Pretty, colourful flowers

All the flowersWe visited Homebase last week, a harrowing trip where we lost Scarlett for a full five minutes and found her in the outdoor bit, presumably returning to a plaster of Paris sheep that had taken her fancy. I actually ran round with a full trolley balanced with flowers without thinking to just abandon it.  Great cardio.

We managed to gather ourselves enough to pay for our purchases: lots of flowers for the long planter in the back garden, and two hanging baskets which were on offer, presumably because Britain is not likely to see the sun again this decade.

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I got sunshine

Sunflower 1…on a cloudy day.

That’s what I think when I look at the sunflowers in our flower bed, anyway.  Scarlett was sent home with a tiny green shoot in a flowerpot for Mothers’ Day, back in March.  And yes, I did cry.  A couple of my friends (you know who you are) think it’s hilarious that I cry whenever nursery give me anything Scarlett’s made, painted or planted, but it makes me so happy!  I digress.

So, we left it in its little pot and set it on the kitchen table near the window, where it started to grow.  I’ve never been very good with plants, but I tried my very best with this one.  You know, because my then 12 month old daughter planted it with her own fair hands (with help, granted) and such. Continue reading

Garden furniture

To go with our new decking and flowers, we bought some garden furniture so we can fully enjoy these sunny days.

Garden furniture

It’s a six-person set, but to squeeze six people round it on the decking, even sideways, would involve someone being very squashed next to the fence and someone at the other end of the table teetering on the edge of falling into the grass.  That’s why we’ve decided to have it as a large four-seater, and kept the other two chairs for the patio area by the French doors.

Two chairs

We just need a table to go with them – we’ve kept the old one for now but it’s kind of had its day.  You may also notice some odd slabs in this picture, this is because Barry’s taken the slabs across to make the patio area bigger, but now they’re a bit obvious.  They’ll weather (I’m reliably being told by Barry, who’s reading over my shoulder)!

Garden furniture 1

The furniture’s a set called Sienna from Homebase, black metal with a purple parasol (hence the purple flowers).  We haven’t actually had the parasol up yet, what with the sun being so fickle, but I can assure you, it does look pretty good – we saw it in store.

Check out the photo here for our fabulous dual coloured fence (it hasn’t been finished yet).

Flora

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Here’s Barry hard at work, planting some flowers. My gardening knowledge is next to zilch, so we went for pretty ones. I was in charge of the selection.

I’ve included a little gallery of the flowers we chose, they’re all white and pinky-purple, because everything we have at the minute is pink and white because of our lovely daughter!

The purples go with the garden furniture I haven’t shown you yet.

The flowers are: Nemesia; Garden Pink “Brilliant Star”; Gerbera; Cockscomb “Caracas” (who comes up with these?); Ornamental Sage. Then there’s the white ones near the middle, either side of the sage, which I have no idea what they’re called. I have a strong feeling they begin with G. Geranium? Gardenia? You tell me!

Edited: Chrysanthemums! They’re chrysanthemums!

 

Gardening in the sunshine

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I’m a bad, bad blogger. My teeny tiny daughter is taking all my time and my housework and blog are bearing the brunt! Procrastination is key, and the blog is coming first today.

I have a photo from a few weeks ago, when it was still wet, of the garden without the huge mound of dirt.  The skip was eventually collected four weeks late.

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Since the decking was put in, Barry has stained it, and painted half of the fence; there’s still one side to do.  We’ve also dropped the manhole cover and are encouraging grass to grow over it so we don’t have a big, unsightly hole in the garden any more.

It’s amazing how much better the garden looks in the sunshine!

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We’ve been using the decking a lot over the last week or so, when temperatures have been nearly 30 degrees, so getting it put in this May was excellent timing (for my maternity leave as well!).

Just getting some flowers for the raised bed, watch this space…

Pork!

Barry mistakenly thought he was going to get a mini hog roast for the princely sum of £2.99 recently.  When the leg of a pig arrived (£2.99/kg), we were surprised.  Not as surprised as our fridge, which is usually just full of Diet Coke.

We thought this may be a tad too much eating for two, so Charlie and Jaime came over with Finley again (hint, hint, Charlie, it’s your turn to cook!), and we had the most amazing roast dinner!  I’m not usually one for pork, but this was gorgeous.  I can take no praise for this one – I was at the hairdresser all morning.

He roasted the pork in shallots, garlic, rosemary, thyme (those two from our garden), and put whole apples in to roast with it, which were so delicious (we ate them like apple sauce).

We also had pepper pot cake for pudding (not sure why it’s called that, it’s got apples in it).  I was so full you could have rolled me down a hill and I couldn’t have stopped myself.

We went to see Tenacious D in Manchester last night, they were absolutely fantastic!  Great show.

Also popped some stuff on eBay this week, including our red drawers.  Hopefully they’ll go to a good home (one that will give us lots of money for them, as they’re discontinued!).

To finish, Barry thinks the empty wine bottles in the kitchen look nice.  I think they look a bit like a recycling plant, but there you go.  Anyway, I tarted them up a bit with some sage from the garden.  How pretty!

The grass is always greener

Actually, the grass is not always greener on the other side because one of our neighbour’s dogs poos freely in their garden so they have giant dead patches of grass. A good reason to get higher fences. But that’s another story.

Barry has had a plan for some time of having decking in the garden. By plan, I don’t mean some vague concept of “we need to do something to the garden”; I mean plan. He’s drawn it out on graph paper so many times I’m surprised he can’t recite our garden’s exact dimensions. I was reluctant to consider decking at first. I’ve seen some examples and it can look very cheap, and it also requires some upkeep (a dirty word in our house), so I didn’t think much to it.

However! My ex-uncle (for an explanation, please see the post where we broke his sander) has lovely decking, which he put in himself and I really like, possibly because he’s stained it dark and surrounded it in pretty flowers.

And yea, I was converted to deckingism.

And yea, I had to google the word “yea” to make sure I was spelling it correctly. It looks a bit too much like “yeah”.

Regardless, let me give you, ahem, the lay of the land of our garden. Our garden slopes towards the back right hand corner. It slopes down to the right, and down to the far end. The patch of land most likely to get any sun at all is the back right corner, which is also where we very cleverly placed our shed. We used to have a rabbit, so there’s a big square patch of dead grass where the hutch was, and I hate the paving stones, which I’d call a “prison” grey. Hence the plan.

I’m not even sure this will get done this year after all the interior fun with the kitchen and living room, but I can tell you what we’re thinking. We’re imagining decking down the right hand side of the garden, and we’ll have to have two or three separate areas (with steps between them), otherwise we’ll end up about five feet above the ground by the end of the garden. Barry’s got visions of firepits and barbecues dancing in his head, but one step at a time, hey?

Updates on Saturday’s activities – it’s (as you can tell by the picture) been snowing, so we’re really in dire need of a radiator now! We’re being quite indecisive about which one to get, so I think some snappy decision-making’s in order. We nipped to Wickes to get some tester paints (not long and we’ll have the complete range) for the kitchen. After Karen commented about brilliant white not being so brilliant for walls, I’ve been wittering on about maybe a pale grey for the kitchen too, but Barry’s having none of it. In retaliation, I’ve painted two different greys on the wall (and in the corner, thanks Karen!) and I’m hoping he’ll come around. God forbid we have to paint it twice.

I’ve also finally finished painting the living room walls, as shown. There are still doors and skirting boards to do, but they’re going to wait until the kitchen’s finished. Meanwhile, Barry was fitting some of the plasterboard we took down into the gaps in the walls, which should hopefully make it a bit warmer as well.



He’s also plugging up the fan that went from the loo to the outside world, but the expanding foam went a bit wrong and it looks like it’s been really ill.




Our dining room table’s currently in pieces, and we’ve moved all of the chairs up to a spare room so they’re out of the way for when the kitchen comes (a week and a half, people!). It does, however, look to the casual observer that we’re ready to play musical chairs at a moment’s notice.