Seasons of Joy

Ooh, I learnt some new skills last week! I have taken to watching gardening YouTube videos in my spare time, and as I learn I do, regardless of whether it needs to be done! Take my mints for example. I learnt via a video that if you want your plants to spread out (and be bushy) rather than up (and be spindly) you need to pinch out the inner leaves. This discourages the plant from growing tall and encourages new shoots from the bottom of the plant. So I did just that. I’m not sure if doing it to baby plants which have literally just been planted is quite the thing, but I have decided that even if things go wrong, I will still have learnt something. So I pinched away:

They seem to be growing very well and thriving so I clearly haven’t killed them with my overzealous pinching 😁

Monday morning I was met by some little parcels left for me by our beloved cats. How they managed to get into the small plant pots, dig, defecate and dig again is beyond me. I mean, there are larger places to do their business than on my plants right next door to the kitchen… So I gathered lots of stones and pottery bits from the garden and popped them into the pots hoping this might solve the poo problem. Interesting fact: our 200 year old cottage was the cottage which housed the workers of a large pottery business over two centuries ago. Dig even slightly below the surface in any part of our garden and you will dig up many varieties of broken pottery bits:

I spread out the hazel sticks that I am still drying on the two larger pots to discourage little presents being left in the future.

I went shopping to Tesco’s for, y’know, food. To feed the eight of us who depend on me to buy, prepare and cook said food.

Unfortunately for them, I’ve got me a new hobby. So I went in Tesco’s and came out with less food than normal and many plants. Technically the French Marigolds are edible, so I guess they could eat them…

I have decided that buying and planting plants are the best gardening tasks to do. I spent many minutes planting out my new flowers. Oh, and I’ve got myself a potting place. I love it! It used to be in our bathroom and I put it outside hoping I might be able to use it somehow in the garden. And now I am! It’s the perfect height and cats, dogs, mice and any other animal at a loose end, can come and sit and watch me as I fumble my way through ‘gardening’ each morning:

My main goal this week was to clean and clear this small patio in the corner of our back garden. I’m not sure what I’m going to use it for but I know I want it to have lots of plants and flowers. I used some of the potting plants I bought to fill in a few tubs. I have no idea what the plants will look like or indeed what plants they actually are (Tesco’s labelling is a very generic ‘bedding plants’) so I am looking forward to what they will look like at the end:

My final task of the week, I couldn’t have done without my husband. Well, actually I could. But he won’t let me. Twenty odd years ago, Gary went off to work with a wall in tact and a working drill. He happily allowed me to borrow the drill, even though I was a drill virgin, and really did not know what I was doing. I mean, how hard can it be? You press a button, push drill in wall and hey presto a hole appears. Only it didn’t. My poor husband came home to his drill poking precariously out of the wall, stuck in perpetual motion. He has not let me go near his tools ever since. Like never. Like he won’t even let me buy my own drill to practice with. I think I’d be a perfectly respectable driller now that I am an adult, and perfectly capable of handling such a simple piece of machinery. But no. So I have to ask him. To his credit, he never moans and merrily drills away in a perfectly adequate manner. Where was I? Oh yes, he drilled an old trellis onto our wall so that I could train old Jasmine the first around the bend:

He trusts me with that, because I clearly did such an amazing job with Jasmine the second 😇

Anyway, below shows you the area I worked on this week. I’m pretty happy with it, although not looking forward to rubbing down and repainting the window frames. But fortunately, I am away for the next two weeks.

So that means Gary is in charge of my plants and if he kills even one of them, I am demanding he buy me a drill. So there.