Another Week at Home

Hi there everyone 😀

Our third week at home was another busy one. After a Monday morning doing errands in town we managed to pot up all of the Impatiens and the herbs that I’d accumulated, before ending the day with our first garden BBQ … be it that we actually ate inside …

The Impatiens are the only annual I am buying this year. As we are away so often it is just too much of an effort to keep everything watered but I did feel the need for at least a splash of summer blowsiness and these will do just nicely.

We’ve planted most of them individually in small pots for the plant stand … but we have put three in Martin’s mum’s old bread pancheon which we have drilled drain holes in the bottom of …

Tuesday started with a hunt for some suitable plywood to use to replace the rotten stuff on the canopy above the front door … which is looking really shabby against the new windows …

We ended up at the local wood yard, which is always a real treat for Martin. There is just sooo much wood and the equipment they used for cutting our huge board of plywood down so we could get it in the car was just amazing … it was done in no time …

Back home I finished off tidying up the front garden which had been abandoned in favour of the Sunday afternoon BBQ at David’s, whilst Martin gave the plywood a couple of coats of wood preserver.

The back garden is actually starting to come together quite nicely now … there’s still loads to do but our time at home, coupled with some good weather, has helped us to take our time and just keep tackling things in ‘sizeable chunks’. This has meant that we’ve actually quite enjoyed some gentle pottering … getting bits done slowly, but having time to enjoy the sunshine too …

On Wednesday I was at food bank and Martin did another big chunk of jet washing and on Thursday, after Martin dropped the car off for the annual service and MOT and I supervised the window fitters replacing a broken window pane, we spent pretty much all day pottering out back in the sunshine.

The main objective was to plant the self set ferns that we’d potted up last year. We have a bit of very shady border where we have tried planting all sorts to no avail. We thought we’d cracked it when we planted a few small shrubs and hoped that would be it, but none of them thrived and we have now pulled out the last of them.

There are a few things that seem to do well there so we’ve left those and dotted the ferns in between … it is supposedly the ideal environment for them so fingers crossed this is the last time we end up replanting there …

On Friday we got the blinds back up at the new windows and actually went on to have a fairly lazy day. The grass got cut and our plans are now to rake again and then overseed and see what happens.

On Saturday it was another early start as one of our friends came round to help Martin have a go at replacing the very shabby looking canopy above the front door.

It actually went a lot easier than we all expected and we are just left needing to give it a couple more coats of wood stain … and I am hoping for a much better finish than the first coat looked, as it’s dried a bit patchy …

We got on so well that we had time to put the electric rake over the grass again and overseed it. Lawn seed is not something we normally have much luck with but we have been very generous with our sprinkling and are hoping that the birds will leave some to grow. We have everything crossed on this one and it will be a tentative few days and lots of watering before we know if our efforts will have been worth it.

On Sunday we decided to head over to mum’s whilst she’s away and do a bit of bush trimming and a bigger bit of jet washing. She been asking us to do it for ages but we’ve just had so much other stuff going on this is the first really chance we’ve had …

Four hours later and very tired we’d managed to cut back two very overgrown shrubs and finish all of the jetwashing …

We are now hoping for a few relaxing days before we head off up to Yorkshire for our annual get together with some of my old work friends … though we may try and top dress the lawn and give the canopy another coat of wood stain before we go 😜

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