More Positivity

Moving on from the death of a close family loved one is hard but it just has to be done. I think about her more now than I ever did when she was alive. I regret not spending more time with her but that doesn’t get you anywhere. She was a very practical person and I can hear her speaking in my head :

” get on with your life, savour every minute, do everything you want to do if you can, don’t waste a minute and be happy”.

And that is what I intend to do and writing it here is an affirmation of that.

One of the things that I enjoy is being creative, whether it is writing, gardening, playing my musical instruments, cooking , decorating my home, photography, planning holidays or walks and its one of the things I miss about teaching. I loved thinking up new ways to inspire the kids and planning music or guitar lessons. That is until I felt I was being forced into a box and things had to be done one way and one way only. So I left.

And so at the end of this summer, better late than never, I have spent a great deal of time redesigning my garden. Building raised beds, planting and rearranging. It’s been creative, fun, physically demanding at times, and it kept me feeling positive and fulfilled. Theres still stuff to do, but that’s good. Its been fun wandering around garden centres and trawling the internet for ideas and learning which plants will go where.

The grass is proving difficult. Thats because our dogs wee kills it leaving areas of bare ground, so its very patchy. I have re-seeded one patch with”Aftercut Patch Fix” which is specially recommended for re-seeding areas damaged by urine, with grass types that are supposed to withstand our dogs liquid outpourings!! Nothing much has happened in a week.

The concrete patio looks very drab and weary so I’m looking into coverings for that.

Our raised bed kit came on a very sturdy wooden pallet, which I painted with green fence stain and potted a load of autumnal plants in it – see photo. It looks good and covers up a wall of pebble dash, which i don’t like. We will see how long the plants last in the small pots.

The raised beds took an awful lot of filling with many bags of top soil and compost. Even though the bed comes with a 15 year guarantee, I lined the sides with a pond liner . I’ve planted herbs in them, to use in my recently reawakened love of cooking. (See the first picture – you can also see what I mean about the concrete patio). I also painted the fence with green one coat Cuprinol Fence Paint, but as you can see one coat has not covered it well enough. The fence, it has to be said, is pretty knackered but it belongs to next door. The third picture is of some window boxes I bought and filled with pansies which always seem pretty hardy. The last picture is of my “Wendy House” and the decking we had done a couple of years ago, which makes use of that corner of the garden. I absolutely love my girl cave and spend loads of time in it. I have a little portable gas heater for when its chilly and I do a great deal of my writing in it. As you can see our dog is rather fond of it too and nearly always accompanies me.

The decking need to be kept clean by sweeping and once a year I scrub it with washing up liquid and water, then use a decking protector. I want to get rid of the compost container which you might see in the corner – it looks stupid and we don’t use it. So am considering making it smaller and into a table area or something – watch this space. I think the table and chairs we have at the moment are too big. And Im going to get some nice paving stones for the little path to the house.