More garden fun..!

As some of you will know, I have tried my hardest to become a 'gardener'. This does not come naturally to me! I kill most house plants just by looking at them! BUT, so far the garden is actually blooming! I am very proud! :o) The front of our house had a pathetic little strip of grass which was useless, and I have wanted to dig it up for years, but never got round to doing it, until now! I unfortunately forgot to take a before photo, but i'm sure you can image from my description what it looked like! Rather than grass it was a mass of 3ft high weeds most of the time, which seemed to come back and multiply no matter what I did to them! SO, this is what Mark and I spent a whole day doing during this nice summer weather we currently have here in the UK (although it now seems to have gone again!)

We had some beautiful lavendar plants at the end by the footpath which the bumble bees and butterflies loved, but I think I got a bit carried away with the pruning last year and one of them died, so this one looked a bit lonely by itself.  I did think about rescuing it....

 

..but I didn't like them all that much as the smell of lavender isn't my favourite scent, unfortunately!  I also couldn't get the thing out of the ground for almost 2 hours, and ended up having to hack it to death thanks to the roots having grown into the pavement and concrete!  I had a work out, I can tell you!

I decided to trim it down in the end, and this is what I got out!  Quite an achievement that required a lot of muscle!

I will be putting some nice pots which my grandmother has bought us for our first wedding anniversary on the slate chippings, so hopefully that will look nice and I will post a picture once i've done it for you to see!

 

We have also been busy in the back garden again!!

Just a reminder of what it did look like, in case you have forgotten..

It now looks like this...

As you can see, the decking now looks rather shabby! We only painted it 2 years ago, and the paints supposed to last 5 years, but nevermind!  We decided to sand it all down on Friday and clean it up, and then oil it! 

My gorgeous hubby hard a work!  I had to take over in the end as he had to go and do some work.  I think he was grateful to get out of it! hehe

This is a much better look, don't you think!?  I've always hated that dark brown paint! :o)  This is just after I had finished sanding it all down.  We then had to get some decking cleaner and scrub it like mad and then pressure wash it all off which took forever and the garden was a mass of bubbles!

Me, hard at work with the pressure washer!  It was fun at first, then after the first block I was about ready to give up!  It wasn't too much fun watching the gigantic spiders come out from underneath it, as i'm sure they wondered what on earth was going on.  I am not a spider fan, they freak me out compleatly!  I am ashamed to admit that I did blast them with the washer.......and they did go for a small flight!

So, all that is left to do is oil it now!  I hope the rain goes away soon! We have a family BBQ in a fortnight and we are hoping the garden will be 100% finished by then!

Fingers crossed, anyway! :o)