Lots To Do & No Time To Do It……
Life near the beach, too many distractions.!?

It’s been a while since I have posted anything (the last post was a draft from last year!). This year has seen a lot of life changes forced on me and therefore quite a bit more time on my hands.
Well this is what I thought, but between dropping and picking up the kids from school, fitting all the jobs in that I had planned for the day and studying I never seem to stop.
I have always been a busy person with lots of things to do but when I think the list seems to be getting smaller it increases again because the jobs I have done mean others can be started. Some of the things I have done since I stopped posting are, complete the shed, remove the old shed/clear the bottom of the garden, move one and put up another greenhouse, build some steps into the extension (this has been in need for the last few years and at last I can have my tool boxes back again!!), clear and dig an allotment, clear a friends allotment and start to build a chicken run. With all this going on I’d best get my camera out and post some pictures in the next few weeks.

With the recent purchase of the Ryobi Brush cutter/Trimmer RBC30SESA to clear the allotment of long grass we realised that the strimmer was maybe not the best thing for the surrounding paths as it tends to send the grass clippings everywhere.

The flexy-mower attachment is small and is perfect for the small grass paths around our allotment. You could probably keep a small garden lawn down with it but it obviously wouldn’t give you a bowling green finish. The machine handles well once you’ve got used to it – it seemed to take a lot of revs to get it started.

The difference with using this head over the strimmer is the trimmings don’t fly about, they stay close to the ground and can be raked up afterwards (or left!). It isn’t the type of tool I’d choose to cut the lawn on a quiet Sunday afternoon but when there’s no electricity available it does the job at great speed without the need for lots of extra tools to store in the shed. The flexy-mower head got a bit clogged up when the grass was wet and quite long – nothing more than a normal mower would have done though.

All-in-all we’re really pleased with this new piece of kit, we’ve even found new homes for our electric strimmer and lawn mower and will be using this new kit in the garden and not just down the allotment.

I was just downloading the photos off the camera and found this one. I’ve decided to make it the background on my computer. Dinefwr Park is a really beautiful place to visit any time of year. We’ve been several times and each time we’ve said it w=ould be nice to see the blue bells in flower. This year we made it and I think probably went when they looked their best.

Last year we landscaped part of our garden, using lots of junk. A pond and bog garden was made from an our flower pot and disgaurded sandpit that the children had grown out of. This year our irises have flowered and they look beautiful. I’m chuffed.

We thought we’d experiment with our own paper pots, rather than using the standard plastic pots or buying biodegradable ones. We did have to buy a newspaper – not a common occurrence in our house, but it did get read – just some would argue it wasn’t news by the time we got round to it!

I ripped the sheets down the fold and then folded long ways. I then took a wine bottle (I wanted 3″ pots for the squash plants) and rolled the paper around the base. Then crushed the base, filled with compost and planted the seeds. The pots have worked really well, transplanting the squashes into the allotment worked really well, I just wish we’d worked out how to stop the slugs – out of the 18 plants that germinated 5 are surviving on the allotment….

Hubby has sent me an excellent link to KULER. The site enables you to upload images like the one above and create a colour palette. I made this one.

This is a great tool. I have posted it on the college VLE site for my fashion students to use when they create their own mood boards.