Weekly Catch Up

It's been an eventful week, mainly at work, with criminal activities taking place in the shop and arrests made, amongst other unpleasant behaviour.  It's starting to get us down a bit as a team, as we spend so much time trawling the CCTV for footage of shoplifters, and then forwarding information on to the police, that we can't get on with the work of getting stock into the shop. I'm very much hoping that after the drama of this week, they'll keep away for a while at least and let us get on with our jobs in peace.

I'm not at work again until Tuesday now, so I'm enjoying some time at home getting on with stuff. Yesterday, was about recovery from work and easing myself into small jobs such as top up shopping, laundry and taking time to read in bed in the morning.

Today, we tackled more jobs in the garden, namely the deconstruction of our falling down mini greenhouse.  Many of the metal rods that make up the frame had rusted through and it was collapsing.  As we don't really use it anymore, we've decided to dispose of it and clear the space for a new seating area at this end of the garden.

As I write this, OH was doing just this. The next job was to  move the composting hot bin that OH bought me for my 50th birthday.  We've never quite got it going properly and wanted to start again in a different part of the garden, once again to free up more space.

Here's a picture of this corner of the garden before we started today:

And here's the space once the greenhouse came down:

There's still lots of things we need to find a home for, but once we get a new shed, everything will be sifted through and we'll hopefully get rid of any surplus and fit everything in the shed. (It's currently full, so this stuff wouldn't fit in).

I cut all the growth back around this corner, so we now have a great blank slate to work with.  The next step will be getting a new shed and dismantling the existing one.  I'm not sure when this will happen though.

The Hot Bin has now taken the place of our previous compost bin. It's a little more compact and a bit less obtrusive, you can hardly see it from the house. It is also self contained in that it is a sealed unit and can take cooked food too, which is useful, although we do have a regular collection of this by the local council anyway. We're not sure what we're going to do with the old compost bin yet, as I don't think we create enough of the right kind of garden waste to fill two bins.

There was actually some good compost in the bottom of the hot bin and the nrmal compost bin when we emptied them, so this was duly dug in to the bed that we're currently replanting.  OH also planted out the two new plants that I'd bought to go in this bed.  They don't yet fill their allotted spaces, but they hopefully will eventually.

The hydrangea is beautiful.  I just hope it thrives here and fills out over the years, as it will look fabulous with it's fantastic white floral cones.

I was happy with the work we got done in an hour or so.  We're a little bit closer to getting the garden how we want it, but there's still lots of work to do in the next few months. I'll keep you posted.