READERS…many apologies!  I was trying to cut and paste Woody Dukes’ excellent emails about the recent repairs of gates and fences and arbors at the garden.  Unfortunately all the visuals failed, so here, in my own words is what happened.  As Woody began to examine the arbor and several gates, he found the rotten members were in worse shape than he originally imagined.  He had to remove the arbor completely to rebuild it, he had to rebuild the gate to the service area, he had to reset posts and cut decorative motifs…i.e. A LOT OF WORK!  With the excellent assistance of Christopher Hackett, David Lichter and Don Roberts, the work is coming along nicely.  Woody chose not to use pressure-treated posts as they have a modern look, instead to set them in gravel to wick the water away from the posts.  He was also able to reuse historic segments froom earlier repairs.  In the interest of time (mine AND yours!) I’m just going to include here a long series of process photos without captions, but I think you can readily see what happened!  (Sorry for the snafu!!)

The arbor was found to have so much rot that repair would be difficult…

and has he worked along Woody soon discovered that the wood was filled with ants…

the arbor was going to have to be totally rebuilt.

and now it starts to rain for a few days…see you next week!