lnr | Entries tagged with garden

Today we went to the garden centre in Shelford, picked out just over 100 quid of things for the garden (plants, food, bark, compost, pots, bird box, etc), paid for them, and then left the shop without them. They're going to deliver them on Monday, free since we spent enough. I was rather amused (and slightly embarrassed) when I realised that every single item we'd picked had to be logged by hand, writing down number, description, barcode and price for each one. It probably took well over 15 minutes, and two staff members, to get it done. They so need to be able to just print out this info from the till!

It's mildly frustrating to get excited by all these things and then have to wait before we can plant any of them up, or put the bird box up in the front garden! Still, it was a nice way to get out of the house for a bit, and we only got slightly snowed on. We've spent the afternoon curled up on the sofa watching the rugby :)

On Friday Mike and I joined a large bunch of his colleagues in the Boathouse for Pete's leaving do. It's really quite a big pub, which is just as well as we took over a large part of it. Nice pub food though - we shared nachos with chilli etc, and chose from an impressive array of burgers. It was a nice evening, even though I was really tired, and I was surprised to realise it was already 10:30 when we were thinking of going.

Saturday was a fairly lazy day, apart from being woken by yelling so loud Mike couldn't bear to stay in bed. Geeking in the morning followed by some gardening in the afternoon. I'm getting to quite like the sort of gardening that involves sitting on the lawn in the sunshine pulling out weeds. There's a particularly invasive one which creeps and almost entirely kills off the grass, combined with a thick layer of moss, and there's a certain amount of skill in getting them out and still leaving the tiny tufts of grass behind. Still, I think we've reduced its stranglehold on the lawn by about a third now. It looks rather bare as a result but hopefully it will fill out again with time. In the evening I learned that Ian had come off his bike rather nastily, and could do with some company, and coincidentally that the 3 of us available happened to be bridge players, so after a nice dinner (courtesy Tesco Finest) with Mike I headed over to MR for the first time for a couple of hours of bridge, in which Ross and I came out ahead again, but once more had the lion's share of the luck. Ian really does look a state, but it's mostly just grazes and nasty bruising, and he didn't seem to be suffering from concussion, which was the worry. Hopefully he'll get better soon.

On Sunday we got up in reasonable time and decide to make the most of the lovely weather and indulge our cycling addiction a bit more. ( Read more... )

In Newmarket we sat and caught our breath for a while then went for a wander. Admiring the training grounds for the races, and the vast numbers of shiny conkers. We took a look at the maps in WHSmith but decided we knew what route we were taking home, and didn't want to carry anything extra. Then we had a lovely lunch sitting outside a cafe by All Saints Church, which was covered in bunting for a flower festival. Definitely a "this is the life" moment. Still, we figured that given it was going to be a headwind on the way back we'd better head home. ( Read more... )

As usual there's a route map on Bikely. Our dinner of steak and eggs felt very well deserved.

Back to work on Monday as usual, but since it was exactly 6 months since we moved into our house we decided we needed to go out and celebrate. We spent our lunch break looking at menus online, and finally decided on the Riverside Restaurant at the University Centre. I had smoked duck, rabbit, and a vanilla and raspberry pannacotta style pudding. Mike had chicken and chorizo terrine, belly pork, and a chocolate cheesecake. It was strange eating in a room with only two other parties, but it was really nice, and the food was very good. In fact it was a really lovely evening all told, and a good way to mark how happy we are. Yay.

On Friday when I got home from work I pulled up the row of dead leylandii in our front garden. Today we went to homebase, bought a spade, shears, secateurs, gardening gloves and some plants both for indoors and out and brought them home by bike. This afternoon we attacked the garden with the implements in order to make room for the plants, and this is the result:

	Front garden This is the "after" shot. We foolishly forgot to take one of what it looked like before!
	Pile of wood In addition to this heap of dead leylandii, rosebush and random woody shrub we also filled the green wheely bin

PS: if anyone wants the wood, perhaps as firewood, feel free to come and collect. Contact details in memories.

PPS: Managed to find the photos the landlord took last winter when trying to let the house, and they included these two "before" photos. It had all grown a fair bit since then, although we had already hacked a fair bit off about a month ago.

It's a funny day for gardening. I popped out just before lunch to mow the lawn, and got it just about finished before the heavens opened and I had to flee inside. Then it got even heavier, and I figured I'd try to take a few pictures. I'm not sure they quite capture it really, but at least I tried.

Then after lunch the rain had more or less stopped, or at least nearly, letting me go put the mower away properly and Mike start attacking the small ash tree in our front garden with the secateurs. In the end we removed most of that tree (it seemed a shame to kill it completely while it's looking to healthy and happy, but it's got to go really), took the growing bit off the leylandii that was still sprouting, hacked the big rose bush back to a foot tall, trimmed the thing near the front door back out of the way, and pulled out vast handfuls of sticky weed and ivy. All rather soggily. To be honest it still looks rather a mess (failed to take before and after pics again, v silly) but it's a much *smaller* mess, and we've more of an idea of what else to do with it. This will have to wait another fortnight though, as once again we've filled the green bin to overflowing already in the space of half and hour. Ooops. We should possibly have got a big one when we moved it, but I suspect once the brutal phase is over we're rarely going to need the capacity.

Plan for rest of today is to go see Pirates again at 3:30, then out to dinner and cocktails. No particularly celebration other than pay day, but that's good enough for us. Then either later tonight or tomorrow we'l watch some more Dr Who on DVD. Foolishly we sent the last one back having not watched the last episode on it, not realising that one had 4 instead of 3. And it was a second-of-two (The Doctor Dances) and one that Mike missed when they were on the telly too, so we'll just have to get that DVD out again. Silly us. Still, I don't think it'll harm to watch the rest out of order.

Ha, here comes the rain again!