Another day of garden things

 I'm fired up with enthusiasm about the garden right now - well, even husband is keen.  We're off out this morning to buy a few more plants - I've set aside a budget for garden stuff.  Incidentally, I don't know if it's the same where you are, but the supermarket Morrisons has a lovely range of plants for sale, all very reasonable prices and really healthy looking.  I guess it helps that the lady who looks after and sells the plants here in our Morrisons is very knowledgeable and loves plants.  Some places which sell plants as just one of their many lines (not garden centres, I'm talking about home stores) appear to have no staff who know anything about plants and don't even water them.

This morning I want to buy some hostas for the gravel bed, and a few more plants for my new flower bed - foxgloves, pinks and a couple of dahlias.  I need a pot for a trailing fuschia which I bought by mistake - I thought it was a hardy bush type (wear your glasses when reading labels!!) - and a couple more bags of compost.

The past 2 days' weather has been really lovely, warm and sunny - in fact so much so that I've actually got a bit sunburnt on the back of my neck.  Today it's a bit cloudy in between spells of sunshine, and a bit cooler - although still warm enough to go without a jacket.  So we'll be spending the third day in a row out in the garden.  

Husband is buying a small multifunction electric saw today, to cut down the stumps of the horrid conifer hedge.  I've decided to make the bed where the hedge was into a rockery - there are plenty of suitable sized rocks around the garden, and I won't need to buy any plants for it, the biggish rockery in front of the kitchen window is overrun with succulents so I can thin some of those out and move them to the new rockery bed.  I'll take photos of each new bit of work and put them on here, and then again in a few weeks' time so we can see the progress as the plants fill out the spaces.

I know the previous tenant had the garden beds (there were soil flower and veg beds in the past, according to our neighbour) covered over with weed suppressant material and gravel to be low maintenance, as she was apparently too unwell to do any gardening.  But all we could see from our back windows was endless gravel and paving slabs, and it was so boring and depressing!  We want a garden full of colour and veggies, that we can sit in and enjoy the look of, and we're getting there a bit at a time - and enjoying the process of creating it.

We've really achieved a lot these past couple of days, husband does get quite breathless and tired and has to take frequent breaks, and my back, knees and hips do suffer - I get round this by using my garden kneeler/stool rather than bending over, and using the wheeled cart thing to move compost and pots around the garden.  We work to our capabilities - it might be slow going, but we get there in the end, and without injuring ourselves.