Gardening!

The weather was so lovely yesterday (20 degrees C) we decided to tackle the back garden area. This has suffered greatly from the building work going on, both with debris left by the builders and not being able to do any worthwhile garden work for the same reason. We have a long narrow bed at the top of a wall which is about 5 feet high. It's right by the perimeter wall onto the street and when we bought the house it was full of cacti, my least favourite type of plant! Last year I dug the cacti out, put down weed suppressing fibre, planted honeysuckle, hebe, osteospermums and geraniums and then put gravel down. I should have tackled this when we first came back here in September but there were so many other, seemingly more important, jobs to tackle that it didn't get done. It was covered with a clover type weed, swamping the plants and looking a total mess. The plants haven't done well either, everything except one hebe and the honeysuckle was either dead or dying. We'd put in an irrigation system but it was dismantled when the building work started as the first job done was the flight of steps up to the drive, right by the wall the bed is on top of (bad grammar!). In the end I pulled everything up except the hebe and honeysuckle and sprayed it all with weedkiller. Later in the week I'm going to try and remove the gravel, replace the fibre, put new plants in then replace the gravel. It did occur to me that salt from the gravel may have burned the plants, to be on the safe side I'll wash the gravel before it goes back. The back yard area is all gravel which can get messy so we've decided to have the whole are 'crazy' paved, including the covered naya area near the barbecue.

It was so warm we ate all our meals on the front naya yesterday!

Some wonderful news - Sara rang last night to ask if we wanted visitors next week! YAY! She and the girls are coming out next Monday and staying until the following Sunday. We're so excited, so lots to do this week to prepare. Long list of things to do and calls to make today, and I desperately want to do some scrapping, for once I have a definite layout in mind and want to get it done as soon as possible.

Time to start the day - see you later!