A year in my vegetable garden - part 2 (Plus the rest)

Well – doesn’t time fly ….. Not sure what to write about really ….....

the thorns of the Gorse bush ......

In General

In general – both McD and I are working too hard … It’s not just the near 60 hour weeks but the intensity of the day ..>It’s like at the start of the day falling into a fast flowing river and being bounced around crashing into boulder after boulder until the river spits you out at the end of the day and you go home and wait for the next morning to arrive …

Pretty gorse flowers ...scented ... you can make a nice wine from them ...we declined

It’s hell I tell you

And we’ve taken too much on at work and I’m trying to do one project while getting dragged into vendor meetings for this and meetings for that and meetings for yet something else and then having to do site visits for this and that and fly to Auckland and so on …..

"Tea cup" artwork already in place

A classic happened over the weekend …Friday the Chief Technology Officer, my immediate manager, tells me that he require and executive overview of the Service Management Office a new function within my company that I researched and stared to build … And that he had to have it Monday …. Well that’s just fine and dandy says me … what are weekends for uh uh ?? So Sunday afternoon was devoted to compiling this damn report pulling bits of other reports together and struggling with writer block as to how to describe it and by 6o’clock I had it in a pretty good state and ready to email out to the eager CTO … And then it happened as I pulled it from our works document management system into an email I receive the error message “Corrupt File!!!!”

making the rats homeless

WAH !!!!!!!! :O( I felt physically sick ….Just awful … ….But with McD already diving in to type it out again from a a print out I had that had most of the detail on it (whew) but none of the graphics (Mcd types with all her fingers !! after 30 years at a keyboard I still use 1 finger of each hand and occasionally a thumb for the space bar) I despondently rang the service desk for assistance … It’s a Sunday night I had little hope of even getting a techie to respond I thought … So call logged I went into the vendor helpdesk system to watch (a privilege being in the role I have) ..I see it getting logged and then priority raised as they see I was flagged as a VIP in the systems (another privilege of the role) and then the call being assigned to Arnold … 20 minutes later he rang me collected information and went away …1/2 hour after that the phone went and it was my mate Arnold saying he’d recovered it …. Oh Joy of Joys !!!!!!!!!!!!!! But it took over an hour after that to reformat the document , rebuild the graphics and get it finally sent off ….. I felt stressed to the max, sick and very tired after that

and in the very middle - my murdered Poroporo............

Is it my age ?

these days I feel tired …And tired of work as well … McD needs to be planning a holiday for us … Something to get ourselves energized and refreshed again …And of course where we can take pictures – A real photo shoot …..

There’s more to tell on that one ……

McD sings the lumberjack song while grabbing some sunshine while it lasts .......

Diet & Fitness

Well, see below as to what I’ve been doing to keep me fit :O) We’ve not made it to the gym ..But the weekends have been filled with exercise traipsing up and down the bank to the vegetable garden in the making, carting gorse and weed downwards and planks and wet soil upwards …

Weight loss this year – 11kg …..That’s 24lbs …… But no one notices … I know as my trousers fall down without a belt that is also becoming to big ….. A great deal to go but it’s impossible to keep up the dieting ………….. But bit by bit I guess

Pets contemplating the actions of stupid humans

The Veggie Garden

We finally cleared the gorse from the veggie garden plot ..It was piled into the middle of the plot and over another weekend we filled a skip to the max lugging it load by load on a canvas sheet down the hill..McD standing on top of it all in the skip to push it down as much as possible …

McD contemplating the future harvesting of her favourite veggies - Brussle sprouts

When full, we still had enough for another skip …the task was taking too long as bad weather had settled into the weekends spoiling our only chance of doing the work ….. And so we did another search for some labour. We struck lucky. Two blokes keen for a days’ work, we agreed they would bring the rest of the gorse down for us and grub the plot down to the soil… That wouldn’t take them a day we’re told (!) and we had paid for a days’ work albeit ridiculously cheaply… So I said how about removing any residual gorse at the edge of the plot as far as the arm could reach (Worried about them working on the side of the bank) and if they had time they could cut the back lawn etc …..

Water never tasted so good ......

We got back to a mountain of gorse covering the already filled skip with another small mountain of gorse and cut poroporo(My Tree!!!! ) No gorse left on bank what so ever ………and back lawn cut ………..How the sam they did all that in a day is any ones guess …. We paid them a little extra despite the fact that my poroporo and a rhododendron were fatal casualties in the process…. However they’d over filled the skip and the skip man wouldn’t take it that full, so at daybreak the next morning we were up standing on the gorse to knock it down even further and me going around the edges of the skip with loppers taking off the surplus …. Skip man was happy and off he went with the order to return asap ..

We must get more tea cup artwork...you can never have enough am I right ??!!!

By 10am we had refilled the returned skip and cleared the yard ……..

That leaves us with just a pile of grass and stuff that we intend to compost once McD buys me some wood

That’s another story …………………….

Mcd Wondering if we could 'throw it over the fence..."

The weather has been unkind to us … But we’d already ordered the planks for 2 raised beds that arrived the same day as the men created the gorse mountain, and the “green” living earth soil for two raised beds was delivered just the next day and so, we slowly started the numerous treks to the top of the garden ….

What a vegetables garden should not look like .......

Of course we knew our garden is the wrong side of the hill facing south east rather that the sunny north west it should be down here …it’s the only place we have for a vegetable plot. Add to that the plot is on a slant in two directions neither of them good …… . So the only option was to dig into the hill to create a level raised bed ….

A semi-raised vegetable bed .... With pea straw no less

The good thing was the Clay …While clay is clay and nothing Veggie will grow in it what we dug out was sandy and crumbled and will help to level areas off for the next beds ….It’s taken weekend after weekend to dig out the space and then level off (well a slight incline for drainage off the clay base) and build the frame …… and then on advice we roughed up the clay with a pick axe as put down a layer of paper and then 2 bags of pea straw directly onto the ground … and then the work began ..

Filling wheel barrow after wheel barrow up the hill at the side of the house then along the length of the house ….and then shoveling the soil from wheel barrow to large 2 handled bucket to be lugged up overly high steps through the tree lined unsafe path up the next hill to the vegetable plot and the now semi-raised bed …..

We’ve found the secret to losing weight !!!!!

We’ve only filled to the level of the first plank – but we’ve been out and bought seedlings of cabbage and celery and by hell or high water we will have that bed finished and planted if only partly by the end of next weekend ……………………..

McD delerious from too much manual labour contemplates partners demise with a pick axe and reclaiming her weekends back infront of the fire.....

To be Continued … as I tell you about

Rats

Holidays

Compost bins

The high death toll in the making of a vegetable plot

And planting up a semi-raised bed ……….

And the final resting place for the family pets ……….

Talk soon ....:O)