Part time gardner!

Here I am planting courgettes, cucumber, lettuce and other lovely stuff donated by Jodi Goram and Pete the Hat.
Some flowers including verbena add a little colour!
But not as much colour as this fella has brought to my life - introducing Mr. Re Head AKA Rich!
Me peas - yep they tasted lovely! A second sowing all got eaten by slug - boo hoo!
Thanks to Rich for helping me out in my garden - that weekend we got more blue chipping and laid them, took a load of stuff to skip and plated stuff!
Here is me with blue hands - and red hair - whats that about?!
Me peas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love 'em!

Slán go fóill, agus míle bhuíochas duit as ucht na h-éisc go léir

Now this one will be an update and a half! Here we are in March 06 and the last update was July 05 - Yikes!

Well, I will try and start from where we were.

We built the raised area sucessfully and yes it's still standing! Then over a few hot summer days, we laid the granite sett patio and circle lawn edging. Now I know its not the best quality work you'll ever see but I am hoping that once the gravel and plants are in place, and the setts and mortar become weathered you won't really notice!

I have to say it was hellish work and something I will never attempt again. I think this kind of job requires experience and skill. However, we did manage to get them into fairly reasonable circles and they are certainly not going to move for the next 100 years or so!









Anyway here is the finished product being fitted with lawn!


The laying of the lawn, also meant the small matter of delivery of 1 tonne of topsoil, which was wheelbarrowed in by my good self and spread before actually laying the lawn. Unfortunately, the lawn does not look so green after the winter and somehow has gone a bit lumpy! Mmm I have some grass seeds but not sure what to do about the lumpiness! Any ideas anyone?










You don't supose the lumpy soil had anything to do with my lawn mowing equiptment do you?
















No, I guess it might have been Rachel! What are you doing????














Ah, these are pictures of our holiday in Ireland when we visited a old Irish village theme park type thing - it was actually very good!

Anyway, winter came, and I got a lovely cat called Chorlton .





Bless, he does look so skinny in that pic! Well, he been at home for 41/2 weeks now and has been properly fed up! Now he has a nice rotund belly ;-)








The next stage for garden, will be vege's and hardy perenials as I cannot afford all those lovely big plants I wanted to get at the moment (due to learning to drive - test date 20/04/06!) and I got a bit excited about growing veg anyway! So more on that soon, bye.

When will this hell be over?

It felt like we turned a corner when the footings were completed. But still I had to worry about how I was going to build a wall for the first time ever, ARGH! I mean, all I have to go on is some notes from the internet, some pink string and my two weedy arms to lift all that heavy stuff and mix mounds of mortar. But the thing that really worried me was how was I going to cut all those concrete bricks in half - cos it looked like a scary skilled job to me.

So lets forget about that for a while, as I did, and play around with the nice bits, and dream about what the garden will look like if and when it is ever completed! We set out the granite setts to see how far they would go (ie. if we had enough!) and what they would look like on the ground.


Pretty eh?

The garden stayed like this for some time, well just long enough for the weeds to start up again. Great, but as I cannot face pulling up anymore weeds, it is weedkiller this time!

So, in an effort to actually get on with the garden, we set about the many trips needed to get all the bricks that were required to buld the raised area, and the sharp sand and the concrete! In our travel's we came across this marvellous invention, a brick that you can saw! No more worries about splitting concrete bricks - these will do the job just nicely! Thank you Wickes - I think I might even forgive you for delivering the wrong bath at our last house, but thats another story!

We needed 60 bricks on all, and here is a picture of me laying them!

See those pipes, they are for drainage - very important in a raised area, unless you are building a pond! Ah, I feel so clever!

And here we are the finished walls for the raised area, ready for rendering (another headache!)

One pink closet later

Well, it has been a long time since I have updated the blog! I know many of you have been eagerly awaiting more news on the garden progress, and I can only apologise, but hope that todays input will satisfy your curiosity.

In June, I took 3 days off work and got stuck in, or at least that was the plan. The weather was good for a change, the trench for the footings for the raised area were dug, we had made numerous trips to B+Q for ballast, sharp sand and cement and we tried to order a cement mixer for that day, but there were none available!

OK, plan two - not to waste good DIY time, we set to work on finishing the closet which had been unusable since Christmas when we had to stop work on the bedroom for the festivities. So three days of plastering, fitting architrade round the new doorway, wallpapering, painting etc - our new closet was ready to be put to use again! As you can see it has a bit of a girly pink theme!








Monday morning, the cement mixer arrived, but unfortunately it is a rather unweilding heavy peice of machinery - something I did not forsee. Consequently, I could not lift the thing onto its legs on my own, so I had to wait for Rachel to come home after work - it is definately a two woman job! We started the process of filling up our trenches with concrete (5 part 20mm ballast to1 part portland cement) mixed with water and a bit of washin up liquid.

Mmmm those trenches swallowed up alot of concrete, so off we were back to B+Q filling up the back of the Ford Ka with as much ballast and cement the poor thing could manage - in all I think we used about 20 bags of ballast!



So after poring what probably was a few tonnes of concrete back into the garden, which I have to say does not feel good, especially since it cost so much (£60 - who would have thought?) and becasue of the worry about whether the raised area will look good or if we will hate and want to rip it out - in which case the only option is to move house!

We were left with this:

Looks great, does it not? Throughout all this hard work, I could not help questionsing myself, why did I want a raised area in the first place? It seemed like such alot of effort (one which I never appreciated at the start - I thought it would be a case of throwing up a few bricks which might take a day or two at most!), for something that once completed could end up looking like a 1980's garden monstrosity! Well, we'll see..........

Rain stops play! So lets talk politics instead! Thanks Matt.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -8
Conservative -21
	Liberal Democrat 43
	UK Independence Party 11
	Green 40

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Blame it on the weather!

It may seem like we have not done much to the garden, and in reality we could have done more if it were not for the Grand National and the rain! The good news is that we both won the Grand National by betting on Hedgehunter, the winner, but with all the excitement we ended up getting a little worse for wear and ended up hung over the next day which was perfect gardening weather.

Anyway, on with gardening news - and to make up for the lack of apparent progress, here are some pictures of the garden when we first moved in and before we took down the big old shed and Rachel broke up a couple of tonnes or more of concrete with only a sledgehammer and crowbar! (now tell me who the butch one is?!)



Here is Rachel posing for the Lesbian beauty contest! A contender me thinks!





See Rachel can look happy doing hard gardening graft!




Well, Sunday, Jules' hangover day, Rachel did most of the digging up of the turf;

as you can see in this picture:

Then Monday (Rachels Birthday), I did LOADS of turfing up while Rachel was at work and then while she was at home relaxing!

Jules digging up the turf with her implement of destruction!

Jules forking in Rachel's Gay and Proud top.

But back to the present. We have completed the removal of the turf and weeds and everything, and put them into piles! Umm what shall we do with those!

After contemplating the cost of hiring a skip and seeking advice from my manager Sian, we decided to buy a seive from Wilko's and try and seive the turf from the soil and use the soil in the raised area! Nice idea, but how long does it take two lesbians to seive 5 tonnes of soil? Too f**king long!

So instead we decide to pay for a skip, and then spend Tues night after work moving 5 tonnes or more of soil and turf in a wheel barrow and stuff it into said skip!

As you can see the front garden needs work too - I think that requires a separate Blogger! Something for you all to look forward too!
and then the final result is an empty canvas for us to create our perfect garden. Yeah right!

SLOW PROGRESS!

We have been off work for 11 days and the garden is far from complete! Rachel was in bed and unable to do much for the first week and the weather (rain) has hampered our progress - not that I am complaining because it gave us the chance to chill out a little and visit a few garden centres!

On Sunday the 20th of March I started to attack the the overgrown garden, cutting back grass and weeds. It was hard to know where to start and whether I should dig and pull or just chop back the growth first! I soon got the hang of it though and cut back the grass and it looked alot more manageable. The next afternoon, I did a bit more clearing, while Rachel slept off the anaethestic.

A giant mound of grass and weeds were piling up, and I got bored with cutting the grass and and digging the weeds, so I decided the next job was to attack the overgrown ivy, which virtually covered the whole of the back concrete brink wall. The ivy had obviously served its purpose very well, hiding that ugly wall, but now it had got to the stage where it was not clear whether the ivy was actually more hideous than the wall underneath!

Having pulled (by that I mean, attacked with a hammer and shears!) some of the ivy from the wall, I decided that a cheap pair of pruning shears were required. So armed with a good excuse, we planned the next day to visit Wilko's, a garden centre and to go look at the pink granite chippings we wanted to order.

Another purchase from Ebay arrived, our bistro garden patio table and chairs. We could not wait to test out the chairs, which are very comfortable! I can't wait until we are sat out in the garden with a glass of wine at our new patio table and chairs! Here they are!

The next day, 24th of March, after a Greggs

cornish pasty for brunch, we set off to visit CED Ltd (see links) in Langley Mill to check out the aggregates. Well, I may well be very sad to admit it, but I did get rather excited about the agregrates! The pink granite chipping were perfect - a lovely uniform colour of pink and light grey, 14mm size which is ideal (and hopefully large enough to stop cats pooing in our garden!) and damn cheap too! Delivery is a bit pricy at aprox £100 for 3 tonnes, but it will still work out cheaper than elsewhere. The staff were extremely friendly and helpful, and female, which makes a change! So I think we will be ordering 3 tonnes of pink granite, a few bags of purple slate, and a few bags of both black and red polished cobbles!

On the way back from Langley Mill, we stooped off at Shipley garden centre, which seemed to have a bit of a sale on. Having ripped off most of the Ivy we need some wicker type fence to cover the ugly grey wall, and to my suprise and delight they had a good range of of this type of fencing on sale! The wicker fence was reduced to about £40, but we spotted some bamboo fencing - which would work well with the Japanese theme - which I seem to be moving further towards everyday - which was only £20 for the 2m x 4m that we needed! We bought it! Along with a double shephards hook, which I will hang the two pink glass lanterns I bought from Ikea.

Over the bank holiday weekend, I attacked the ivy somewhat more successfully, now that I had the help of my new 99p Wilko's pruning shears. The ivy came down as far as the shed and we fixed bamboo cane fence to the wall. We also made a couple of trips to the recyling centre, taking the grass and ivy cutting, and losing one of our big green waste bags (£1.99 wilko's - I cannot tell you how FAB these bags are!) when trying to empty it into the skip and the whole thing fell in! Oops! Luckily, I had purchased a couple more of the these bags in Wilko's, so we had three to work with which was perfect because that was all that we could fit into the back of Rachel's Ka!

Rachel did and excellent job of painting our side of the neighbours fence, which looks like it might fall down at any minute! And with the new bamboo fence now in place, it was certainly time for a well earned rest which inclued a couple of bottles of wine, a few spliffs and loud music (sorry to our neighbours!). A hang over the next day (Tuesday the29th of March), meant no much work was done, but I did manage to clear some weeds and plants from the old bedding area.

Now that I am back at work, the time for the garden will be limited to evenings and weekends, and once again the rain today is not boding well for any work to be done tonight. Ideally, I would like the garden cleared by Saturday evening ready for the purchasing of sand and cement and laying out of weed control membrane and grantite setts on the Sunday. I forsee at leat 2 trips to the recyling centre with some heavy bags of soil, grass and weeds!