Gardening within liMitS: colour

17th June 2018

Birthday week and Granny clearing and sorting our house out!
It's been an eventful and chaotic week in our house and we have sorted a lot of garage sale items. The sale is next week...

Allium

The week of my birthday was not restful but a lot was achieved. I slept a lot because I think the thought of the surgery has hit me for six. Gardening was on the backburner due to other things taking priority, but the kind gifts of family have enabled me to buy some things for the garden and dear friends from far away have treated me to Ardbikie Gin and Gardener's balm for my hands. Somebody is following my blog!
My clearing of a corner for a compost bin was abruptly halted when my husband's car was written off in March... and the cleared stuff had never reached a green bin, but it was collected by the refuse lorry on Thursday. Yay!
A large amount of couch grass beside my rhubarb was cleared and a greenhouse was assembled today! This was my dear husband's attempt to get me growing from seed and saving me a fortune in pregrown plants. My brother gave me an Amazon voucher which has been spent on some of my favourites; blue poppies, chocolate cosmos and seeds and plug plants.
I've watched a lot of the garden shows on TV this year with envy, but our budget and free time is not about that this year.
We will try to enjoy our month until I go for surgery, as yes, I have a preop date the first week of July and Surgery is scheduled for mid-July, a few days before the school suumer holiday. I go to see my consultant on Thursday and I must prepare my question list...

August Enjoyment

Summer holidays took over and gardening was reduced to weeding and grass cutting. But we did enjoy the fruits of the hard work as we enjoyed time in the garden, as well as visits to gardens while on holiday in Norfolk - Felbrigg Estate was one stunning garden visited - we completed some amazing walks through different Broads and 10 different beaches were visited in a week.

Reeds on Blickling Broad

Schools In, September 6th September 2017

And another month slipped in and we are facing the builders coming in to add to the house. Added to the builder’s tasks are hard landscaping, or the removal of serious amounts of concrete. My architect liked my ideas of ponds to try and stop the flow of water from the housing estate behind and above our house straight through the garden along the concrete and eroding the surfaces as it goes. However as the levels are higher it would need to be a sunken pool, so I started to envisage a sunken seating area too. I dug a pond before preMS: it would be great exercise!

Planting in my wooden planters have been a mixture of unforeseen pests and great success! I pulled out three carrots yesterday, which we were never able to grow in St Albans (which I was told was an allotment bugbear). The ones we pulled yesterday were chunky and sweet.

Sweet chunky carrots!

The chilli plants (another bargain from Morrisons) have given us lots of sweet red chillies. And the courgettes, surprisingly, grew really well. My family in Scotland benefited from them during our travels in August.

A baby pigeon grew up in the conker tree and chomped through the Brussels sprouts (I am not heartbroken about it really). Strawberries also disappeared but they were 50p in a pound shop sale so again not a disaster. Lettuces grew so well and profusely we couldn't eat them all so they are needing composted as soon as I get off my computer.

Landscaping the garden is not in our budget, unfortunately, so I will have to look at inventiveness as my desires continue apace. I will have to be truly patient over my dream space and work shed, and be content with drawing little doodles of my imaginary home office and the demise of the rickety decrepit sheds. Even my book shed, or library, as my girls have nicknamed it, has been less than successful in displaying my exceedingly heavy book shelves. A load fell over with an almighty crash one day when we were doing other work. The girls were less keen to sleep there after that happened.