Jobs for September (part 1)

FOUR water-butts on a newly mended flooring.

Attempting to tidy up!

The books and TV and radio programmes are full of advice for harvesting and winding down the summer beds, but we have had additional jobs to attack recently – in between heavy rain showers! 

Firstly, the Hot Composter has been doing its thing for about three months so we were interested to see how the compost was looking after such a short period of time.  The rough compost was more stick-y as opposed to soil-like, however, it has been spread underneath the rose bushes and buddleia – more of a protective mulch, I suppose.

Another fairly major job has been to ‘make-do and mend’ the rotten wooden planks on the decking – which supports the greenhouses and water-butts.  This also encouraged Paul to buy yet another water-butt – so we now have four!  The cheap solution to replace the decking planks was to use plywood – helpfully cut free-of-charge by B&Q [similar to Bunnings in Australia] - which was then painted black with stuff already in the shed!  The decking will probably be stable enough for a few more years but Paul has already started researching the alternatives… however, this is very much a dream at the moment because of – naturally - cost and logistics.  What a surprise!

The Hot Composter was initially purchased to release more storage space and that has been another task - but there has been a lot of double-handling and sometimes there seems to be an accumulation of even more rubbish than before...?!