The master plan, funnily enough, was not to stop making things and never blog again. It was to make the garden more manageable so it would be less work and I would have more time for sewing!

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A particularly labour intensive business is the weeding of the vegetable beds where seeds from the grass and general weed seeds get thrown over the edges by the lawn mower so, given the relative success of the ‘new’ flower garden, which is surrounded by box hedging and where I put down weed fleece and bark around the outside edges (where roses etc grow), I decided to switch out a grass path for stone one and edge the beds with box. Around Christmas, we changed our stairs/landing carpet so I made a path using that (laid over the rubble left over from building works last year) and we bought the box small from a nursery (which is by far the cheapest way to buy them) and by the time I’d accomplished that seemingly straightforward feat, I’d got tennis elbow :(

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I think I agree with Fiona that the best thing to with the garden is use it as a personal birdwatching area!

Anyway, I ploughed on and everything got greener and greener…

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…and we finished up the leeks and started on the over-wintered broad beans and onions and cabbages and I planted the summer seeds and planted them out and even the flowers started coming out to see if the frosts are finally gone for the year…

…and then (just as I had strategically positioned the bean sticks and was about to beat a retreat back to the Makery) Mr RH decided we really needed to dismantle the green house, which has been buffeted and warped and twisted and had havoc generally wreaked on it by storms for more Winters than I can remember and has been cobbled back together as best we could each Spring. And (not before time!) he decided to start helping.

And so began the next phase of dismantling it and sieving bits safety glass from the stones where the greenhouse was to reclaim them for the path. I was actually amazed at how much of the stone we had so, laborious though it was, it was definitely worth doing.

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With only some minor dismantling of the frame left, this brings us to the question of replacing the greenhouse. Whether to put a new (stronger one) one in roughly the same place, very firmly concreted into ground, or whether to put one further into the garden where it might be more sheltered and reclaim it’s old place as garden.

I was up for trying a polytunnel but Mr RH has a grander vision of something very decorative. Hopefully, we will manage to find something in between that is structurally sound but doesn’t break the bank.

In the meantime, I think we can safely say that the master plan has failed – in the short term.

But I’m remaining cautiously optimistic that all this will end up being time and labour saving in the longer term. It’s not a position that I am giving very close scrutiny because I think it’s only that kind of cautious optimism that is saving us from living in a massive tangle of brambles and nettles and overgrowness (which was pretty much what we inherited when we came here and you couldn’t actually walk around the house or see out through some of the windows).

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I hope your sewing and knitting and making is fairing better than mine :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

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