It’s huge with a big garden, a pool and three bedrooms. In fact, I’m planning to turn the whole front garden into a veggie patch (patch is probably not the right word to describe an almost 300 square meter section – but I’ll stick with it for now).

We’ve got many plans for the place, plans made during late nights drinking wine and looking at the photo’s we’d taken. Some nights we’d only get through three or four and then I’d go off on a planning spree. Some nights we wouldn’t even get to eating dinner!

Now that we’re in, these plans all seem a little daunting. I dug up one bed in the front (which is currently over populated with mustard – I’m apparently not that good at distributing seeds evenly), one just outside the back door for herbs and, in a brief enthusiastic morning, helped our tenant dig one outside her back door for potatoes (please read “helped” as “did the pick, fork and spade work”). Then I was exhausted, to the point where I had to take leave from work.

I don’t think the exhaustion was entirely due to gardening, I mean please, what kind of a woes am I? No, a lot had been going on at work as well but I’m not going to dwell on that here. This is a blog for craziness and laziness, neither of which I am in the lab (certainly not the latter, my colleagues could dispute the former though). Nothing much else happened for a while, not even the blanket in the to-be solarium we put down for the cats while moving has been picked up.

It’s winter now, being June and the first frost came on May 19th. When I opened the back door for the dogs that morning and saw the terrible whiteness of the ice, I promptly decided to invest in some frost covers, which I duly purchased after leaving work early. They did help but the wind kept on blowing them off the plants. Hubby was wonderful though, he built frames for them, which made it a lot easier to keep the blankets in place (except for the kitty though, she’s in her naughty phase and likes to tear things up!). Not too much damage done and most of the plants have survived.

We also got stuck into restoring the dilapidated Wendy house out back, which we originally were going to throw out. Instead, I decided that having a grean house would be a fantastic way of keeping me out of nurseries in the spring. Besides, seeds are cheaper than seedlings. So the paint was scraped off, a new coat put on, the rust mostly removed from the window frames, a see-through roof put on and shelves from the solarium put up (once again, thanks to my wonderful husband) and, last but certainly not least, glass installed in the window frames. That last point had me wishing for kids to do all the putty kneading!

At the moment there are three different types of basil plants living out their last days in the snug, frost-free little house (these by the way are plants I’m taking care of for a colleague) as well as some winter seedlings I planted a while back. More are definitely to follow, since I’m sitting here waiting to go to the airport to fetch my mum and she’s bringing what appears to be a farm’s worth of seeds with her.

Gotta go now.