Pruning, washing, moving earth...

A nice sharp, bright day today. I intended to keep filling up the middle raised bed by digging earth from the back of the garden, but also chopping 5cm from all the lawn edges. MBH worked at pruning the beds either side of the steps. I did OK, but was distracted by keeping the children clear of MBH, minor jobs and remembering to squeeze the gates so that you couldn't see straight through them! I was still glum all day after putting my foot through the ceiling of the kitchen when doing the plumbing for the extension...

This is just annoying really, since we need to get plasterers in anyway, but still. What a muppet.

The beds before and after:





And the jasmine, which is just about giving over at the moment:

You can see the garlic coming up in the background, and the frame I put in today - this had sunflowers growing up it last year.


A shame we don't have htm-smell, because this is really fragrant at the moment.


I also put the kids to work - and they did a great job!

The Extension preparation

After probably two years of humming, harring, planning and preparing, we finally expect the builders at 8:00 tomorrow morning, with a JCB. We had to prepare the ground for them, saving and destroying various plants.


E. photographed me struggling with the frame with H. "helping".


Then we yanked out the pyracantha (nowhere for this one to go, so it gets the chop) and various herbs, that are now distributed around the garden.



Then I noticed the cable supplying the garden shed and thought that was best dug out rather than chopped by a JCB. And here we are, ready for the off.

Autumn Leaves

Some fine colours and patterns in the garden at the moment.



Can't remember what this is called! NOT Boston Ivy though.


Zebra Grass


You'd never know about the grass in front of the bench now. The area is much more level than it was and can be counted a success!

Bark

The bark was delivered on Wednesday. I estimated three bags and calculated five, so ordered four.

From The Surprised Gardeners

I had help carrying it up the garden...




But it took a long time!




And we missed a bit. Today we are going to see if we can spread it out a bit, rather than buy a new bag.


The finished section. It looks good this deep, not sure if it will still look as good after having shifted some around.

Another tree goes...

One of the apple trees has been scheduled for the chop, and today we took action. It has always grown too fast and this year produced three apples, that all went bad.

Harriet guarding the tree?

From The Surprised Gardeners

1 minute later

From The Surprised Gardeners

The last step

From The Surprised Gardeners

Later after all the bark moved around...

Finally back in the garden!

Last weekend was a complete write off. Tamsin horizontal, feeling awful and me under the weather and juggling three kids. It also lashed down all Sunday. Not good, especially with me back at school.

But in the last couple of days of the long holiday I did manage to finish the steps and get the raised beds in situ.


I made it level using the soil dug out from behind the steps, and the bargain basement laser level from screwfix ;)





We have also eaten some of Tamsin's multi-coloured carrots. Poor crop this year though. I think there were only two, so they had to go a long way.


This weekend we got a fair bit done too around managing the kids and catching up with sleep. It is not often you get "before and after" in the same shot, but I managed it in this one. Finally I got round to clipping the front hedge.




And the finished article:



The best things in the vegetable garden are the carrots and the squash. Elizabeth was practising her photography skills with these today.

Carrots and back to the steps...

We got some carrots today, not that many, but enough for a photo. I fear that we need to pay much more attention to the soil in the veg patch and not trust to luck.


I also went back to the steps today, after two weeks of damp holidays and a few days of recovering and feeling lethargic. Tomorrow we head off again, and I wanted to get something done.

I had decided after an idea from Dad, that the top step would have to be the bottom step. This left a problem of what to make the bottom step and to solve that I decided on "stone" there is already "stone" at the top of a pair of steps feeding in to the lawn and the new chair will be on a "stone" plinth. I am just going to be adding to the "stone". Getting the bottom step out was not too hard, but pleasingly did require some force. Hopefully I have not affected the second step too much though it definitely shifted a little.

Fortunately I had two bits of stone lying around and only needed to buy one more. One is slightly chipped, but not enough to notice and one has a very fortuitous break that follows the line of the garden...

From The Surprised...

I was not the only one working on steps...