Blogtober 2023 : Day 7

Phew, I’m a bit later in writing this than I intended, but here I am at last! 🙂

Thank you so much for all your comments on yesterday’s post about the Future Dreams yarn.  I haven’t managed to reply to them all yet but it’s been lovely to read them.  I’ve also fixed the broken link to the video so you can watch that now if you want to.

Today is Saturday and I always consider that to be my day off – my day to do whatever I want to do and as little housework or “proper” work as I possibly can.  Today, I’ve spent my day in the garden, and more of that in a minute.

Last night, I went to see Deacon Blue in concert with a friend.  We’ve been going to watch this band, sing along to the songs and dance in our seats together for many years now and it’s one of our favourite things to do.  We realised that the first album that Deacon Blue recorded, Raintown, was released in 1987 and as we looked around the concert arena, many of the people there were about our age.  We’ve grown up with this music – not something that’s unusual by any means, but watching the band and realising that they are older too brought home to me just how long their songs have been part of my life – and long may it all continue!

They didn’t stay sitting down for the whole show, in case you’re wondering – they were their own support band and played an excellent acoustic set first before the really noisy stuff 🙂

Today, I’ve been out in the garden.  I started turning my veg boxes into a flower border months ago and it’s still not finished.

The weather’s been too bad or I’ve not had the time or the inclination, or other things have taken priority … life gets in the way of what we want to do sometimes!  I’m going to do my best to finish it this weekend, though – I did think I might have got it finished today but then I decided that I was going to cut up an old water barrel to make a pebble pool and of course these things always take longer than you think.

This water barrel has been hanging around in the garden for a couple of years.  It was given to me by someone who didn’t want it any more and I was originally planning to use it for water for the ducks, but it didn’t have a lid on it and I was worried about not being able to make it secure enough – a friend once found a cat drowned in her water butt when the lid broke and I would hate to think that something might fall into this one.  So it’s been sitting under the hedge since I took it – it’s even been a place for Astrid to sit when she’s been out in the garden – but no longer!

Now, it’s in three pieces and I’ve got a plan!

I’m going to turn it into a pebble pool in the border.  I’ve already got the bird bath in there, but I like the idea of putting a solar-powered fountain in it so that the water moves.  I think that might be better for insects than the bird bath although I expect that there’ll be a bird or two in there as well!

I looked on the internet for the best way to cut it up and it turns out that a hand saw does the job very well, so that’s what I used.  I put the tap on the inside to close off the hole and then I started digging the hole to put it in.

This is always easier said than done, isn’t it?  There’s a piece of damp proofing to try to keep the couch grass at bay and there were all kinds of roots that definitely didn’t look like vegetables, but eventually I managed to get the hole to the size I wanted it.

It looks a bit green at the moment!  It’ll look better when the soil is back around it and the plants grow – and that’s as far as I got today.  I realised that I needed to go and find the spirit level to make sure that it was level so that the fountain pump will sit properly when I eventually get one, and by the time I got it out of the garage, it was time to go and get not so small daughter from work.

Fingers crossed the weather is OK tomorrow so that I can get it finished! 🙂