And Suddenly it's Summer!

 ...and once again we are waiting to hear whether restrictions are to be lifted further next week or not. In the meantime the French Open is nearly over - which means Wimbledon cannot be far behind, and the garden is rather untidily full of flowers. 

The peony in the picture above has been annoying me for some years, as it would bud, and then drop, so I said it could go. It must have heard, in the way these things do, because this year it had four big buds, once of which was in full flower when the scaffolding from our roof replacement came down...and knocked the stem a bit. It might have recovered, but I decided to cut the stem and add it to one of the vases of the latest delivery from Bloom and Wild. 

We are both fully vaccinated now, and have had a wonderful night away at the Castleman Hotel in Chettle, Dorset. This had changed hands since we were last able to get there - 2 years ago! - but the ambience and the food were still of exceptionally high standard, and it was such a treat for us not to have to think about preparing or clearing up a meal. The room we were given had a four-poster bed, which was a bit high. In fact anyone shorter than me would have needed a step to get in, and getting out (inevitably) in the middle of the night, was a bit haphazard, so next time we go, I think we'll ask for a different room.

 

I am still knitting - a top-down rust-red cardigan at the moment, though also trying to finish a conventionally  structured black one while the days are bright, as it is impossible to see the stitches properly in winter or artificial light. A few days ago I had to drop down about 25 rows to correct (with a crochet hook) the two purls that should have been knits on the body of the garment! 

We also have a new dishwasher! Many years ago on here I recorded that I was unhappy with the first dishwasher we had, and thought the problem was the detergent. 10 years on, we have replaced it as it was just pumping and not draining properly, and find that the new one (which has the added benefit of popping open when it has finished) doesn't smell of detergent when it has completed the cycle. This makes us think that the old one had never drained/rinsed properly, and that we've been exposed to dishwasher detergent in our diet for all that time. It was the first one we had, how were we to know that it wasn't normal to get the detergent smell?

The garden is looking good, if a bit wild. The strawberries are ripening, the blackcurrants are setting...and the forecasters tell us that summer is here!

What did you do in the Lockdown...?

...well in some respects, not a lot. I don't have an immaculately tidy house, a cleared loft, rows of homemade jams, jellies, etc. I haven't even made bread more than a couple of times! That was partly because I ran out of yeast, and partly because we found a baker that was delivering really good bread via our cheese man, who has also got together with a butcher, so we have been supplied with meat as well, when necessary, though our freezer was fairly full in March anyway. 

And I treated myself to a subscription of flowers every month for three months - from Bloom and Wild - this was the first month's selection - over a week after they were delivered, and still going strong, though by this time I'd had to get rid of a few. I have the second delivery now, but haven't taken a picture yet.

I do have a fairly well-weeded garden, but that's only because Mr Bufo went out for at least a few minutes every day, and dealt with anything obvious, as well as marching round to try and compensate for the fact that having the paper delivered means the daily walk to fetch it wasn't happening. And the strawberries have been magnificent!


But in January I started to follow a 'Crochet-Along' some of the early parts of which I showed in the April blog. And in early July, I finished it! Some of it was hard going - I thought I was never coming to the end of the 36 squares that were part 1; but then there were lots of triangles - not all the same, admittedly, but about 180 by the end, and finally 9 octagons. We were able to join up some of the triangles into larger shapes along the way, and then the squares were added to the octagons, together with 'wedges' made of three triangles each, so there were nine large roundels that then fitted to the odd shapes we'd made earlier. And finally a border round the whole lot. So I haven't been entirely idle, either...


Returning to add photos of this month's flowers - 2 vases-worth

Heating and Raised Beds

As always, time seems to zoom by and blogging seems to keep dropping to the bottom of the list. But things have been happening. Our annual boiler service took place on 27 Feb ... the boiler was here when we moved in nearly 30 years ago, so for at least the last 5 years I've been expecting 'have you considered replacing this ...?' But this time, it was. 'This isn't safe, I have had to disconnect it!'

So we had to start getting people in to quote for fitting a new boiler. This of course was not straightforward, as the old one was a back boiler, and they cannot install new versions of those, as these days every flue has to be able to be inspected at each joint, which would mean hatches every metre up a chimney breast through the bedroom as well as the dining room - which of course isn't practical. So we needed to find somewhere for the new boiler to go. When you are in a semi-detached house, with a porch on the front and a conservatory on the back, there aren't many options, and in our case there were two - the loft, or the back wall of the integral garage. There was nowhere in the loft that wouldn't have meant the flue would be too long or have too many elbows, so that was knocked out as an idea, so we were left with the back wall of the garage. That was straightforward for getting the gas supply along as it was the same side of the house as the meter, but needed a lot of extra pipework to tie it all in with the heating and hot-water system, as the airing cupboard was the other side of the house!

  

 

We did the correct thing and got 3 quotes, made our choice and eventually were given a date for installation - 12 March. This meant we would be nearly 2 weeks without heating, and after the warm few days towards the end of Feb, the temperatures had of course plummeted again. We couldn't just escape elsewhere, as we had to clear space in the garage, removing the shelves on the wall where the boiler would go, and finding new homes for their contents, changing the position of the ladder that had been suspended from the ceiling at one end, and resting on the topmost of those shelves at the other, clearing the airing cupboard, shifting things in the loft to allow access for the pipes that would come straight up from the garage, and run across the loft to the expansion tank. we managed to have 2 nights at the flat, and the weekend before the work was to be done we had already arranged to have a night away as part of the celebrations for my impending birthday.

We were expecting the work to take longer, but in fact E-on sent enough workmen - there were four doing different things in different parts of the house at one stage! - that it was all done in one day, and we were able to start getting warm again!

            

 

A couple of weeks later - having arranged with our neighbour, who wanted a new fence on our boundary, to go shares in having it done - we also arranged that they put new edging round the raised beds in the back garden, as the old edging was rotting and falling out. So we have two very smart sleeper-edged beds; the deeper one for veg - which has lain fallow for a couple of years because of the frail state of the edging

and the shallower one with flowers - which has been growing on regardless!

Not only does it look smarter, but the edge of the veg plot is just the right height to sit on!