Gardening

Thought I'd show what I've been up to in the garden. I moved in (July last year) too late to plant anything summery so had to make to with some containers of things pilfered from Mum's garden. This is what the garden looked like on the day I completed on the purchase (June) last year.

And this is what it looked like last weekend!


All that stuff about gravel being low maintenance is total cobblers. OK, so you don't have to mow it every week. But weeds grow through it (this is with a plastic membrane thing underneath, which is meant to stop the weeds). The weeds grow along under the gravel and have roots that reach for far enough. And they grow like nothing I've ever seen so it looks **** if it doesn't get weeded every week. I had the raised bed in the corner put in in January (me, lift a railway sleeper or two? I think not, have you seen the size of my muscles?!), along with a new side gate as the old one was rotten.

The outhouse still needs sorting out. This is it emptied (it's usually full of my bike, assorted garden tools, various boxes, my veg box delivery and other random things). When the house was built (sometime between 1902 and 1909) it was the loo as the house wouldn't have had a bathroom. Fear not, I do have a bathroom now (one was put into one of the bedrooms upstairs) but my Mum grew up in a house without a bathroom and only an outside loo so we're not that far off those days. I need to get a shelf put up in there, but I'm not very good at drilling holes in walls so am going to wait until I find someone who can help.

These are potato plants, which have done what the instructions on the BBC gardening website (excellent for the completely clueless) said they would. One of the tubs is a birthday present for my brother, who has got a similar "low maintenance" garden and therefore can't grow much.

The neighbour at the bottom of my garden gave me some leftover cabbage and sprout plants. I'm not convinced they'll grow in tubs, but we'll see what happens. These tubs have a water reservoir thing in the bottom. I'm not sure how my garden's going to cope over the summer if the weird hot weather continues and I'm away most of each week so won't be able to water.


And I had LOTS of fun getting through the gravel and plastic (how come the weeds get through it but I have trouble?!) to plant three miniature fruit trees. This is the pear tree, with a lilac in a pot behind it. I added the log roll (after going all over the place to find an FSC certified one, they have them at Homebase in case anyone else wants one) to keep the gravel (grrr) at bay and then added bark chippings on top of the soil to act as a mulch (does it sound like I know what I'm talking about?)



And I've planted some things in my mini greenhouse and look, something green has appeared! It might grow faster if I didn't keep going outside every half hour to look at it. Ah, the joys of working from home...

This is, er, a Thing, which I pilfered from Mum's last year. I like the way the leaves are starting to grow.

And my fuchsia (as pruned at the same time as lovelife) is going great guns now! I won't mention the lovelife... And the Azalea (pink thing to the right) is flowering rather early - hmm, global warming in action again?!

And Blueadt saw my last post about painting the fence and how Claire had yarn to match her fence (scroll down to bottom pic) - and sent me a skein to match mine! Thank you!! This is Rowanspun DK and it's very yummy and soft. It doesn't look like a very good match in this pic (well, on my monitor anyway) but it is!

Oh, and I have been knitting. This is my first attempt at lace, and I'm totally addicted!