Tidying Up

It's the official 'End of Summer' here in the UK as the clocks go back from Daylight Saving Hours to the Greenwich Mean Time.  This means lighter mornings and darker evenings with the sun setting about 3.30 around the winter Solstice. 

This makes it the perfect day to start tidying up the garden and greenhouse.  I cleaned the old tomato vines out of the greenhouse, raked it over and planted up the winter crop of chard.  We both love chard and planting it the greenhouse gives us a delicious cut and come again crop throughout winter.  

Tiny Chard seedlings.

 

We also have some kale that has survived the predations of snails, slugs and the sneaky and incredibly persistent small green caterpillars, which those lovely butterflies I've been admiring all summer on the bee and butterfly friendly border, have laid on them. Oh the irony!

I hoed and raked over one of the veggie beds (removing all traces of the local cats visits!)

I then turned to a much nicer job and harvested some herbs, the last few calendula flowers, the fennel harvest, some rosemary and sage.  These are now drying in the summer house.  The summer house is great for drying herbs and we have put a cheap set of pine shelves in there for that purpose.

While I was doing that Jean-Luc was painting the wall in the front room; we had it decorated last December but last month we had to have some work done on that wall as it became obvious that we had rising damp. :-(

At the same time as the rising damp was sorted out we had the outside toilet converted into a secure tool shed.  

 

 This is quite different from Jean-Luc's shed.

Jean-Luc's shed isn't for storing things, oh no! It's for doing 'stuff'; it is in fact a 'Man Cave'.  

I'm not sure what a man cave is for but it definitely isn't for storage.  

Actually it's a workshop; it will have a workbench, shelves and cupboards for nuts, bolt, screws, hand tools and other accoutrements of a potterer and aspiring amateur woodworker.and artist.  

Truthfully we originally got this shed for storing garden and other tools but when we stepped into it Jean-Luc just stood there and said 'Wow. The light's really good in here, it'd be great for painting wouldn't it', and so it became his man cave.

 The compromise - to get all the stuff from the old shed out of my pantry/ storeroom - was to convert the outside loo.

The next job is to replace the front of the pantry as it is wooden and starting to rot at the bottom; and then remove everything from the pantry, clean it down, paint it and set out my shelves and worktop.  Not an easy job with a store cupboard, two freezers and a whole set of shelves - but it will be done!

 A pantry/ store before freezers and all the stuff from the shed.  

Boy does it need a clean now.