Jo's Strimmer!

Because if I'm gonna be cracking puns anyway then they might as well be about the frontman of my favourite band.

So happy about this right now!  A) new toy, B) flat lawn, C) cut grass smell, D) NEW TOY!  

I found a ton of dessicated dog poo that had fallen below the horizon.  Now that the lawn is flat I should have no problems spotting it early.  

  Other things: the potatoes were overlapping the thyme and alliums, so I've put in some bamboo.  

I now have red strawberries!

The runner beans have gotten as tall as the bamboo.  

And tarred most of the roof of the shed.  The bit I've missed I'll get with a long-handled roller on the next dry day we get.  The stuff stinks and it goes on like Marmite, but that's bitumen for ya.  

And lastly I've given the lawn a good feed to help it recover from its first mowing.  

It looks so much neater for a good mowing, but more than that, doing something that's a visible change for the better has lifted me right out of the blues.  

Once more:  NEW TOY!!!

Good times.  

Borders and builds

Good news first: I got an interview to study Biology!

The back border is in place.

I've included a slab there so that Bill and George can still access the social hole without trampling the bed.  Hopefully they catch on.  On the right we have Heathers behind, Coleus in front:

And on the left we have another Heather/Coleus pairing, followed by Borage, Bergamot, Tarragon and two varieties of Rosemary.  I've left gaps of a foot each side of each fencepost; these gaps will be filled by Jasmines and later trellis.  

I've put a few planks on the shed walls and put nails in.  Saying I built racks is giving it a lot more than it is, but they do the job.  

I'm also halfway through building a long box with a lid, akin to a footlocker.  It'll sit along the back of the shed and house things like paints, fertilisers, my sledgehammer and other dangerous items; hence the timber being two inches thick.  It'll also double as a seat, though I'll be sure to mark it boldly with "NO DRINKS, NO LIQUIDS".  You could mix up half the shit in a gardener's shed and make dynamite, and I like having windows.  

It's purple for the pretty.  Meanwhile, the grass is getting unruly.  Dammit, I want a strimmer!

In Pictures: Getting organised!

Busy weekend, pt. 2

I've finally got the first of my beds built!  I've built the fruit bed and the first two vegetable beds.  I would've blogged this last night but just as I sat down to the keyboard there was a mass exodus out the door to see Iron Man 3 and I just had to go with.

The long bed that runs along the East fence is the fruit bed.  The shorter one in the centre of things is one of the veg beds.

You want broken bricks in the bottom for drainage.  If you can only get so many bricks but have a bunch of slabs then divide them as follows: bricks under the veg beds, slabs under the herb beds.  The reason for this is that slabs have a higher pH than bricks, and herbs can generally tolerate a higher pH than veg.

I dug a pit and filled it with broken bricks,

-parked a bed over the pit,

-and half-filled it with soil.

As you can see from the plan, these are bed 1 and bed 2.  The finished beds will project twice as far.

This week I'll be shopping for compost to fill the remaining space with, as neither my compost nor my leafmould are fully decomposed and ready to use yet.  It looks shabby just now but this is the bare bones, and even that much isn't finished.  Once I've got stuff on the grow it'll look better, and better still when I've got grass growing in the rows between the beds and perennial plants like herbs in the herb beds and fruit in the fruit bed.  The rosemary will really set it off.

Lastly then, because I am a fantasy gamer to my bones, a little flourish:

Back to the grind...

Busy weekend, pt. 1

Today I've finished preparing all but one set of the panels for the raised beds.  They'll go up tomorrow.

I've built a worktop for the shed from part of an old wardrobe.

I've begun decorating the shed.

I've nailed up some trellis.

My strawberries are beginning to flower for the Spring.  We'll have home-grown strawbs this Summer.

Unintended consequences

Our Diane's bedroom window is some five or six feet above the roof of the shed.  Bill now sees the window as a new door, sort of like an elevated catflap.

He jumped in there today and Diane freaked out, which left me doubled up laughing and prompted the following doctored lyrics:

He's climbing in windows,
snatching yo kibbles up,
trying to get treats,
so you'd better
hide your yarn,
hide your mice.
Hide your yarn,
hide your mice.

He's since tried to climb out of my window, which opens not onto a shed but a storey drop.  Daft animal.  Well, come the heat of Summer she'll have to choose between sleeping with the window shut and melting or sleeping with it open and suffering the occasional cat burglar.

If he comes in the window at Hallowe'en I shall have to start calling him LeChat de Valois.

Beds and sheds

I built the shed yesterday.  It took two of us all bloody day; mega thanks to Tauren who I now owe a pint.

I'm gonna offer a review of the shed: it's not a well-made thing at all.  One of the windows didn't fit the frame, such that I had to carve the frame to size with a wrecking knife.  It has too many bits and they don't fit together very well.  You need to buy a silicon sealant separately lest it leak, yet it doesn't say that anywhere until after you've bought it.  The roof felt supplied is too small to adequately cover the roof, so I'll need to buy a bucket of pitch to cover the roof.

I bought this from a major DIY chain, one of the big three.  I'll go down there tomorrow and ask them for a bucket of pitch and a tube of sealant; if I don't get them then I'll publish the name.

Pics:

Glad I'm not claustrophobic...

Now that the shed's no longer an immense strew of timber, I have the opportunity to get stuck into building the beds.  I've spent this morning dividing the pallets and stacking the wood ready for reassembly, though it'll be a couple days yet as I've just ran out of nails.  

In cuter news: 

Bill has investigated the roof of the shed, the climbability of the new trellis, and found them both to his liking.  

George and I like to sit together and watch Gardeners World, me for the tips and George for Monty Don's old retriever.  "George, you wanna watch the dog show?"  So today our Sam says to me "this isn't about George liking the dog at all, is it?  You're watching this because you like gardening!"  Well no shit, Sherlock.  

Mike has celebrated the new Spring with some new growth: 

It's my day off from caring today, so I shall be spending the evening in Skyrim.

Until next time xx

Shed bearers

The compressor box is off the wall and I've built the shed bearers.

Now when you buy a shed or similar structure it'll usually say in big letters GUARANTEED AGAINST ROT FOR TEN YEARS, then down the bottom in tiny letters it'll say the guarantee is only good for one year - not the full ten - unless you put it up on bearers.  You need the bearers for the ten year guarantee.  They'll try and nudge you towards buying their own bearer kit made of timber and steel with ground spikes.  If you're putting the shed on soil then you'll need this, but if you're putting the shed on a hard surface like a patio or other paved area then you don't need the steel or the ground spikes and can just as readily build your own timber bearers.

This cost me £25 for the timber.  A bearer kit is £50+.  I already had the screws and the stain in the house.  STAIN YOUR TIMBER!  If you don't treat it with some kind of protective stain or exterior varnish then you might as well chuck a bucket of mould right at the shed and have done.

If you're buying a kit shed then check the instructions to the shed carefully.  Beneath the floorboards there'll be joists.  You need to know if those joists run parallel to the long side or to the short side before you cut your timber.  If the joists run parallel to the long side then your bearers must run parallel to the short side, and vice-versa.

My shed is 8' x 6'.  The joists run parallel to the long side, so I've cut 2x 8' and 6x 5'6".  If the joists ran parallel to the short side then I'd cut 2x 6' and 5x 7'6".  All the timber is two by four.  It should be built so that the two inch sides face into the ground and sky, giving you four inches of ground clearance.  That way any ground rot has to penetrate the stain at the bottom, creep through four inches of wood, then penetrate another layer of stain at the top before it can attack the joists.  The thicker your bearers, the longer the joists are protected.

I've stained them two colours.  The shed is blue, so any part of the bearers that'll see daylight is also blue.  The blue stain is about seven times as dear as the red stain, litre for litre, so any part that isn't seeing daylight I've stained the cheaper red.  No sense wasting the good stuff.  

I've held the timbers together both with heavy carriage bolts and broad-threaded timber screws and with a good blob of wood glue.  I'm a big fan of the belt-and-braces approach, particularly where something has to take a lot of weight.  

These'll look after my shed a treat.  The shed itself is going up on Saturday.  I've stained the panels blue but I still need to paint the trim white.  It's a kit shed, I know what's going where, so it's easier to stain it while it's still laid out flat.  

I guess that's it for now.  The shed goes up on Saturday, the beds go up on Sunday, the lawn gets replanted at some point this weekend.  Big flurry of activity coming up, but it'll all be worth it afterwards.  

Until then :)

Getting closer

The compressor comes off the wall on morning of the 18th and the shed'll be up that afternoon.

I'm digging the lawn over ready for replanting.

I'm treating the areas contaminated with cement.

My hand is fixed and I'm just waiting to get the shed panels off the pallets so I can build the beds.  Next weekend will be incredibly busy.

Bring it on!

In other news: the two fingers that took the brunt of the hammer seem to each have a floating lump beneath the skin.  They're smooth, so not bone shards, and I'm beginning to suspect that I've managed to give myself sesamoids with one blow.

Shed update

The shed arrived on Tuesday.  I've improvised the bearers using old paving slabs and the sides of a wardrobe.  Where it's meant to be going however there's a compressor unit on the wall.  The compressor belongs to a lift that no longer exists and should've gone at the same time, but it didn't.  I'm now waiting on that being removed, so meanwhile the shed is still in panels, stained blue, standing on pallets with a tarpaulin over the top.

We have moved from a state of stagnation without shedparts to a state of stagnation with shedparts.  I guess it's progress of a sort.

Shed dramas

The shed - paid for before I thumped my right hand - is being delivered Ikea-style on Monday.  I'm in no fit state to build a shed, though thankfully I've got help.

I went up to B&Q in Chiswick today to pick up some woodstain: 2.5L of Cuprinol garden shades in Iris if I could get it, else Barleywood.  I've been planning where the shed is going for well over a year now and I always pictured it as stained dark blue with the trim (doorframe, corner edgings) painted gloss white.  I don't know why I pictured those colours, but I did, and now that's what my shed looks like.

Turns out they do the range in 2.5L, and they do both Iris and Barleywood, but they don't do either of those colours in 2.5L.  They stock everything but dark blue in 2.5L.  Bugger.  I could buy two 1L cans, but they're £14 apiece while a 2.5L can would be £19, meaning I'd be paying damn near 150% the price for only 80% the amount of woodstain.  Sod that for a laugh!

So the shed's coming, sure as Winter in Westeros, but I've got no stain, half a hand, and I've still not built the bearers yet.

Shit.