Garden explosion

By the time we came back from holiday, our garden had exploded with flowers and new growth! The rambling rose over the fence was laden with blooms, and the roses and huge peonies were filling the front flower bed. One of my first jobs was to mow the jungle to reclaim the lawn.

I found tiny strawberries alongside the shed and gathered a full handful, and more again since. They’re delicious and the boys are enjoying picking them too.

I’m not particularly green-fingered and though I try to approach gardening in a considered way, I usually end up employing the ‘hack-it-and-hope’ method, often after things have gotten a bit out of control!

I spent a while untangling long branches of climbing rose, and jasmine and clematis and weaving them back into the trellis at the back of the garden. Unfortunately during the process, I managed to cut off the one beautiful clematis flower! Hopefully some more will grow in its place.

One of the biggest ongoing jobs in this garden, is dealing with the effects of having a huge sweet chestnut tree growing in the corner. We spent a large part of the autumn raking up leaves and picking up the chestnuts and their spiky cases. The spring seems to consist largely of hunting down all the seedlings that have sprung up from the fallen chestnuts we missed, or the squirrels have hidden, and digging them out before they get too big. We have to watch out for holly and sycamore too, as well as the brambles that suddenly seem to have started sprouting all over. Pumpkin helped a little – he was especially proud of the ‘two-man-job’ saplings that had huge roots on them that required a good joint effort. I also had a little feathered helper who seemed very curious and friendly and hung around for quite some time.

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Garden pompoms

Isn’t it nice to have some sunshine again! I’m enjoying my garden at the moment, especially these pompom pops of purple chives which are right outside my kitchen doors. I do love alliums, and it’s still exciting seeing what my new garden has to offer me as the seasons progress.

Knitting has been sorely lacking here of late. I am gearing up to do a tubular bind off of the bottom ribbing of my crazy stripes, but haven’t managed to summon the courage or find the time to dedicate to it properly yet. Soon, I hope.

Theatrics continue. I have auditioned for a play and got a recall, but am still waiting to hear whether I’ve been cast. This week also sees the start of workshops for the next full-scale musical production my local society are doing. It will be good to get stuck into something again soon.

I’m also trying to get back into running again. I did quite well at the start of the year, running fairly regularly and getting up to 3k routes, with the aim of taking part in a parkrun 5k event. I stalled at 3k though and life and (not wanting to cripple myself before) shows got in the way, as they do. So, after several months of not running at all, I did the sensible thing and just decided to go for it and do the parkrun anyway! Crippling yourself *after* a show is fine, right!? I didn’t manage to run the full 5k. There was rather more walking than I’d have liked, but hey, I made it to the finishing line in a reasonable time, and I can only get better, right!? Maybe having a time to beat will encourage me to put some work in!

 

A different kind of WIP

Since we moved house, our front room has been a playroom. It’s a pretty small room with not much floor space, so the boys haven’t really played in there much and it’s actually been more of a glorified toy cupboard/ hurl-the-toys-in-and-shut-the-door kinda space. In short, a total toy-filled pigsty.

So last weekend, Mr Jack and I set to work while the kids were away for a couple of days with the aim of turning this room into a study/hobby room.

Inspired by Pinterest we had grand plans of picking paint colours and shopping at Ikea for a desk, shelves and storage solutions, and generally spending the weekend getting the job done as fast as possible.

Desk, shelves above, drawers or cupboard underneath. And I’m loving the idea of using a really deep blue colour on the walls, with white furniture although it’s a North facing room so I’m not sure if it would be too dark. (You can tell I’m not really an interior designer!)

Unfortunately, the room is one of three in this house with woodchip wallpaper. We battled woodchip once before, when we first moved unto our previous house, and it was such a struggle to strip the stuff that we never bothered tackling the other rooms that had it! But in this case, and since we plan to stay here long term, we decided that if the job was worth doing, it was worth doing properly. So we hired an industrial steamer and set to work.

The first strips came off in large sheets so we were lulled into a false sense of security that maybe it wasn’t as bad as we remembered. But after that, every square centimetre was thoroughly steamed and scraped and steamed and scraped some more.

Halfway through the second day we were vowing never again and suggesting paying someone to do the rest. But, we persevered and finished the job.

Unfortunately, that was the end of our childfree time, so that’s as far as we’ve got. Another project on the WIP pile. Hopefully we’ll find time to get back to it soon.

In the meantime I’ll continue browsing Pinterest for inspiration and flipping through the Dulux brochure to try to decide on a colour. What do you think of dark blue?