Our year so far !!

For those of you who don't know we moved home last June. Our new place is an older style council property six doors away from my Nan and one road away from my parents. The house was in much need of some tender loving care when we moved in, progress has been slow (due to the lack of funds and help from the local council) but Rome wasn't built in a day.
Unlike our last place, here we have a nice sized garden (a dream come true), so March saw us turning our thoughts to putting our mark on it. Paddy had his work cut out for him, and I made sure he had a detailed (NOT) plan to work with. The above picture was taken before the arrival of the rotavator that turned the place in to a mud bath, and with the help of Mollie, Chelsea and Murphy (another of Mollie's off spring) the inside of the house too!!! Thank God we have laminate flooring.

The first and biggest job was to put up new fencing to the left hand side of the garden (all 22 meters of it), and it would only be right to mention our 'Guardian Angel' Carl at this point who worked very hard putting the stuff up, so long as I kept him fed and watered. Our other 'Guardian Angel' Nicky helped us paint it all Black!! I promise you it looks really good. The picture below is the fence in progress.

It has long been a dream of mine to have a garden big enough to have a veggie patch (all be it small) and a green house to grow all my own stuff in. As you can see in the above picture I have my green house thanks to my very good friend Patsy for introducing me to Freecycle, this green house cost me nothing. For those of you who don't know what Freecycle is it's a message board within Yahoo groups where people advertise things they no longer want for FREE. http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=freecycle Take a look and see if there is one in your area. Alice and I spent a very long Saturday afternoon at the beginning of march planting up many many seed trays with a variety of veggie seeds, not really knowing what we were doing but we had to start some where. We both planted a tray of sweet peas each and I was slightly miffed when Alice' popped up long before mine, but I needn't have worried mine soon caught up. Next came the fence for the veggie patch. Paddy managed to knock a few feet off the length much to my disgust but reluctantly I forgave him other wise I wouldn't have got my fence. I stapled pea netting to the posts so that I could grow my runner beans (the seed came from Mum & Dads crop last year) and french beans up this to make an attractive barrier between the veggie patch and the rest of the garden.

Paddy then cracked on with the decking that was to cover quite a big area, he made this job harder for himself by NOT rotavating the area where the decking was to be situated, so it took him ages to dig the hole's for where the frame work was to go (remember he is Irish LOL). Give him his due he worked bloody hard, and in all it took him 3 weeks to complete.

At this point just to keep Padders on his toes I made a few minor adjustments to the plan of the garden, these adjustments involved the purchase and removal from the pavement outside of our house 3 tons each of topsoil and pea shingle. Many thanks to our neighbours Nicky & Nigel for helping shovel it all in to barrows and to Nigel's 4 year old son Thomas for telling paddy where to dump it!! (Paddy had made him site manager). Mandy also lent a hand with racking the top soil level with the sleepers put in place to retain it all, she went home with black feet as she only had her sandals on at the time.

There was no rest for the wicked as the next day the turf arrived to finish of 'The Padsters' labour of love.

Much to our annoyance whilst the turf was being laid Chelsea started digging holes in it, she soon stopped once the sprinkler was turned on HA HA.

We are very happy with what we have done so far, but thre is still quite alot to do, but we are getting there. I will keep you all posted and The Moore Family hope you all enjoy our blog.