Flower bed

Catching up now on all the things we did over the summer - this was one of the first - bringing the old flower bed back to life. We killed all the existing stuff and have now put in a geotextile underlay with lots of bark chips on top. It's got automatic watering laid in there too, so it hasn't been too much work to maintain over the summer. Weeds are amazing things though, and they still manage to poke through the slightest gap in the bark chips...

Water water everywhere

The obsession with pipes continues - this is but a small part of the garden watering system we've been putting into the garden.

It's spent the summer watering the tomatoes and our new flower bed, but I have greater plans for it...

There's a couple of conduits built in the concrete wall supporting the balcony - they were previously used to get water to and from the old swimming pool. I plan to use them to get the house cave-drain through the wall and down to the bottom of the garden where there's a real drain (underground).

We'll also take a garden water pipe through the wall to get the water out into the rest of the garden and down to the bottom of the garden where we'd like to put the chickens.

There's a garden at the bottom of my garden!

After some work - we've finally got the bottom part of the garden (the bit next to where the pool was) in a state where we can plant a lawn. We've hacked out I don't know how many bushes, trees and bamboos, mulched them into compost (with the fantastic Bosch tree chomper) and killed most of the remaining foliage - none of which was grass. We did this over the winter and got rid of all the remaining rubbish in about 40 cars loads to the local dump.

This was followed by a rotovation, an epic stone hunt (the kids helped), burying of some pipes to transport water around the garden, and days of raking to try and level out the bumps. Along the way we found a water source (the same that flows through the village), a barbecue and paved bit, and an old border (which now has some tomato plants in it). We've added a swing set, a sandpit and a little wooden house for the kids to play in.

The grass seed is now sown according to Alan's careful instructions, so now it's just a matter of watering and hopefully we'll have a new lawn in a few weeks!

No pressure on the heating

In an unrelated problem, it looks like we'll have enough fuel to get through the next few days - not because we've got more fuel, but because limescale in the tank has reached such critical proportions that it's blocked something - the hot water pressure is now rather low.

There is plenty of hot water it seems but it's just not moving very fast. The morning shower is now a little bracing since the mixer tap evidently hasn't noticed that it shouldn't be dumping the usual quantity of cold water into the mix. The bath still works, though it takes 30 minutes to fill.

We could get everything serviced and all the pipes flushed, but since we're planning to rip it out all in the next week or so, we've decided to live with it...