Mini greenhouse

The windowsill just isn't cutting it anymore, I need more seed growing space. Thank you Wilko's for this super mini greenhouse!

What a patio is for

The weather was just so lovely today we decided we just had to have lunch outside. But our patio wasn't quite up to it yet. So this inspired a big patio tidy and clean.

old pots. gone. random tins of paint and varnish from the shed. gone. loose bricks. gone. heaps of sand. gone.

Iced mint tea and Leon inspired salad. Yum!

Blossom & Bill

Many moons ago our Friends Nell and Paddy gave us a lovely tea-towel for Christmas. They got it because it looks like us in cartoon tea-towel form. Jon's likeness is especially uncanny I think. It's from Blossom & Bill and they are 'design vikings'. I like this idea. I think I might describe myself as a viking more often, though Blossom and Bill are from Scandinavia and I'm from the Midlands.

One of the reasons it's taken us so long to do anything with our new tea-towel (too lovely to actually use to dry tea cups) it because we couldn't think how to frame it. Picture frames are so expensive and they've never quite the right size. But inspiration struck when we were at Stour Space on Jon's birthday. In this Olympic-side gallery all the art works were hung with mini bulldog clips on little nails. Maybe not a solution for our finest impressionists masterpieces (if we had some) but certainly perfect for our new tea-towel.

This photo doesn't really do it justice. You'll have to pop round for a cuppa to see how nice it looks in our bedroom.

It's a bit rude, isn't it? Now you can see why it's in the bedroom!

Rhubarb

Our rhubarb is growing and a perfect example of beautiful tastiness as mentioned in yesterday's post. I'm not sure whether we should tuck in this year though, or leave it to get settled after it's garden move and await a bounty crop next year. Any suggestions? 

Getting ready for beans

If you have spent any much time talking to me about gardening you will know that my all time heroine is Alys Fowler. She had an amazing television series on the BBC a while back, used to be on Gardeners World (which actually made me watch it for a while) and writes a column for the Guardian which I always read at the in-laws. And the reason I love her isn't just because she has the best hair ever (better even than Rebekah Brookes and much more worthy of my adoration) she has completely influenced how I plan to garden forever. Her basic premise is that a garden should be both beautiful and useful and what better way to plan a garden in Walthamstow, one time home to William Morris. This means that everything has to either make my garden or home look lovely, or has to be edible, but preferably all of the above.

My garden may be far off the lovely, productive place I am dreaming of but I got one step closer today when I started work on an Alys idea I have been planning to steal for ages. She has an arch in her garden which she grows beans up*. It's pretty, gives the garden some interest and is easier to pick beans off than a wig-wam because you can just walk under the arch and pick away.

Our arch was a steal and only cost £6.18 from Wilkos

We've also decided where our little brick path is going to go - currently marked out by canes. Mainly so we knew where to put our arch. It may look bare and desolate now but come the summer it will be covered in tasty beans and lovely red flowers.

* Jon insists I appologise for linking to the Daily Mail but it was the only picture I could find on the whole of the internet that showed Alys's bean arch perfectly. So I am very sorry for making you click on a link to the Daily Mail website. Please don't judge us for it. Apparently it's actually a technically very good website, just full of crap - apart from the article on Alys.

Let there be light

You may remember last month that Jon got himself a new bedside light. Well it was fine but my black anglepoise was better and I felt sorry for Jon with his £9 Ikea light. It wasn't that it didn't look right but the poise-ing mechanism just wasn't as fluid as the anglepoise. So when we went to late night opening at Wood Street Market and saw this red anglepoise we couldn't resist.

I really like the matchy/non-matchy-ness of the two lamps which are the same style but different colours. Also this now means that Jon can use his old Ikea light in the great loft kit-out which will be tackled this summer when my Step Dad has finished building my Mum a new kitchen. Don't get too excited it will be a budget kit-out and not a major extension!

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.