Plant Mix

The lovely thing about not working at night is that you can get up in the morning and have enough time to do interesting things with the day.

This is what happened to us.

We weren’t exactly early to bed, because of sitting around the kitchen drinking wine and giggling, but we were considerably earlier than we would have been if we had been driving drunk people home from nightclubs.

We had got to be up in any case, because Oliver has got to be fed before he goes to work, but once he had gone we finished our coffee and considered our building works in the back garden with a happy fascination.

Mark drew some sketch plans of what he thinks that it will look like. He has bought a heat pump on eBay. Tiresomely it is in Liverpool, and we have got to go and collect it, and it isn’t likely that we will have any other reason to go to Liverpool, it will have to be a special trip.

Once we have collected it it will sit around uselessly until we have got a conservatory, after which it will be fitted into the wall, and blow cold air out into the log pile and hot air into the conservatory.

He is becoming very contemplative on the subject of heating, because since he took over paying the bills he has realised how much we spend on having showers. In fact it is a very lot, our electricity is the biggest bill of all. It costs a hundred pounds a month, which is an absolute fortune over a year, and we most certainly do not wish this to get worse once we have got a conservatory to heat.

He has designed a solar heating system and bought some solar tubing which will be attached to the wall outside. We have got to collect this as well. This is in Yorkshire, so we will go and get it after we have taken Oliver back to school next week. This will heat the water for nothing so that we can have cheap showers instead of expensive electric ones. We can do this without much trouble, because he has already fitted both sorts of shower, what a good thing.

He has also thought of a way of having hot water close to the taps so that when you are heating it  you do not have to run six gallons down the sink before it becomes warm. I do not know how this will work, although he did draw me a diagram and explained, if anybody is really interested you will have to ask him yourself.

Of course as well as all of this creative activity there is still the building site in the garden. This is an integral part of the water considerations because we want to put an outdoor loo and sink in the shed that he is building at the end of the garden. This is so that we can empty the camper van loo and fill its water tank, but also so that any nasty smells that anybody needs to make can be made harmlessly in the garden.

I can tell that things are getting serious, because this morning a lorry arrived with a huge bag of something called Plant Mix. This is a mixture of sand and stones, and it was so big that it had to be lifted off by a crane.

I am not sure what this is for, exactly, I know that it will be made into concrete, but where the concrete is going to go I do not quite know yet.

He mixed some cement this morning, and carried on with his current project of building new flowerbeds. We have demolished the flower bed at the end of the garden completely, and dug all of the soil out. Some of this is in a heap in the middle of the path, and some of it is getting shovelled into the new flowerbeds. The new shed is going to be in the place where the flower bed was, but just at the moment it is the new home for a huge bag of Plant Mix.

I am finding all of this more exciting than I can say. It is thrilling to watch everything changing, even if at the moment all that there is is a massive mess. This is slowly transferring itself to the living room carpets. I am so pleased about having the adventure that I don’t even mind this.

Whilst Mark was building flower beds I went up to the front garden and painted the stones around the kitchen window. This was so that I could put some netting up over them for the climbing plants that we have put there. We have taken these out of the demolished back garden. It has rained so much this week that they have settled in very nicely and are flourishing. The front garden is beginning to look like a real garden. I am excited about this as well.

I planted dozens of crocus corms whilst I was there, so we will have colours in the early springtime. After that I went to help Mark in the back, and spent a very contented afternoon shovelling soil into flowerbeds.

All good things come to an end, and eventually we had got to stop in order to come and drive taxis, which is what I am doing now.

It is being a very exciting week.