Bonfires 101.

Written by Daniel

21st June, 2013.

When I agreed to help write a couple of posts for the blog, Clare assured me that she would give me detailed notes, to help remind me what we had got up to on each day. With that in mind, here are her full notes for this post:  

"You weren't there, mannn. Vietnammm." 

Helpful much? Thankfully, I remember enough to know that this was bonfire day. Hold on, everyone, we'll be alright.

 
The day started, as many days in the garden do, with Clare seizing the opportunity to take some snaps of the tadpoles in the pond, to see how they were growing. Meanwhile, I was trying to move the bonfire further away from the pond, and making sure that any creatures hiding within were out of harm's way before we lit the fire.  As it turned out, I needn't have worried for a while, since lighting the fire was something of an anti-climax.

Within 15 minutes or so, we had used up the few matches we had, with only a few wisps of smoke to show for our efforts, and so MAJ had to make a run to Tesco to buy more matches and firelighters.

Once we had the correct provisions, we got the fire going pretty quickly, and it made light work of the pile of old branches and sticks that we had assembled.  Unfortunately, not everything was as dry as it could have been, which meant lots of smoke, so the three of us spent most of the afternoon facing the opposite direction and trying not to breathe in. 

When we did manage to turn around, though, the fire looked great as you can see from Clare's photos, and burning away all the old garden rubbish has helped to clear plenty of space for future gardening!

In the evening, having succeeded in smoking out half of Folkestone, we decided to leave the fire to burn out in its own time, and went to get some burgers and chips to mark the end of phase 1 of the gardening odyssey!

Party Preparations!

Written by Clare

8th June, 2013.

  

With a party looming, a garden tidy-up was on the cards.

The party was in celebration of MAJ's birthday, which we had already celebrated once in hippie style, with plenty of fabulous tunes and good old-fashioned hippie food - PIZZA (ummm?)  Onto party no.2.  We decided to spend the day before preparing for the party by getting the star of the show (the garden, obviously) looking it's absolute best.  And surprisingly, despite a couple of distractions we got quite a lot done!

We began by weeding and filling in the gaps between the patio stones, which seemed to make a big difference very quickly.  MAJ also managed to Delboy her way into borrowing some top of the range garden furniture.  The patio was beginning to look like a garden paradise.

It was around this time that I became momentarily distracted by the red arrows flying overhead, and MAJ went on a cous cous hunt.  After all, what party is complete without cous cous?

Then, with the intention of moving on to tidying the rest of the garden, I noticed that the pond was now heavily populated with something I had never seen before: TADPOLES.

 Obviously, this was enough to distract me (and my camera) for a good while, particularly when I realised that I could use my macro lens to spy on their tiny eyes and tongues darting about which was very sweet.

Aw, lovely.  So all in all, a successful day.  Daniel even managed to take on a tech-support role briefly when MAJs phone decided that it no longer had the will to function as it should.  Which provided a good photo opportunity for me - as if anything doesn't!

And so I'll end on a selection of other lovely photographs that I managed to get in the garden that day...

 

And another cheeky couple of MAJ, just because we love her so bally much!:

Happy Birthday, MAJ! xXxXx