Easy morning porridge here we come

This is an interesting space on the kitchen counter.....

Whoopie, a microwave from Dr. Lloyd to make early morning porridge that little bit easier. I haven't had a microwave since I left home so I'm not sure what else to do with it. What do you lot use your microwaves for?

First sowings

First, apologies if you mainly want posts about our house. I'm afraid that as summer gets going I am going to become obsessed with my newly ready garden so garden posts might crop up every now and again.

Today I have planted some February seeds including some flowers (Chinese lanterns and marigolds) and some edibles (strawberries, sorrel, spinach and corn salad). Fingers crossed I have some seedlings soon!

Starting to look more like a garden!

After all Mum's digging yesterday, it was time to start planting.

herbs go in near the back door, rosemary, sage, chives, oregano

While Mum and I are planting, Jon keeps the digging going

Thyme, strawberries and more oregano

Jon evens up the path

Isn't it looking good!

Jon makes a little wall to separate two areas of the garden, we're going to do a bit of terracing

Raking the soil to even perfectness

The rasberries go in

deciding where to put the blackcurrents

Mum does some archaeology

You may remember when our garden looked like this. All lawn and falling-apart shed. I started off back in summer, getting rid of all the grass by covering the whole thing in cardboard. Whilst this was a great plan for preparing my vegetable garden, it wasn't so good for making it pretty. A few weeks ago Jon and Stephen dismantled the shed, which again, got us one step closer to the veg garden but left a bit to be desired in the looks department.

Well this weekend, hot on the heel of looking after my new niece (Isabella, gorgeous!) my Mum came round to take the garden in hand. 

We started off by clearing all the rubbish into one corner that is all concrete.

Then Mum started digging...

...and digging...

...and digging

Then she got distracted by some archaeology. Looks like the patio wall used to come out a lot further. Luckily it's quite far down so as long as keep my root crops away from this area, all should be well.

After all this digging I ran my super-Mum a bath and the she took us to The Windmill for tea - what an amazing Mum!

Space for spices

The boys just didn't feel like they'd done enough drilling recently, so they put up some nice shelves in the kitchen.

They're going to be where we keep all our spices so they are in easy reach of the cooker and not all stuffed in a box in the cupboard so you forget what you have and just use cumin in everything. Actually I quite like cumin so I don't mind so much.

I think I might put some hooks in the bottom too so I can hang tea-towels off them to warm up and dry out over the radiator.

Making the house a little warmer

Jon and Stephen added a draft excluder to the back door in the kitchen. Hopefully that will make it all a little warmer.

The wooden hills

Since when we moved in there has been a rather unattractive, and not altogether sturdy, banister on our stairs. Now with an impressive 45 degree angle, you want a banister you can trust. Also, Tim and Laura got one so we got a bit jealous. Jon and the ever amazing Dr. Lloyd set about replacing our banister.

This is a big hole that was left after removing the old banister. As you can see below, our wall is clearly made out of a bit of old wood and wattle and daub 

(this may not actually be true, I may be exagerating a bit)

But it was quite hard for the dynamic duo to find anything to give our new banister some purchase. That meant there was a lot of prospective drilling.

and here it is! On the wall to help us mountaineer up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire.

or down, if that's the way we're going.