Flexing those muscles...

image from Magnific.com

Well, sort of 😏 To be fair, Adrian has been doing most of the "proper" muscle-flexing ~ under my supervision, of course 😄

I mentioned previously that we were going to reuse the old kitchen garden beds to create the new, purely, ornamental ones.  The first one to be moved was the old strawberry bed.  Before we relocated the strawberries into it, it was smaller and Adrian extended it with odds 'n' sods of wood.  This made the bed really weighty and it took a lot of muscle-flexing on the part of Adrian to lift the bloody thing, with me prising it up as much as I could manage with a long iron pole that my Dad gave me years ago. 

We were able to shuffle it across the (thankfully!) short stretch of garden to lean it against the new raised bed.  Adrian then spent a fair amount of time prising off the old bits of tattered weed membrane that had been tacked to the inside.  He wanted to clean it up as much as possible so that he could get some fresh coats of wood stain on it.

The space where the bed had been looked like a flippin' grave when it had been moved 😳  We've already started to whittle the soil down, though, and it won't take long before it's level with the ground around it.

It took some huffing and puffing but in the end we got it in its new position.  It's amazing how smart it now looks after three fresh coats of wood stain!  The canes in the new bed, by the way, are just markers for when I start to move shrubs into it 😊  The very large pot to the left was one of two that originally stood against the front of the house.  At some point I will get the matching pot emptied out and moved to stand at other side of the new bed.

We have also now shifted some of the stone chippings from further down the garden to create this new path.  All the stone chippings are gradually being moved from the lower part of the kitchen garden area; eventually it will be grassed over.

As you can see, I've been "shopping" from the garden to plant up the first of the patio containers.  I also brought a few little bits and pieces round from the kitchen courtyard.  I was going to put one of the round tubs where the chair now is but changed my mind.

I also put a largish pot (that I already had) beside the bench, again filled with plants from elsewhere in the garden.  The black rectangular thing currently being stored beneath the bench is the new pond; hopefully we'll be able to get it in position before too long.  

I'm so thrilled with my beautiful white peony 😍  I couldn't get a very good photo, though, as it was a tad windy at the time.  This is the first year that it's flowered so well ~ I'm just hoping that it won't sulk too much when I move it later in the year!