DIY season

It's a wonderful time of year. DIY season. The sun is shining, the children are healthy, Favourite Handyman is doing diy jobs and I am mostly in the garden. Today we put the chooks in the area I want turned out of lawn and into trees and mulch again. I pulled up the logs around the raised bed and turned them over for the chooks to feast on the slugs. While they were feasting and having dust baths, Favourite Handyman and Fionn collected some new bamboo (the older seasoned bamboo we have is not supple enough) and mended the broken arches of the chook run. The last big wind was a shocker for our poultry palace. He also replaced the plastic on the first section, this time with stronger and much better quality plastic. This home made lark is full of learning.

Brighid and I weeded the tiny garden patch by outside the wash-house (laundry in other parts of the world, but I like the word I grew up with). She could help because we were pulling everything out. As a team, we are not yet ready for selective weeding projects.

We talked paint. Favourite Handyman and I are pondering painting the lounge this winter. Favourite Handyman changed the ancient lightbulb in the funny recessed shelf in the lounge. It is probably sixty years old like the house and I wasn't wildly excited when he managed to zap himself. I'm standing there in the dining room crossing myself like a fearful girl brought up Catholic and telling Fionn not to touch Dad if he goes to the lounge. But anyway, there was no more zappy excitement.

We talked more paint in the back porch and I started preparing the deep windowsill in the porch. I scraped off a lot of paint, I would like you all to know. I have taken a fancy to a red shelf (windowsill). It would look good red, underneath my potted growing projects.

FH put more scaffolding up for the peas and I culled one sad little tomato plant and gave the rest a drink of very smelly seaweed brew. FH dug some bokashi in along the side fence behind the punga raised bed.

I found time to go to the liquor shop as DIY has its currency, to the dvd shop as we all like the odd treat and I am not totally immune to the charms of spoiling my son, to the golf putt shop to plot Fionn's birthday treat with his friend's Mum and finally but very importantly to the garden shop. I bought a lemon verbena plant and a punnet of six kale plants. I wanted beetroot but they had sold out, so I'll have to get my seed packet out and grow both seeds and patience. The lemon verbena smells divine.