Accident in a Spaghetti Factory

Today has been a bit of a mixed bag. Between reading the last rights to my car’s fuse box (so no heating for us!) and just sitting down to write this entry. I have managed to finally fit in some time to change the colour of my fingers from pinkish to green. However they were more of a definite brown when I had finished.

This is how it started today:




In just 90 minutes of graft I can definitely see some sort of difference starting to happen. I had to do a lot of digging out today and here in the Princess Garden we had or first casualty of war. While digging out some bramble roots there was a loud snap and off falls the blade of my spade! Oops - that will be another purchase I need to make tomorrow. How romantic!



Tomorrow is Valentines Day and for the first time in about three weeks we are all vaguely well give or take a few snuffles here and there. This means that we get to travel to the in laws just across the border in North Yorkshire. Also, and more importantly, lunch in a pub. That means I don’t have to cook and even better, wash up! It’s also the in law’s wedding anniversary too so all in all it’s a very special day.

C & I are not the most romantic of couples or the most conventional - you might have noticed this by now, but I think it would be rather boring if we were I could be wrong though.

So, back to the gardening. After a couple of days fighting my dark thoughts, that probably plague us all from time to time, but tend to take up squatter’s rights in my head, it was nice to be able to do something that cleared my mind. Usually that is a perk I normally find from my running. Once I dug out my edging spade, which is a really girly small bladed one that I’m not keen on, I started on the job in hand.


At one point my spade went in and what it brought up looked like an accident in a spaghetti factory. A whole new root system for another infestation of ground elder waiting to happen – just what I needed – not. There is only 2 ways to eradicate this problem a flamethrower (which would be fun but deadly for the fence) or constant attention to digging over the soil and picking out all of the thick white roots one by one. Easier that it sounds every time it snaps another root is enabled to make yet another weed systems. I have been fighting this particular weed for 3 years now and I’m still fighting the fact it seems to prefer my borders to my neighbour’s garden isn’t lost on me, but it’s ever so annoying as a lot of the roof mass is on their side of the fence so it just comes back season after season.



So there I am elbow deep in mud and leaves and bramble thorns and I hear a little shuffle in the background only to see Littlest B has broken free of the house and stormed the garden no coat no shoe no gloves and then refused to re-enter the house! So there I am attempting to get to the root of the problem (ooh that’s a bad one and I do apologise!) and Littlest B is shuffling around the patio on his trike and then attacks the border with a trowel. Very cute. But we are paying for it now as he is still up, an hour after his normal bedtime.

So here is my reveal of the day and the surprise flowers that I found in the process.