We always have a quiet smile when some stripling
of 65
comes in and tells us he's moving to a house with a smaller garden
now that
he's getting older!
:-)) I'm always amazed at the anchor person for Australia's best
gardening show. This bloke was born in Britain in 1927 and is so fit
that he puts the young people on the show to shame. He's forever
digging beds with gay abandon and talking 90 to the dozen without a
puff or wheeze and only looks about 60. He's been a Communist all his
life and became a gardener because he kept getting sacked from
factories etc but figured out that the gentry needed gardeners. A
truly fascinating man and an inspirationt oa ging gardeners. He has a
garden of over 10 acres plus does this show weekly..
Don't approve of the Communist bit. ;-) But he sounds just the sort of
person old Tom was. Often there's also an element of 'just get on with it'
rather than moaning or complaining about life's smaller or larger
difficulties and I'm sure that has something to do with it. I had an
elderly man helping me in the last garden I had and he seemed at first to be
working very slowly and I found myself wondering if he'd ever get half the
work finished on the one day a week that he came. I discovered rapidly
that, having worked on the land all his life, he knew exactly how to pace
himself and got twice or three times as much done as someone who rushes
outside, tears into each new job and then has to go and have a nice lie down
because they're exhausted!
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
http://www.discoverdartmoor.co.uk/