3:15 project, update 20

or, the end is in sight - quite literally...

On Tuesday, it'll be 6 months since I decided to take the garden in hand. It's a bit of a testament to the kind of spring/summer we've been having here that there hasn't been a single weekend where I've not been able to get out into the garden at all...


Most of the work this week was done by an enthusiastic friend who got more accomplished in just over an hour than I probably would have in several weekends; so the least I could do was getting the photos up on time for a change!


Photos 1 and 2, no real change...


Photo 3, quite a dramatic change if you look down the right hand side of the garden - yes, that's a fence at the bottom - bet you didn't know that was there! (I'd almost forgotten that myself). More pictures of that further down this post...

Picture 4, everything blooming nicely. Including the Bug who was determined to get into all the photos today.

Picture 5 with one of the current projects - I'm gradually edging the vegetable bed with empty wine bottles. A raw material which is never in short supply in the neighbourhood (neighbours on both sides have had parties in the last couple of weeks) and I hope reasonably decorative when it's done...

And here's that cleared area. That pot was behind the ivy - I'd sort of remembered it was here... It's a fairly remarkable transformation!

It also allowed me to get at the greenhouse door, which I'd noticed some time ago was broken - one of the bolts at the bottom had slipped which meant it wouldn't close, and the subsequent gap had let a lot of ivy in.

The only way to repair it was to dissasemble the lot. Once I'd done that, I had to strip ivy out of all the frame pieces, along with some very disgruntled spiders who were breeding in there...

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and remember how it all went together. Having done most of the assembly of the greenhouse in the first place, this went OK - making up flatpack furniture is my idea of a good time, so it was quite enjoyable once I'd evicted the various arachnids...

Done.

The fuchsia in the pot is a bit of a cheat - it's just in a small pot perched on top of the big one. It used to be in one of the hanging baskets, and this is its third year - when it came back again this year I thought it deserved a pot of its own and it's responded beautifully... I need to find a pot that's a lot taller than it's wide, I think, as it's a trailing one...

I also discovered that the crocosmia I planted - oh, must have been 8 years or so ago now - have flowered for the first time. Only one flower so far, but better than nothing, and after all this time it feels like free flowers!