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Very garden heavy weekend this weekend, as Mum and Dad came to visit and Mum, Jeremy and I went to Gardeners World Live. We had a lovely time and did some very successful shopping but boy was the heat oppressive! I don't remember finding a gardens show such hard work since the first year we went to Hampton Court. Still, it was a really lovely day, with lots of beautiful gardens and plants, especially some of the borders.
I managed to buy quite a few good shade loving plants for my garden (and stuck to my budget!) but actually, being out here today, I hadn't realised how much the tree surgery had done in terms of reducing the shade on a lot of the garden - a lot of beds which were previously shady pretty much all day are now only really partial shade, which opens up quite a lot of options. Planting things up has also necessitated getting rid of a lot of weeds, including absolutely masses of creeping buttercup, but hopefully now that I'm a bit on top of it, things will be better. The trick next year will be to make sure that I keep ahead of the leaves in winter (which shouldn't be so bad anyway) so that I don't spend lots of spring clearing the paths and so on and letting weeds in the beds get out of hand.
I was also kind of chuffed that we managed to do the show experience in my Leaf, despite the fact that the NEC itself has no chargers, which surprised me. Still, a convenient charger on the M42 allowed us to recover post show with cold drinks and a seat in the shade, while charging the car up enough that I could run the air con on the way home :) Lucky that we had lots of sunshine on the solar panels at home to keep us going!
I managed to buy quite a few good shade loving plants for my garden (and stuck to my budget!) but actually, being out here today, I hadn't realised how much the tree surgery had done in terms of reducing the shade on a lot of the garden - a lot of beds which were previously shady pretty much all day are now only really partial shade, which opens up quite a lot of options. Planting things up has also necessitated getting rid of a lot of weeds, including absolutely masses of creeping buttercup, but hopefully now that I'm a bit on top of it, things will be better. The trick next year will be to make sure that I keep ahead of the leaves in winter (which shouldn't be so bad anyway) so that I don't spend lots of spring clearing the paths and so on and letting weeds in the beds get out of hand.
I was also kind of chuffed that we managed to do the show experience in my Leaf, despite the fact that the NEC itself has no chargers, which surprised me. Still, a convenient charger on the M42 allowed us to recover post show with cold drinks and a seat in the shade, while charging the car up enough that I could run the air con on the way home :) Lucky that we had lots of sunshine on the solar panels at home to keep us going!
