Brief feelings of satisfaction

I normally find January the worst month of the year. I'll continually ask myself and my loved ones 'what do I want to do with my life?', 'why are we here?', or 'why is the thermostat set so high - do you not want us to reduce our carbon footprint?!!!' (oh yes - I'm a joy). The January blues seemed to have passed me by this year, but I am finding February a bit of a struggle. Last month was all blue skies and crisp cold mornings (albeit that the ground was rock solid, which was not conducive to gardening and I couldn't get to work for half the month due to the snow drifts, but still!) whereas February has been grey skies and, well, not even rain - just a sort of constant 'mizzle'. You know, when it is almost raining but not quite, yet you still get wet through? And there are still two weeks of the month to go until March, when I can hopefully get out and about a bit more consistently and start sowing my seed mountain.

That's not to say that there isn't still plenty to do. Our greenhouse, already fraying at the edges, did not hold up well in the storms before Christmas and has a number of cracked panes as well as an impressive new ventilation system (where a whole pane blew out and landed in pieces in next door's garden!) We ordered some perspex (cut to order and specified thickness), some z-clips and some glazing foam online to do a thorough patch job. Then the greenhouse just needs a good clean and the purchase of some staging (we're looking at Two Wests and Elliott) so that we can get growing. We're also making good progress on clearing the area under the pergola, ready for the delivery of our grape vines (due to arrive later this month). Then we'll need to decide what we'll do with the rest of that space. Given that it took us about 50 trips to move the last tonne of gravel we had delivered from the front of the house to the veg plot, you'd think I might have had enough of the stuff, but no, I'm voting for a 'gravel' garden for under the pergola, with a number of sun-loving plants, including strawberries and some of the Mediterranean herbs, set in containers surrounded by a light-coloured gravel. I do like to have a plan for things....

Still, speaking of plans and their eventual fruition, we've finally finished the vegetable plot - it's all ready now for some veg!

As I mentioned in my last post, we put down some weed suppressant fabric first, then we layered the gravel on top. It's called moonstone and we ordered it online for kerbside drop - it took literally the whole tonne to edge the raised beds - phew!

We then covered the beds back up with more weed suppressant fabric, weighted down with some bits of wood.

WH used some more of our surplus logs to make a nice border to the patch, to mark where the fruit area begins.

He then did the same to edge the area around our existing compost bin, leaving space for our soon-to-be-delivered second bin.

And finally, here's something that cheered me up earlier this month - my daffodil and tulip bulbs haven't all been eaten by our resident squirrel population!