New beginnings.

It was a big day for Torin (and me!) on Friday, as it was his first day at nursery school. He'll be going every morning and so this will be his first full week. As you know, he's been at home with me since he was born so taking this first big step of independence is quite a big deal around here. I have to admit I did feel a little bit wobbly while I was walking home after leaving him at the nursery on Friday.

He was so excited on Friday morning - he couldn't wait to get into his uniform and put on his backpack. In fact, I think he was walking around the house with his backpack on his shoulders for a good half and hour before we actually left!

I wanted to take some photos of him in his uniform on his first day, and I thought the shed would provide a good background - the morning light was lovely and clear too.

I keep looking at him in his uniform and thinking he looks so grown up and yet so tiny at the same time!

Fairies in the garden.

I have actual, real life fairies who come and make my garden look pretty. My parents came to stay this weekend and as usual, my garden is now looking a whole lot better than it did before they arrived! Torin spent a fun couple of hours potting up autumn-flowering plants and spring-flowering bulbs with my mum on Sunday. Here's what they got up to:

I now have a pretty bucket of delicate violas in front of the shed.

The pot that should have had a wonderful hosta in it this summer (pesky slugs!) now has a lovely display of pale heather, purple hebe and a beautiful bright cyclamen that should give me a colourful view from my back door for the rest of the year.

I've also got black tulips and white daffodils to look forward to in the spring (once they've woken up, as Torin says!).

Thanks mum, I'm very lucky you're so green-fingered and incredible generous xx

Our pretty blue shed.

We've managed to be quite busy around the house while I've been away from this little blog, so I'll be preparing some posts in the next week or so to show you what we've been up to.

Thanks to my brother, our shed has finally been painted! I decided what colour I wanted to paint the shed a while ago, and finally managed to track it down in Homebase recently. I decided on Coastal Mist by Cuprinol as I thought the pale blue shade would bring some much needed colour into our garden and liven up the drizzly view we have out of our back door for much of the year!

As I said, despite the rainy weather, my lovely brother painted the shed for me while he was staying with us a few weeks ago - he even took Torin out with him so he could "help"! Thanks Ad! Don't they look sweet together!

This is what it looks like now - a little different!

I'm so pleased with it. It's lovely and sunny here today, but even in the rain it really does brighten up the garden.

I decided to paint the hinges white, mainly because I had some paint left over from when we painted the drainpipe on the front of our house (white drainpipes look so much better than faded grey when your house is newly painted white!) and I also thought that black would look too harsh against the blue. What do you think - do you like the white?

I hope it's sunny where you are today!

New garden table.

You may have noticed that in the picture of the bottom of the garden that I showed you here, there are three chairs but no table. That's because after about six years of living outside, ours was totally kaput and it was time for a new one. After looking around several places and struggling to work out why it was almost the same price to buy just a new table in some places as it was to buy a table and four chairs in others, I ventured to the Swedish place once again.

Here's my lovely new MÄLARÖ table in place at the end of the garden. Torin helped me to put it together yesterday and we even saw some sun while we were working on it (although it was definitely not warm enough to sit around it when we had finished)!

I really like the contrast between the white painted finish of the table with its metal legs, and the weathered (ahem!) finish of the wooden chairs. Just got to paint that shed this summer and plant a few more plants and then this area will be finished. Can't wait for the warm weather - it'll be lovely to sit out here on balmy summer evenings.

In other news, Astrid rolled over for the first time on Friday! Here's a picture of her lying on her back after completing her gymnastics.

A transformation in the garden.

In one of the breaks in the rain today I managed to get outside and take a few quick snaps of the work that we did in the garden over the Easter weekend. My parents were visiting and with Torin's help, transformed the end of my garden!

This is what it looked like for ages:

And this is what they managed to do! I'm so grateful for all their hard work and I'm sure you'll agree, it looks really lovely now.

We had done some work in the interim - like smashing up that concrete slab and planting the apple trees to the left of the picture, but the work that my parents did this weekend has made such a difference! 

That stack of bricks to the right of the shed all came out of the earth underneath the concrete slab. I kept trying to push the spade into the earth and each time hit something solid - I must have pulled about thirty original Victorian bricks out of the ground - the ones with loads of holes in them - think I'll put them on Freecycle in case anyone wants them. I'm going keep a couple back though to turn into outdoor candle holders - can't find a picture of this anywhere, but you basically just put think candles in the holes and it looks really effective - I'll post a picture when I've tried it.

Neat and tidy garden pots.

Today it finally stopped raining for long enough for me to get outside (briefly!) and take a photo of the greenhouse Torin and David put together the other day.

I didn't manage to take a true "before" picture, but you can see in the background of this picture, the plastic greenhouse that this wooden framed one has replaced.

At the moment, there are no plants in the new greenhouse, only empty pots and some of Torin's outdoor toys and garden tools. I'm sure this will change in the Spring though, as we're planning on trying to grow some of our own vegetables next year. We've done this before and really enjoyed the process - especially eating the fruits of our labour, but for some reason it didn't really happen this year. Now we've got a lovely new greenhouse to 'bring on' seedlings, I'm sure we'll manage to grow something, even if it's just a bit of rocket!

For now, the frame is made from treated fir tree wood, but I think I'll paint it in the Spring at the same time as I paint the shed - have a peek here if you want to see the colour I'm thinking of using.

Down at the bottom of the garden . . .

I love it when the weather begins to turn and we can start spending more time outside. Never has this been more important to me than now, with a toddler in tow. The sun comes out and behold, we can add an extra room to our house - the garden!

When I was pregnant with Torin, I spent a couple of days sunning myself in the middle of the lawn while I watched my parents, brother and David lay a patio and build a shed at the end of the garden. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do anything to help so I reluctantly agreed to stay beached on the rug! 

The end of our garden is a bit of a sun trap and so it's a great place for us to sit and relax at the end of a sunny day - we made full use of it over the weekend. 

Didn't realise until now that Torin's pull-along dinosaur was in this picture - he must have sneaked it in as I'm sure I moved it!

As I said in a previous post, there is still a lot of work to do in our garden, but this is so completely different to what we had to contend with when we moved in. The whole of this area was covered in some kind of massive prickly bush that had taken root everywhere! My mum and I spent ages digging it all up and then raked the whole lot over after levelling the earth. It was hard work! 

Where the plants are in the foreground isn't finished yet either. There used to be a greenhouse on this part of the garden - I have no idea why it was put here, as it effectively blocked off the rest of the outside space. Before they laid the patio and built the shed, my little work party had fun demolishing the rickety greenhouse. We were left with a concrete slab that has gradually broken up over the two years since the greenhouse was taken down. It had become quite dangerous actually, as it was getting very wobbly and Torin had become quite partial to dancing on it, oh, and vacuuming it (!) with his toy vacuum cleaner. 

Our options were to clad the concrete with decking, or to break it up completely and remove it. We chose the second idea, as it wasn't structurally sound enough to clad - we would have had to build a frame that sat over the entire thing. So, David had fun at the weekend breaking up most of the concrete and digging over the soil. Quite excitingly, he found several slabs of slate underneath the earth - we'll definitely use that elsewhere!

We're now hoping that the weather will stay warm and we'll be able to finish this little project so we can enjoy it over this summer. We're planning to lay turf over the area and then join it up with the rest of the lawn.

Do you have a favourite place to enjoy the sun in your garden?

Spring tulips and lovely sunshine.

What a glorious weekend! Hope you had the sun where you are.

My parents came to stay and we were able to spend most of our time outside because of the lovely lovely weather. When they arrived on Friday, they gave me two bunches of pretty tulips:

The windowsill behind the sink in the kitchen is one of my favourite places to display flowers - you can perhaps see from this picture that we can't see our garden from this window, as it is at the side of the house, so I love to have flowers here to bring a bit of the outside indoors.

On Saturday, my brother and his girlfriend, and David's brother came over and we all went to Bute park in the centre of Cardiff, for a picnic. We sat in dappled sunshine underneath blossoming trees, and drank in the beautiful spring day. A lazy walk back to our house via a sunny beer garden completed a relaxing day. 

Can't stop looking at . . .

Although it's been a little cold and drizzly here today, it really feels that Spring is just around the corner. Daffodils are everywhere; crocuses in our local park are almost finished and being replaced with sweet smelling Hyacinths. 

I get to this point every year and begin to think that this is the year for our garden - it really needs sorting out. Since we've lived here, David and I, with A LOT of help from family, have done quite a bit of work on it, but there's still a lot to do - it looks very rough around the edges (and in the middle, if I'm honest).

I'm sure this smart willow planter from Garden Trading would help to make it look better:

At £70, it's not cheap, but it looks like it would weather well. How beautiful is the outside of this house? Sigh!