Spring cleaning

Cec comes round, as promised, after his morning constitutional and helps me get the frames back over the berry beds.

No, your eyes do not deceive you. One of these things is not like the other. The strawberry bed in the foreground, built and properly levelled a couple of years ago by Mr Fixit, is the horizon line. The slapdash beds I concocted before that, not so much. Oh, well.

Cec goes off to rob from the rich and give to the poor (he played little John in last year’s panto) or do otherwise good deeds.

Cec as Little John, with my air guitar hero Will Scarlett (Paul O'Sullivan) .

 I go back to the cursed netting and the staple gun to get the strawberry frame done.

Oh, bloody bollocking bollocks. There isn’t enough netting to cover these two side panels. I refuse to buy another bloody bollocking roll of the bloody stuff for just these two panels. Back into the house to ring Cec and ask if he and Joyce by any chance have any spare netting – or perhaps some plastic sheeting? Yes, they do! Cec will return tomorrow. What a guy. 

(When the organisers of the Gabriola Garden Tour come to call – ha, bloody, ha – to ask if I would allow the public in on their fundraising weekend for People for a Healthy Community, I shall have to bill it as the Holmes/Ashley Garden – with special mention to the Rosses of Toronto.)

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Cec thinks my cup hook solution for holding the netting in place was inspired?

Well, he does.

With the netting job brought to a halt by lack of netting, I turn my attention to spring cleaning. Of the house, do I hear you ask? No, of course not. To hell with the bloody house. I’ll get to that later. No, at the moment I’m more interested in the garden path.

Not impressed? Well, that’s because I didn’t take a before picture. Trust me, bloody buckets of pine cones and needles have been removed. Not to mention the ten thousand (okay, okay – several dozen) little plastic potting pots which are going to GIRO tomorrow.

A good day’s work. Time to make a cup of tea and take it down to the garden, where I find Stella waiting.

Fifteen minutes later I’m heading back into the house because it is too bloody hot to sit in the sun. And it’s still only April. Yikes.