Steel Kitten

I'm in love with Abraham Darby

The majority of the outdoor work last week was all about Zone 2.

As you can see, the area is cleared and being forked it over with compost and fertiliser. All that's needed is the turves to lay, which will be in at the end of this week (supposedly, although perhaps not if this rain continues). The greenhouse frame and fencing found good homes on freecycle and will shortly be gracing allotments, and the rustic poles are at the end of the garden to be re-used as a pergola.

I've been trying to get the bindweed under control, but really I'm fighting a losing battle. It's running underneath the weed suppressant membrane. This is immensly galling as it's supposed to suppress weeds, not provide them with the ideal conditions under which to thrive. But at least I can now see the base of the shrubs, which is an amazing achievement.

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:: I found an excellent tip in a gardening supertips book yesterday. If you want to kill a climbing weed like bindweed but don't want to spray in case you damage the plant underneath, fill an empty roll on deodorant bottle with weedkiller and roll it on the bits of weed you can see. Inspired!!

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A clematis growing through the shrubs was also suffocating under the weight of bindweed, so out it came and was planted by the pergola by Bed 4. It does not look happy. It hates me for doing it. To assuage my guilt at trying to hasten the demise of a perfectly healthy plant, a good sniff around a garden centre revealed a beautiful David Austen English shrub rose called Abraham Darby, which gets to about 5ft and has numerous heavy sprays of blooms on it.

I'm hopping with excitement at the thought of training it across the patio fence along with the Ville de Lyon clematis. And the smell is incredible - fruity and lemony. Absolutely out of this world.

The log roll in bed 3 didn't come up in the end because of a lack of time, but when the slate chippings arrive for the patio this week some nice fresh new bark chippings will be coming too for a good thick layer of mulch to tidy it all up.

So that's the work in Zone 2 almost complete.

Zone 3 ahoy.....and it's not my favourite. I'll tell you why another day.

I promised you a patio...

...and this is it so far. Bit of a difference from what it looked like two weeks ago, with empty animal hutches, bricks, algae, dead trees and weeds:

The rest of the slate chippings will be laid at the back on Thursday when the stone merchant takes delivery of his new stock.

A hunt about the garden last week for interesting object d'art to liven up the patio area revealed numerous ceramic pots, a stained glass window, some driftwood (picked from the beach by the lighthouse in which Martin frightened the life out of me by proposing), some shells and bits of tiles rounded smooth by sea, and an old mini wooden boat.

 

 

 

On the days it rained last week, I took to my craft room and knocked up four cushions for the patio chairs (only two shown) and a long cushion for the iron seat. I have another long one to do for the stone seat, as well as recovering an umbrella for the patio table.

But in terms of outdoors work, bar laying the chippings, I've done as much as I Intend to do in this area this month.

Enjoy that thifty goodness

Just so the blog doesn't descend completely into a gardening diary, here's a sneak peak at some of the lovelies I picked up today at the car boot sale. Oh yes, I still go, but the last few weeks have been very disappointing. And then today as if to make up for it, I found a huge amount of stuff.

Two enamel coffee pots (£1.50) plus the gingham tablecloth (£1) above

 

Checkerboard tea cosy (50p)

 

Complete sunflower kitchen set (£2)

 

A delft pendant (50p)

 

A vintage heavy linen tablecloth (£1)with a crinoline lady embroidered in a different colour in every corner

 

Two raspberry iron trivets (£1; unused)

 

A wooden plant container (£2; three months old)

 

A metal plant container (£1; unused)

 

A thistle trinket dish (50p; unused)

 

An enamel bread bin (£2; unused)

...this is only about half of the items I bought. The rest; Body Shop and Weleda toiletries, pads of paper, sets of postcards and cards, craft and interior design books, scarves, new shoes, new Per Una shirts and skirts, French olive fabric, a year of Country Living and Country Life magazines, two wool blankets (one mint green, one various shades of brown) and outdoors paraphenalia like tools and gadgets.

Amazing really. One man's trash is another man's treasure!

The Glory of the Garden by Rudyard Kipling

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall
You find the tool-and-potting-sheds which are the heart of all
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ‘prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing “Oh how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner knives

There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden

Oh Adam was a gardener and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees
So when your work is finished you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

Nice poem huh? One of my favourites.

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Well, the work in Zone 1 has finished for now. I'm not ready to show you a complete picture yet, as I'm still painting the top coats on a couple of items I found at the car boot sale Sunday, and I have not found any bedding plants to go in at all. I think I may have missed the boat there, so I'm gradually digging up and moving some garden plants (at a rate of one plant a day) into the area in a desperate effort to give it some interest.

I will show you a picture soon - promise! In the meantime, you'll have to content yourself with the above picture of the lilies with the (undercoated) bird table in the background.

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So the work has kicked off in Zone 2 this week, which is Bed 3 and the rest of the main garden, the latter of which is shown below (Bed 3 is directly to my right and out of shot).

 

First thing first, throwing rubbish away. Monday morning I was out picking up rubbish and managed a full bin bag in under 10 minutes. Tuesday rain stoped play. Harumpf.

The main aim of the decluttering work this week is to move all of the garden paraphenalia away from the side of greenhouse and re-turf the area.

 

This paraphenalia consists of a frame for a 6x8 greenhouse (no glass), and tens of metres of green plastic-coated chain link fencing plus 6 to 8 large rustic poles that we dug out when we removed one side of an enormous 10 foot fence which divided the garden. The poles we will keep for finishing off our pergola so I'll move those down to the bottom of the garden (I call this the Infrastructure area now!), but the fencing and greenhouse frame is going on freecycle.

I've rung the local garden cenre and ordered 3 sq metres of hard-wearing grass turves. Unfortunately due to the shocking thunderstorms we're having, their delivery will be delayed as turf is not lifted in bad weather. However, I can still give the area a fork over, add some fresh compost and fertiliser and tamp it all down ready.

With such bad weather I think I'll probably have some time left this week. I plan to nip out between rain storms to weed Bed 3 and add fresh bark chip, and I may even rip out some of the log roll around the edges, which is starting to rot, and give it a nice neat edge with some clippers.

That's the plan anyway. Many a slip though. And thunderstorm.

In the meantime, sit back, keep reading and I'll update you on my efforts. Here, have one of these while you're waiting.....

Just what is the Flylady programme?

Just in case you've never heard of Flylady after my post yesterday, I thought I'd talk a little about how the basic programme works and how it will work in the garden. 

Flylady is designed to split housework down into manageable chunks of time and organised routines so you don't have a house in CHAOS, that is Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. First, you set a routine for the morning, afternoon and evening. For example, my morning routine is:

Make bed

Feed cats

Make invalid chicken food for Paxo and open up chickens

Have cup of tea while checking calender for the next couple of days ahead and making to-do lists

Shower

5 minute swish and wipe in the downstairs bathroom (Wipe round sink, swish toilet bowl, wipe round toilet, clean cabinet mirror and every other day swish floor with microfibre mop)

Get dressed

Put on load of washing

Take vitamins

Wash up

Do Flylady 'mission' for the day 

 

What's a mission?

That last one needs a bit of explaining. As part of the Flylady programme, you mentally section off the house into 'Zones" and work on decluttering and cleaning a new Zone every week. There are also little 5-15 minute missions throughout the day to clear hotspots where papers or clothes or shoes have built up, or accomplish a small task you might not ordinarily do, such as clean out your handbag or get rid of the rubbish in the car. I usually do these missions in the morning. 

Anyway, back to the basic programme; one of the first things you do every week in a Zone is a 15 minute declutter. This is usually accomplished by a) walking around the Zone with a bin bag throwing away rubbish b) the next day grabbing items to give away to friends or charity then c) the following day picking up and returning objects that do not belong in that zone to their rightful places around the house. That's a bit simplistic but essentially everything you do boils down to those three things. 

So for example, if you're in the bathroom you might be asked to go through your cabinet and fling away all the out of date stuff, then the next day collect all the opened things you tried a couple of times but didn't like and give them away. If you're in the bedroom you might be asked to pick two pairs of the your rattiest old shoes to throw away or pick the most unflattering item of clothing and put it in the charity bag.

 

The last few days in the zone is then spent doing some cleaning that perhaps doesn't often get done (for example light fittings, behind furniture, under beds etc). Over a period of months you end up completely decluttered and then each week in the Zone is just spent deep cleaning or doing projects that need to be completed. 

This week was Zone 1 

In the house Zone 1 is the porch, lobby and dining room. 

This week most of the junk in my house in those three areas has been cleared, either by throwing away, giving away or returning to their rightful homes. The front door, back door and internal doors in between have been wiped down, the light fittings cleaned, and the windowsills wiped down. It all took less than 15 minutes a day in addition to my routines. 

Tomorrow I do the main cleaning in the house for an hour: clean the upstairs bathroom, dust the lounge and master bedroom, hoover the house and change the bed. Then I have the odd bigger jobs to do when it crops up every now such as cleaning the car, washing the windows, washing carpets and upholstery, wiping out the fridge, cleaning the oven....you know the sort of jobs I mean. 

It seems to work ok for me, but I am not strict Flylady. I do not do my washing up at night and shine my sink, as I'm stink tired at the end of the day and can't be bothered. I'd rather have a bath and read a book in bed! I also do not get dressed down to my shoes, as I prefer to run around in bare feet to give them a rest, and I'd trash my carpets very quickly if I wore shoes in the house. 

Flylady in the garden

Flylady has also translated very well to my new garden Zone plan too. 

My morning garden routine:

Check all pots and water any that need it

Water hanging baskets

Check tomatoes in greenhouse

Pick up any rubbish that crosses my path

Check over plants for obvious problems that need looking at later during evening routine

Very quick weed (usually of bind weed) while the watering cans are filling up at the water butts

Then there's the decluttering and missions - so far in Zone 1 this week I've thrown away dead plants and empty pots, emptied and cleaned out a water butt with Jeyes fluid, cut back and fed the herbs in the butler sink and planted a new clematis against the fence.

 

The breezeblocks and small rectangular pavers have been dragged off the stone seat and up to the end of the garden, and the seat scrubbed down with algae cleaner. 

 

 

By the end of the weekend I aim to have some new bedding plants in the patio bed and the dahlias staked and tied back. I have even made rumbling noises about finally making up the seat cushions with this fabric I bought last August:

 

Personally I blame Carol at Boxwood Cottage for all of this. Click on her Flickr pictures on the right hand side of her blog and check out her garden pictures. Pure inspiration. I now have some leads on wonderful climbing roses and plants I want in the garden. And thanks to her I've also made up my mind that - yes - box hedging in the beds is the way to go to contain everything neatly. My bank balance may not recover after this.....