Still slogging away...

image from Magnific.com

I'm still running behind with the photo-sharing, but I left you on Monday with the "new" area finally cleared ~ along with a pulled muscle 😏

I told you previously that I was planning to give the wooden retaining wall at least a couple more coats of woodstain.  I thought I should give it a bit of a clean first, though, as it had got a tad muddy.  So I set-to with a bucket of soapy water and a handbrush...

...only to find that it didn't really look much different after a good wash-down 😄  Still, at least I know it's had the soil washed off ready for restaining 😉  Although we're going to put a long raised bed along the wall we still put down some weed membrane, which we pushed beneath said wall as far in as we could poke it.  We're going to have stone chipping paths running alongside the rebuilt wall, as well as in front of the new raised bed, so thought it would be easier to just lay the membrane across the whole area.  Once the bed has been put in place we will cut across the membrane within it and attach the "flaps" to the inside.  Hopefully that will help to stop the soil escaping out the bottom into the stone chippings.

We've come to a bit of a pause with the new area now, as Adrian is working on the raised bed(s).  I think I told you that we decided to build it in two separate halves?  Anyhoo, he's got one half built and is currently working on the second.  It's really not so much the building of the things that takes up the time, it's more to do with slapping on a few coats of stain and having to wait for each coat to dry before applying the next!    

I had laid the old pond on the patio so it was out of the way until we needed to re-use it, but the wind picked up and it was being shunted around the garden!  Obviously I didn't want it to get damaged, so decided to corral it in one of the empty veggie beds ~ good thinking, eh 😏

Despite the less than seasonal weather we've been having...

the view from the bench has still been lovely, especially during those odd patches of blue skies and sunshine 😊 

Little words of wisdom

 

A clean slate

image from Magnific.com

It's taken a whole lot of the proverbial blood, sweat and tears but we eventually got the old wildlife area cleared.  Well, not "blood" exactly but I did manage to pull muscles I didn't even know I had 😉 I made myself take a break because I didn't want to make things worse ~ it's been like having a "stitch" just under my ribs on the right-hand, and under my shoulder blade on the same side at the back 😖

I suspect what did it was raking the soil over the area to try to make it more level ~ perhaps I was a bit too gung-ho 😏  Anyhoo, we got to this stage in a shorter time than we thought we would which was a nice surprise as we've had a fair few rainy days.  The raked soil disappeared into the hole where the old pond had been but will need some more added from the soil mountain out the back in due course.  What we've put in there needs to be tamped down as it's very soft ~ every time we forget ourselves and step in the area our feet sink in!

The next job on the list is to get the raised bed built ~ or to be more accurate "beds" as to make life a tad easier, it's going to be made in two sections which will then be joined together.  Luckily we had enough wood stored away to build it, just having to buy in some posts for the corners and more screws.  Whilst Adrian is occupied with that I'll clean off the wooden retaining wall and give it a couple more coats of stain, which will be easier to do before we get the bed installed.  The bed is only going to be two boards high, but will eventually be planted up with shrubs relocated from elsewhere in the garden to create a visual barrier from the patio as it's higher than the wildlife area.  I'm also considering fixing some trellis along the back of the new raised beds, but haven't quite made up my mind yet.  As I've said many times before, the joys of living on a hill, eh 😳

Once the raised beds are in place, we will be laying out an L-shaped path running in front of them and continuing down alongside the stone wall.  There's still a helluva lot of manual labour to get done before we reach the stage of building the new wildlife pond area!

And to finish off this post I thought I'd share a photo I took the other day, when I was sitting on the patio bench having a little break ~ it really does show just how out of line the other half of the garden wall is!

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)   

Carnage!

Again, I'm not talking about next-door's cat 😄 I'm sure he must have some nice sunny spots in his own garden, but I half suspect he regards this as his garden too 😏 

I left you on Tuesday, my lovelies, with the grand rediscovery of the wildlife pond ~ which by this point of the dreadful neglect inflicted upon it, was looking rather more like a bog!

Little-by-little, though, we cleared away all the detritus.  I have kept a few of the plants that were here but most of it was overgrown rosa rugosa, fuchsia and weeds all of which I most definitely did not want to keep 😉

This massive piece of sycamore stump was over to the right of the pond.  Once we'd cleared off the stuff that had taken root on it, we were able to roll it away.

I wasn't sure that anyone would be interested as it's a hefty beast, but one of the chaps who took about half of the other logs happily took this as well.  It was quite the feat though for him to get it out of the garden and into his trailer, even with Adrian's assistance 😲

It's not easy to tell from this photo, but the ground does slope away from the wooden retaining wall, so that helped in moving the "giant economy sized" piece of tree stump.

Eventually we will be making a new wildlife area, complete with a (possibly larger) pond, so I have kept a few of the logs to reuse as insect habitat.

Then came the none-too-pleasant task of emptying out the old pond ~ it was a tad stinky and slimy 😒  We were both surprised at the depth of the pre-formed pond we'd used ~ we definitely don't remember digging out quite such a deep hole!

By the time we'd got to this stage, we were both knackered and the area looked like a bomb had hit it 😳  We decided to let the debris from the pond dry out for a couple of days so that it (hopefully) wouldn't be quite so heavy when we bagged it up ready to be taken to the tip.

We can now more easily see what needs to be done in order to bring our plans to fruition.  Our first task of course will be to thoroughly clear the area of weeds, etc, so that we are starting off with a nice clean slate. We then plan to level off the ground as much as is possible ~ that pond hole will come in useful for raking excess soil into 😄  We currently have another little soil mountain out in the back garden (from where we emptied out the raised beds that were previously in the new patio area), so no doubt we will be making use of some of that to finish filling in the pond hole.

Step one of the garden rehash will be to get the raised bed built along the wooden retaining wall.  We have quite a lot of wood stored away that we can hopefully make use of, so fingers crossed that we won't have to spend too much money!  It will also be interesting to see how much of the soil mountain is left once the bed has been filled.  I probably won't relocate any shrubs until later in the year, when we've got the hottest weather out of the way.  There's also bound to be weeds lurking in the soil, so it will be useful to clear out as many of the pesky little blighters as possible before planting any of the shrubs. 

We have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do in this part of the garden but rather than inflicting "information overload" upon you, I'll tell you more about our plans as we go along 😊

A sharp intake of breath...

I swear I could almost feel our credit card "wince" when Adrian paid the bill at the opticians on Tuesday ~ a little over £1,000 in total for our four new pairs of glasses 😲  To be fair the bulk of that was for my new specs, which are always expensive with the lenses that I have 😏

Neither of our prescriptions had changed very much at all, so in theory we could have just carried on with the specs that we already had.  However, I have two pairs so that I can alternate between them (I wear glasses all the time) and one pair had a scratch right across the middle of one of the lenses so I thought I might just as well have the new prescription put in them.  Rather than just replacing the lenses in my other old pair, I decided to have a new frame as well which in the scheme of things really wasn't the expensive part!  Adrian, likewise, had had his old glasses for a number of years and they were looking a tad battered hence his two new pairs.

We had our eye examination a couple of weeks ago and whilst Adrian's was generally okay, mine threw up a couple of things *sigh*  My eyes in general are healthy enough but the optomotrist told me that I have a freckle on the iris of my right eye.  I can't really recall a time when I didn't have that little speck there, to be honest, but wasn't aware that it was actually a freckle.  She said that she sees them regularly and they are pretty common, just like having freckles anywhere ~ I certainly have them elsewhere about my person!  She told me that it was certainly there on my last eye examination a couple of years ago, but their more up-to-date equipment has shown it in much clearer detail.  Because it has now been shown to be a freckle she wants to monitor it for a while to ensure that it doesn't change, in much the same way that one would keep an eye on freckles or moles anywhere on one's body.

Slightly more worrying is another issue that the examination showed up ~ I am apparently in the very early stages of developing cataracts.  To be honest I haven't noticed any difference to my vision and the optomotrist said that it will most likely be a number of years before I do.  So fingers crossed that I won't need cataract surgery for some time to come 🤞

I had my 65th birthday last Saturday ~ the joys of getting older, eh 😒   

Little words of wisdom

 

An overgrown mess *sigh*

 

No, not next-door's cat obviously!  He likes to sun himself in our garden and doesn't seem at all bothered by the weedy, overgrown borders ~ he just plonks himself down regardless 😄

This, my lovelies, is the actual overgrown mess to which I was referring 😳  I was talking about having to get it sorted out early last year but we just didn't get round to tackling it.  Somewhere in there, believe it or not, is a little wildlife pond!

Having to have the wall rebuilt gave us the proverbial kick up the backside that we needed, so once George had finished we made a start.

Because we want to build a raised bed along this wooden retaining wall, the only sensible option was to raze the whole area to the ground 😖

It's been pretty hard work, as you can no doubt imagine by looking at these photos!

There was originally just ONE rosa rugosa planted in this side area, but omg the bloody thing spread all over the place 😮

Eventually, though, we found the wildlife pond ~ hurrah!

We had edged the area with pieces of wood from the two sycamore trees we had to have removed when we first moved here, but I didn't realise just how much of the stuff we had made use of 😄  It was quite the pile, as you can see, but I'm happy to report that I advertised it on our local Facebook market page as "free to take away" and it was snapped up in double-quick time ~ one less thing to have to worry about getting rid of!

A rather nice new area

image from Magnific.com

You may recall that the front patio area has undergone a number of iterations over the last few years, and whilst we're not yet at the stage suggested in the picture above it's something nice to aim for 😉

When we knew that the wall would have to be rebuilt, the only sensible thing to do was to completely clear the area to give George plenty of space to work in.

Once he'd finished and cleared out the leftover bits of rubbly stone, we decided that we didn't actually want to rebuild raised beds the same as we'd had before.

There were a few slabs leftover from the new border that George had done in the shared drive on the other side of the rebuilt wall... 

...so we asked him to get a few more to make this into a proper patio area.  It took a fair bit of fiddling about on his part to get the new paving laid as evenly as possible!  Our garden is very tricky with the different levels, and an awful lot of the time what the eye sees and what the spirit level says are two rather different things 😳  

As I've already mentioned, we will be adding some planters along both the far side and front of the area to make it a tad safer!  We're going to build a raised bed along the garden side of the wooden wall, up to a similar height, which I will plant with shrubs moved from various areas of the garden.  This will create a good visual barrier across the front.

I told you last year, after my health woes, that we have decided that it would be sensible to rehash a lot of the front garden, and altering the borders somewhat is part of those plans.  This is why I'm going to be "shopping" from the plants and shrubs I already have in the garden rather than going ahead and buying in new ones.  I'm afraid the garden is going to look rather messy and upside-down for quite some time to come😏   

Once the new raised bed has been built, I will feel comfortable about moving these wooden tubs across to sit alongside the new garden wall.  Rather than leaving an expanse of bare concrete, I may well relocate the old wheelbarrow (that we turned into a planter) here from the other side of the garden.  

We moved our old garden bench out to the new patio as it looked very open and bare!  We will be buying new furniture for the space in due course, but will take our time and wait until we've got the long planter built and the tubs moved across.

Even on an overcast day, we really are so lucky to have such lovely views from our new patio 😊

As usual I am running way behind with sharing photos of what we've been doing 😏 We actually started work down in the garden area last week but hopefully I'll get you all caught up with our latest trials and tribulations soon!

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)   

Reading round-up: May 2026

image from Freepik

The Blitz Detective Investigates - The Pimlico Murder: Mike Hollow

One Lost Soul (The Hidden Murders Book 1): JM Dalgliesh

Bury Your Past (The Hidden Murders Book 2): JM Dalgliesh

Kill Our Sins (The Hidden Murders Book 3): JM Dalgliesh

Tell No Tales (The Hidden Murders Book 4): JM Dalgliesh

Hear No Evil (The Hidden Murders Book 5): JM Dalgliesh

The Dead Call (The Hidden Murders Book 6): JM Dalgliesh

Slimming World May/June 2025

Slimming World July 2025

I have come across a new-to-me author of detective novels ~ JM Dalgliesh.  His books are set in Norfolk, a county I lived in for much of my childhood, and I am enjoying reading them very much.  He also has two other series of detective novels, one set in Yorkshire and the other on the Isle of Skye.  Obviously I will be giving them a whirl in due course 😉

I did read a couple more of the Blitz Detective novels during May but got a bit knocked off track by JM Dalgliesh's DI Janssen 😏 I also managed to catch up with two more issues of last year's subscription to Slimming World magazine but still have a fair few of them to get through, plus this year's subscription is adding to the magazine pile.  As we've already started to get pretty busy with all the work out in the garden, I suspect I may be a tad too tired for much reading over the coming weeks.  Perhaps I'll manage to get more magazines caught up with instead, as they don't require quite the same amount of concentration as novels 😄

Finishing touches and another little issue!

image from Magnific.com

Of course, we can never seem to just have one task to get done without another, usually totally unrelated, rearing its ugly head 😏

Whilst he was taking a coffee break, George happened to look up at our roof and noticed that the leading around this chimney was coming adrift *sigh*  So that was another little job that none of us had previously noticed that needed doing.  He got the lead all fixed back where it was supposed to be and touched up the base of the chimney stack.  Hopefully it won't take too long for the new paint to "weather" and look more like the old layer!

A job that we did know needed to be done was repairing the coping on the front wall, as it was cracked in a number of places.  It all looks nice and tidy again now. 

The final task connected with the rebuild was going from the photo above...

... to this!  Obviously we didn't want any plants or weeds growing along our freshly rebuilt wall, and rather than slapping some stone chipping in there we decided to extend the paved area instead.  We were unable to find slabs to match the existing flagstones, so decided the best option would be to go for something contrasting.  It's made a rather nice edging to the original paving and finished the whole area off very well indeed.  Now we've got to set-to and sort out the bloody garden 😳