Grumble grumble

Throat bug and feeling fluey.  Taken to bed all weekend with a rooibos and lemon and just trying to RPG my way through it.  Nobody bother me until Monday.

Repotting, reseeding and Georgeproofing

Mike got sick again.  Mature leaves turned red, new leaves turned black.  Bit of a disaster really, and fearing fungus I decided that a windowsill was no place for a tree.  I moved him to an outdoor pot and as I took him out of the existing pot I was met with an almighty reek.  The compost in his pot was rotting around the roots!  Aaaargh!  So I scraped as much away as I dared and binned it.  I took off some diseased roots, patted the rootball dry with a towel and applied mycorrhizal fungus.  He's been potted in fresh compost in a bigger pot with a bed of stones and a topdressing of further stones.  I've pruned all affected leaves and moved Mike out front, where he looks thoroughly forlorn.

I've mentioned previously that George is in the habit of climbing into the Strawbrary while he barks into the dark.  Well, I think I've got him foiled:

If he gets through a trellis with a bush behind it then he's some kind of Houdini dog!

Lastly then, the lawn has been reseeded.  This is it now, and fingers crossed it'll be thicker than thick in a month's time.  

Feels like for the past few days I've done little but grafting, eating and sleeping.  With emphasis on the eating and sleeping.  I've even set Skyrim aside!  Tonight then I'm going to get squared away and make some time for me.  I'll knock together a Baileys hot chocolate, colonise the couch and put a game on.  I haven't played Dragon Age in a while...

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...