sunday evening

Well...

... let's just say I sat on a stool on a paving stone in the general vicinity of what will become my lovely new seating area, and leave it at that, shall we?

No point aiming for perfection I say!

sunday morning

Generally Sunday mornings in this house are pretty lazy. Breakfast in bed, perhaps a call to or from a friend to suggest meeting up for lunch, then a mid morning, mid afternoon trip to a cafe, or a friend's house, to drink tea and while away a few hours nattering and plotting.

Today I woke relatively early, and sneaked downstairs. The house was pretty tidy, which is rather unusual, but felt good.

We don't have much of a view from our kitchen, and the sun only hits the window early in the morning, and I often miss it. Today I didn't.

It feels like a day for an adventures.

Getting-things-done adventures, these, though. Doing-of-things-that-have-been-hitherto-put-off adventures.

I've been inspired this morning, in a roundabout kind of a way, by a lovely friend who I met through the internet, and who I've only spoken to once in real life, over several cups of tea in a cheery little cafe (of course) at the seaside. I ambled over the fence to her blog over breakfast, and found this beautiful post, talking about following your dreams, in which, right there at the end, she says this cheery little blog is inspirational. I'm blushing! How utterly wonderful, and what a lovely thing to wake up to!

So I figured I'd best get on and do something inspirational, if you can call digging holes and visiting the DIY shop inspirational, that is, or else I'll be thought of as a fraud!

And so, my tea is in hand, my wellies are on, and I'm heading out into the garden to level the soil, ready for laying my pavings. I've not eaten Sunday breakfast out there, but I very much intend to eat my tea sat on that patio later this evening.

(of course, that involves a trip to the garden centre, laying pavings, building a fence and numerous other things, so we'll see, but that's my intention!)

There's also bikes to fix, and presents to make and wrap (just in case you thought it was turning into a little bit too much of a building site round here).

Progress report, with photos, later....

on saturday I drove to Wales...

... I very nearly didn't, because I'd spent all week dashing about the country on trains, and I really didn't feel like doing more dashing.

However, sometimes you just have to, because you know that when you get there, you'll appreciate having made the effort.

And when I lay in the back of the car with the door open, looking out on this (slightly murky, I admit) view, I knew I'd made the right decision.

Bizarrely, the only other photograph I took all weekend were of breakfast.

Strange, that.

Today has been altogether more mundane - a working at home day, with a short break in the middle for shifting a load of soil over that there hand-built wall.

'it'll only take you 5 minutes to shift that lot love' said the driver, as he drove off.

I should have given him a spade.

Needless to say, it took two of us a fair bit longer than 5 minutes, but it's all in place now (good job as it was blocking half the road). I'm planning to eat my breakfast outside on Sunday morning - think I'll make it??

I've been smiling every time I've walked into the living room this week and spotted these flowers (rescued from the reduced bin at the florists), popped into two old china cups from a picnic basket. How extremely jolly!

I've finally managed to get out into the garden this week - I must confess to avoiding it, because it's still a mess of rubble and pavings, and it makes me ever so slightly grumpy every time I see it.

But what kind of an attitude is that for a cheery person to have?!

A daft one - that's what.

So, I armed myself with trowel, green bin bags (the council collects garden waste here and turns it into compost), and a camera (and a cup of tea, of course)

While staring in a slightly grim fug at the beetroots refusing to grow on the windowsill, and the basil that just won't get more than 3 leaves whatever I do to it, I had a revelation.

We've got a small garden here, and we are NEVER going to grow a substantial part of our food. Last year we had an abundance of yellow courgettes, and one broad bean pod. One. I like plants - but I never was very good at keeping them alive. Every year I plant things (late), forget to water them, then put them outside for the slugs to eat, while I stare on morosely thinking about what a terrible gardener I am.

The things that do best in my garden are the things that look after themselves.

So - my revelation. Why on earth do I do this to myself every year?? Because I want a beautiful and productive garden, that's why! Because I like the idea of growing my own food and I believe gardens should be useful as well as beautiful.

Well, guess what? The fruit bushes are looking great - they look after themselves. Maybe if I watered them more they'd do better - but they manage.

There's plenty of herbs that are flourishing, all on their own - sage, rosemary, chives, lemon balm, st john's wort, all come back year on year, as well as the rhubarb, and masses of mint. The honeysuckle spreads over more and more of the house each week, it seems.

So, as of now, my garden is getting low maintenance. Well, aside from the major seating project, that is.

I'm not going to try a big pile of annual veg any more. I'm going to plant the whole thing up with fruit bushes and perennial herbs, and spend more time sitting out there admiring the view, eating rhubarb crumble, sipping herb tea, and scoffing blueberries.

Why on earth didn't I think of that before??

And now, flushed with my own ingenuity, I'm heading for the bath.

what I don't do

Ooh, just look at those scrummy redcurrants, all waiting to ripen!

My mum's been visiting this weekend, and we've spent almost all of the weekend in the garden. It was starting to feel a little overwhelming, but a weekend's work has sorted that out, and it feels half manageable again now, although there's still plenty to do.

Stupidly, I didn't take many 'before' photos, and now it's gone all gloomy so my 'after' photos all look like 'before' photos anyway...

In fact, I debated whether to share these at all, they're so uninspiring! And I do like to be inspired when I look back over my little blog.

But then I got to thinking that the reason I started blogging in the first place was to share photos of my garden as it changed over the seasons, and if I was only going to share pretty photos, then I wasn't going to share many photos at all, because my garden mostly *isn't* pretty...

And then I got to thinking about something I've been thinking about a lot lately, about how I witter on here and elsewhere about what I've been up to, and post photos of cakes I've made, and things I've knitted, and that, along with how I'm pretty good at spouting off with life changing advice for other people, sometimes gives people the impression that I'm up to something exciting all the time.

It all came to a head when I read this the other day - goodness knows how I ended up over there, but I did, and I read lots of people's lists about things they *don't* do.

So, for the record, here's some of the things that I *don't* do (and this is by no means an exhaustive list):

* I don't iron.

* I don't change the bed every day. Or even every week.

* I don't have a very clean and tidy house. There's one room I can barely get through the door of.

* I don't always remember people's birthdays

* Sometimes, even when I do remember, I don't get round to doing anything about it for ages (oh dear, this is the worst one!)

* I don't watch much tv

* I don't clean the car, ever

* I don't replace things when they break

* I don't go abroad for holidays. Not a big decision, I just generally don't

* I don't keep on top of the garden as much as I should

I'd best stop there before I start making myself feel bad!

I'm writing this list, not to beat myself with, and not because I think I give the impression that I have such a fabulous life, but as a reminder that sometimes we have more choice about how we spend our time than we might think we do.

Looking at my list gives myself permission to remember that I have choices about how I spend some of my time. If I'm tempted to feel bad because my house isn't as tidy as someone else's, or my vegetables are still all crowded in little tiny pots on the windowsill when they should be in the garden, I can remember that I threw the duster to the wind, left the seedlings to fend for themselves, and went for a bike ride instead.

So, if someone brings up even the (completely laughable) possibility of me washing the car, I will always think 'what else could I do with this time?'

Invariably, I think of something else I'd rather be doing.

Which is why my car is rather grubby, and I bake quite a lot of cakes.

Hmm.

Anyway, as if you needed yet more evidence of how I'm not the perfect gardner, take a look (peeking through hands over your eyes if you like, which is what I'm doing) at this...

Bleurgh! Concrete and rubble, and a whole load more work left to do! Pah!

Still, one day soon I'll be sitting on top of all that, drinking tea and eating more of those cakes, and all this will be a distant memory.

Let's hope it's *very* soon...

digging holes

My lovely friend took this (not very elegant!) picture this afternoon, after a good few hours digging those holes you can see by my feet.

Don't look very big, do they??

Well, they're not. But that's not exactly sand we're digging through there!

And the point of it all? Well, to rescue those most gorgeous, and enormous, ancient paving slabs that you can see lining the path.

Of course, having freed a couple of them after several days hard graft, I've realised that I can't actually lift the things, and have had to draft in a friend with a sling and a winch.

I thought gardening was meant to be all pottering-about-with-a-basket-collecting-flowers? (I did manage some of that too, as you can see).

So what with all that digging, and a late night party in another city, and only 5 hours sleep, I'm exhausted now! But instead of sensibly going to bed early, I've spent the evening dancing round the kitchen in amongst cutting and sticking for the latest daft project, the photo rainbow. This version's heading for the office, so photos when it's there!

Fingers crossed for sunshine tomorrow, I'm digging again...

communing with a pickaxe

One of our living cheerfully assignments this week is to think about what makes us beautiful, inside and out, and to write about it and take a picture of ourselves.

I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking about when I took this picture! My wellies, mostly, which have somehow hardly made it into the picture at all. Mind you, this was the 71st picture, I believe, and by that point I was so carried away with the excitement of taking a picture of myself in the giant mirror and was concentrating so hard on not having a stupid expression (oops, didn't manage that one) that I'd forgotten that the whole point was my wellies in the first place.

Still, you get the impression. Today I'm beautiful because I'm strong enough to pull on my steel toe capped wellies and get out in the garden and wield a pickaxe.

I've spent the whole day communing with this pickaxe, which belongs to a friend, and this rather fabulous green enamel bucket, which belongs to ME, after Peter rescued it from a skip.

I took plenty of photos of piles of rubble and soil and stones that are now covering most of the garden path (the bits of path that I didn't attack with the pickaxe, that is). But they mostly just look like any old building site you'd care to imagine.

So instead, here's a couple of photos of the old stones that are lining the path I've just demolished. The idea was to free them up and use them to pave my new sitting-out-for-breakfast-area.

Rather beautiful, don't you think?

I've dug down 18 inches, and still haven't reached the bottom. This is going to be a longer job than I imagined...

Still, I'm hot and sticky, I've spent the day in the sunshine listening to the birds, feeling first strong, and then tired, and now achey. I've worked to change my world today (the garden part of it at least), and it feels good.

Cheerful living indeed.

scones in the sunshine

I'm having a lovely few days off, I tell you, and trying to full embrace the idea of living cheerfully. The sun's shining, and there's been scones and hot chocolate and tea, a ducks and trees and water. What more could you ask for?

And, while I'm at it, can I say how much I appreciate all your lovely comments that you leave here? It really is so heartwarmingly gorgeous when people say cheery things! I have no idea how to contact people who leave comments directly, so will often reply in the comments themselves - if anyone could enlighten me that would be great! (I'm sure it's really easy...)

Today's excitement involves a pickaxe, a pneumatic drill, my fabulous steel toe capped wellies (see, I KNEW I'd need them one day!), and a concrete path.

Also tea, coconut cake, and sewing.

I fully intend to eat my breakfast in the garden, in the sunshine, for the whole of the summer, and that involves work, now, and plenty of it. Photos to follow, although I can assure you they won't be beautiful ones just yet!

Icicles

I popped out into the front garden yesterday to investigate the snow, and found this - a rose, entirely encased in ice. Absolutely beautiful, the photo doesn't do it justice at all. I was tempted to bring it in and put it in the freezer to save for the summer, is that silly?? I'm not sure what I'd do with it in the summer!

When I was out there, I noticed an ENORMOUS icicle hanging off the front of the house. Very excited, I dashed back inside to announce my find, only to be met with dismay - obviously an enormous icicle right there means a non-working gutter...

I waved a broom handle threateningly at it (couldn't *quite* reach!), and this morning when I popped out, it had fallen off - fortunately not *on* anybody...

Anyway, what with all this snow and ice, I've declared today Christmas Preparation day - so cards, presents, decorations, holiday plans, and general festivities. I was given 3 free mince pies earlier, so that started me off nicely!

Off to wrap up warm for the trek into town...

colours

A slightly gloomy week here, so I'm very much in need of a bit of colourful cheeriness. And colourful cheeriness I've had today! The sun's been shining, and there's plenty of gorgeously coloured leaves lying around. I've scoffed an entire box of strawberries today, we must be getting to the end of the season soon, these ones didn't have quite the flavour of last month's.

And oh! I haven't told you about the limes! But I might save that for a special lime flavoured post later in the week.

I've been pottering about in the garden in the sunshine this afternoon - would you believe my sweet peas are still flowering? I planted these a couple of years ago, nothing much happened last year, then this year I've had a few of these pink-and-white cheery little flowers. A few weeks ago they started producing pods, and I thought I'd seen the last of the flowers, but no! This week, they've started blooming all over again! So now there's a few of them in the kitchen along with the last of the roses (well, I keep saying 'the last of the roses', but they just won't stop flowering either! Not that I'm complaining mind you...).

And it's not just the flowers that are full of colour in the garden - look at that rainbow chard! I just couldn't capture the colour properly, such a rich, dark red, so beautiful with the light shining through it. I'm ashamed to say it's looking rather slug-munched (and would you look at all those weeds round the bottom! Oh dear!), so I've snapped a fair bit of it up to go in the freezer.

I must get out and do a rainbow-chard-themed photo session in the garden soon. I do love this stuff, all the little seeds look the same, and then you get such an array of colours! Of course, half of mine got eaten before it had much of a chance to get going, but I've still got some fine red ones, and a couple of smaller but no less cheery pink and yellow. Yes, I'll do that this week.

No pictures of the sewing project just yet, but it's progressing, if a little slowly! Perhaps I was rather too ambitious, I never was much good at following a pattern - but this one I just couldn't resist. You'll see what I mean when you see it (unless I abandon it as too much effort - which still isn't out of the question!).

harvest

Well, would you just look at what came out of my garden last week! Runner beans, rhubarb, spinach, rainbow chard, yet more yellow knobbly courgettes, a couple of tomatoes, and a whole load of herby flowers. And they all seemed to just grow, all by themselves! How's that?

I'm also very much enjoying my decision to paint that bench blue :)

A week of dancing and trains here, so not much gardening or craft, but I am taking some sewing round to a friend's this afternoon (and some cake!) so let's hope this is the start of a bit more creativity round here.

What's your weekend going to involve?

weekending

Would you just look at what we recused from a skip yesterday?? Just look! A pink colander, and a pink gingham mug! Sadly the colander is a little rusty for kitchen use, but I was thinking how cheery it would look out in my new little picnic area in the garden, all prettily planted with cheery flowers and maybe strawberries. Strawberries!!

Today the sun's shining, I'm eating pancakes and drinking tea from my new pink gingham mug, and I'm gearing up to pick up a friend's chipper to turn that huge pile of tree into tiny little wood chips. Then the next stage can start!

timber...

The garden's had a little remodelling today...

It rather took me by surprise somewhat, I'm more used to dithering than action when it comes to big steps like this! But it's done now, and there's great plans for the little space - not to say quite a bit more space and light in the rest of the garden (and the house!)

Hmm, that also appears to be a rather large pile of tree to get rid of too...

weekending

Ooh, more lovely flowers and herbs from the garden. What can you see? Fuchsia, rocket, basil mint, spearmint, acer, St John's wort, herb Robert, and various other things that I don't recognise. How lovely.

So, after the excitement of the week's birthday celebrations, it's been a fairly mellow weekend. I've been writing, and writing, and tearing my hair out, and writing some more, but we won't talk about that, oh no, let's talk about cheery things instead.

Like bunting, Cheerful Orange Campervan Bunting, to be precise. Because at the market on Thursday, I found this material, and it was just crying out to be made into bunting, and I know someone who has the Most Gorgeous orange VW camper van, and who will very much enjoy receiving some surprise bunting in the post.

Just *how* difficult is it to take pictures of bunting?? I only ever seem to be able to do it dropped in a pile on the floor. Shall we call it an artistic pile?? Yes, why not.

And while I'm feeling artistic, here's another entirely unnecessary frivolous project I've started this weekend. This is the little draw I keep my seed packets in.

You can't quite see, but it says Cheery Seeds on the front, so you know what's in there. And inspired by a friend who's covering an entire table in pictures of flowers, I thought it needed a few vegetables stuck on it.

So here we are, half way through, because I didn't quite finish sticking the bits on and then got distracted doing something else. But that's ok, because now I can look forward to finishing it later in the week!

And what I got distracted by was, er, ferreting around in the compost bin.

Yep, digging in the compost bin, trying to see if there was actually any compost in there - which there was! I don't know why I was surprised. I didn't actually manage to dig any of it out, and I really *must* learn to crush up my eggshells a bit smaller, and *not* put whole cardboard egg boxes in there...

Anyway, look carefully at that bit of the garden, just in front of the front-door-that-we-don't-use. It's in for a bit of a makeover in the next few months. I must confess to *not* enjoying that tree very much at all, and since we don't use the front door at all, there's no point having a path to it from the pavement. So there's plans afoot, and oh how I love Plotting and Planning! And this Plotting and Planning is going to other people, possibly even *paying* other people (shocking!), and eventually, hopefully, a little table and chairs for breakfast, and picnics, and tea and cake, and evening eating and entertaining out in the garden. Can't wait!

afternoon tea

Well, it's Sunday afternoon and I just fancied a cake. And some strawberries. And tea-in-a-teapot.

So that's exactly what we had. And very nice it was too. I don't normally bother with a recipe for sponge cake, but we've been talking about the old Be-Ro recipe book here recently, and there's a recipe in it for a sponge cake without butter, just 2 eggs, 3oz sugar, and 3oz self raising flour.

Surprisingly, it does actually turn into a cake! (I must confess to being a little doubtful...). But the verdict seems to be that it's a little on the dry side, and would be better with jam in the middle. Or custard. Or ice cream. Or, as my auntie (who made her own version the other day) put it - it's a 'with something' cake. Definitely.

But still, it was very nice, and perfectly acceptable for Sunday Afternoon Tea with a few strawberries.

Would you like to see the little cheery bargains I got from the charity shop yesterday? 49p each, and they seem to have been hand painted, maybe by a child and parent?

Yep, handpainted glass jars, one with flowers and caterpillars on (with stuck on googly eyes!), and the other an underwater scene with lots of stripey fish. They're living out in the garden at the minute, as I'm trying make a few litle special secret places out there, with little colourful whimsical things to happen across, and these seemed just right.

They also came with lids, so I've put a tea light in each, and popped the lid on to keep the rain out, and now we just need a nice warm evening so I can sit out there and light the little candles and have a nice glass of something tasty.

in the garden

butterfly on the spearmint

the entire garlic harvest

sweet peas! finally!

I've not been out in the garden much lately, but it does all seem to be carrying on rather well without me. We're eating rocket every day, and we could be eating courgettes every day if we wanted to as well. It's looking like we might get some broad beans, there's a couple of tomatoes growing, and there's plenty of chard to go round all and sundry.

I really will have to be a bit more organised next year though. I planted quite a lot of garlic, but it all seems to have, erm, got lost under the geraniums, and one bulb was all I could find. The sweet peas have rewarded my haphazard style of gardening though - I planted them out months ago, mourned a tiny bit when they didn't grow, and then gave them up for dead, only to have them sneak up on me and start blooming this weekend. I do like surprises like that!

So this week in the garden I've got a basil to nurse back to health (which I seem to have inadvertently made *worse* - it was perfectly healthy when it arrived...), and a redcurrant to plant somewhere in the garden, which suddenly seems to be rather full. I'm also plotting a 'feature' outside the kitchen window, which needs to stay quite clear and low to the ground to keep the neighbourhood cats away from the bird table. I've had an inspiration, but as so often my mind is far more capable than my hands, I might keep my mouth shut about this one til I've tried it...

weekending

strawberry tea at the Women's Institute cafe

a garden bouquet

a tiny sunny garden

This weekend's been mostly filled with PhD work , but I did manage to squeeze in some cheery little moments. Strawberry tea at the Women's Institute (which never gets missed out, no matter how busy I am), and a friend's birthday tea in a cheerily sunny little garden. How lovely, and what a nice break from the computer screen!

eating from the garden

Well, I have to say, the garden's carrying on pretty well without me these days. Yes, it could do with some weeding, and a bit of tidying up, and yes, the cabbages on the windowsill could probably do with planting in the ground, but other than that, it's all going to plan.

Not that we've been able to give up food shopping or anything! I'm sure our garden could be far more productive given the time and energy on my part - which I just don't have right now. So for the time being, it's just ticking along nicely, and every so often we get a cheery little surprise for dinner.

These peppers have been growing on the living room windowsill. I bought the plant for 50p a couple of years ago, and last year got one small pepper. Then it looked like it had died, but I carried on watering it, because you just never know. This year we've had three peppers! It doesn't look like there'll be any more, and again, the plant looks like it's on its last legs, but I'll keep watering it, and who knows what will happen next year!

Anyway, we ate these all in one go, with some tasty cheese, and home grown rocket, all rolled up in, er, pancakes, which must be on the list of most-often-eaten food in this house.

I'll pop out into the garden later today to investigate what other edible treats are in the making... Hope you're getting something tasty from the garden too!