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...

Absolutely cream-crackered...

So, five steps back in, two to go, but I am out of cement and sand. Even if I did have them I am devoid of any energy to do much let alone stagger inside for a drink and a calming blog.

Current developments:

The huge volumes of cement...

Four in!

Five in!

Now to have a nice cup of tea and ponder when to pick up my daughters who are desperate to be home early.

The mystery of the growing railway sleepers...

Ten years ago I buried some rubbish soil behind the sleeper steps towards the back of the garden. I remember flippantly saying "in ten years I will have to deal with that". Actually it was eight years. Ah well. I am certainly paying the penalty. It is brutal hard work, and I am missing the pint of blood I donated yesterday!

I have had to dig out beneath and behind each step and then mix cement to pour in. I am rubbish at cement mixing, and am also probably digging out too much so it is taking a long long time. I am not helped by the roots stretching across that make spadework very difficult, or the large stones I hid there so long ago.

You can see the progress I have made in the photos. It has been very very slow work, and as you can see from the last one, pretty exhausting.

3 down, four to go. This one had grown overnight. When I came to put it back the hole was 10cm too small!

And now for a smoothie!