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?
