An old half barrel used as a shrub-tub decided to finally give up the ghost during Storm Eunice.
My Lovely Cousin has always been the brains of the outfit, and she suggested carefully wrapping the remains in log-roll, so I did a quick measure of an identical tub followed by a rough Pi x D in my head to get the circumference, then nipped out to our local sawmill and timber-yard to get some materials.
Next, I carefully stripped away the old staves and the hoops that had completely rusted through. Luckily the root ball and barrel contents were moist enough to stay relatively intact without crumbling …
… before equally carefully wrapping it with 300mm log-roll.
“Huzzah!” My rough calculations turned out to be spot on.
I used some builders’ strapping “round the back” to hold the ends together. Note that all my screwdrivers are cordless.
That’s the hard bit done.
Following the storm, and having spent its whole life living in a beer barrel, the poor old shrub was suffering from brewer’s droop …
… so it needed something to make it erect. As the vampire hunter said to Dracula, “How do you like your stake?” This was my dad’s club hammer. He used to call it chloroform.
An application of garden twine, tidying up the gravel, and job-jobbed.
On completion, this courting couple came along to view my handiwork from the lawn.
