And now I think I deserve a beer!
The weather here today has been weird.
It hammered down with rain last night from about 2AM til 6AM (and has been doing it again pretty much since dark), but by noon we had blue skies, temperatures pushing an unseasonal 20C, and a howling gale. This is an unusual combination.
Given the gale I decided I'd pass on doing anything in the garden and curled up with a good book, at which point I promptly heard a dull thud.
It wasn't that loud a thud, but I thought I'd better check. So I wandered through to the back bedroom, looked out and spotted that my patio table had blown over. Given it's glass topped I'm pretty impressed it survived undamaged. And clearly it had blown over because the wind had caught its furled umbrella, which I was still using just last week.
So I had to throw on outdoor clothes, find some shoes and hurry out to put things to rights before anything more happened - table back upright, dismantle umbrella, store umbrella indoors. At which point my neighbour, out checking her washing, pointed out some minor damage to the garden fence that separates our gardens. The top bit of wood on one of the panels, mainly there to shield it from rain IMO, has rotted through and the wind had torn a lump of it off, leaving several nails sticking up. She suggested fixing it with some scrap wood that's left over from a panel her husband replaced earlier in the summer (he's working away right now), but that wasn't even close, so I said I'd do it as I knew I had some wood in the shed that was about the right size.
So off I trot to find the wood and a hammer, then spend half an hour or so levering out old nails, removing the rest of the rotted bit, and then nailing the new bit in place. (I did have the police helicopter hovering overhead for about five minutes in the middle of that, clearly they thought fence repairs in the middle of a gale either suspicious, or stupid). And that worked, job done.
But standing where I was to do it made it readily apparent that the jasmine bush needed pruning, not only was the weight of growth pulling it away from the fence, but it had managed to stretch out and snare one of the patio chairs. So there was nothing to do but go and find the secateurs and give that a good pruning, half-filling the gardening recycling bin.
And when that was finally done, I came in, picked up my book again, and promptly fell asleep.
When he started up again today I decided I might as well be out there as suffering the noise in the house or back garden and headed out to do something about my front garden. My back garden is big by modern British standards, but my front garden is a bit of a postage stamp, and noticeably sloped. There is, in theory, a hedge at the front, with planting behind, and then about a yard of grass before you get to the path to the front door. I've deliberately set things up not to need a great deal of management, but I might have overdone the not managing it.
I'd intended to strip back the hedge where it fronts onto the road, there's about a foot of growth at ankle height overlapping onto the footpath, but then I took a close look at the planting. Holly is not exactly a shy and retiring plant, nor is a rhododendron, nor christmas rose, yet they'd all been swallowed up by overspill growth from the hedge - apparently it's reaction to me cutting off all the branches on the streetside last summer was to make a determined effort to swamp the planting area. So I spent the afternoon snipping off branch after branch of hedging. You can at least find the holly now, you can't find the christmas rose because I trimmed back the flowering heads (see 'christmas') and the rhododendron was always tall enough to be seen, you can just see rather more of it than you could before. And I'd completely forgotten about the irises.
I think I'm about two thirds done. There's still stuff to come out, but I can at least get in to work now. The only problem is I've completely filled the garden recycling wheelie-bin, and that's not picked up until Thursday morning, so progress is at a temporary halt, Which is probably just as well. I had planned to work from the chair, I trimmed the hedge that way last year, but the slope meant that wouldn't work for the planting - I kept slipping out of the seat! So work consisted of spurts of standing and trimming, followed by sitting on the chair on the path while I recovered. And the periods of standing were getting shorter, and the periods sitting recovering getting longer and longer. When it got to the point I was doing two snips and having to go sit down again that seemed like a good sign I should stop. I think it was a mix of disability related fatigue, plus the temperature, I slurped back almost a litre of pineapple juice while I was recovering - it was a relief when it clouded over and a slight breeze kicked in.
And when I'm done there's still the hedge proper to do, and then the back garden....
It could have been worse, I could have been my neighbour, who'd reached the peaked roof of his porch, and discovered the corners were completely rotten due to sloppy workmanship. So he's spent the day replacing that, including sourcing material and cutting new bits to shape. From what he's said his simple couple of days retouching the porch is now headed toward £500 and at least a fortnight of effort.
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timeasmymeasure
