The great outdoors!

A beautiful September day in Dublin today.

And I made the most of it.  I started with breakfast in town in the sunshine, with two former workmates, and finished with dinner of homemade vegetable lasagna made with fresh vegetables, donated by another friend who grew all of them on his allotment.

But in between, I spent the day in my garden, working.

For the last few years I have neglected my poor garden.  I used to love being out there digging my hand in the dirt, planting stuff and then the anticipation of watching it grow.  And I loved the summer evenings when I would spend time out there with the garden hose giving everything a good drink.  Very therapeutic after a long day at the office.  But the events of 2007 (marriage break-up!) left me with no interest in anything except survival!  Of course, being the trouper that I am :-) I survived!  But, unfortunately, not many of the plants in the garden did!

At the beginning of last year, when the snow had cleared and it started to turn into spring, I began to take an interest again and I had a look at the garden and realized that it was gone a bit beyond anything I could fix.  So I looked around for somebody to help.  I finally found somebody and together we came up with a plan to restore my little patch to its former blossoming self.  The plan being, him doing all the work, and me basking in all the glory!!  We agreed on the plants and where they should go and we agreed on a date for him to start.....and then.....I was made redundant!!  It's a conspiracy against me and my garden!!

Needless to say, once again the garden went straight down to the bottom of my list of priorities, and Joe the gardener had to do his best on a severely reduced budget!  And to his credit he did!  And to my shame, once again I neglected it.  But not as badly as I had done for previous years.  But I planted no flowers and all my flowerpots remained empty again this year.

So today, I spend the whole day riding them of the moss that had grown over anything that was left in them and cleaning them and stacking them up ready for next year.  I also painted two wooden boxes that my dad made for me and they are ready now for planting.

So today I got pleasure from the garden in two ways, one by doing some work out there, and the second by eating the rewards of somebody elses hard work in the garden.

I am determined now not to go back to my neglectful ways and made a good start today by planting loads of spring flowering bulbs.  So when they flower (hopefully) next year, that will give me a good incentive to plant summer flowers.  And then once again my garden will be back in bloom!!

You never know, maybe next year will be my year to 'bloom' too.....although I hope I don't need to be stuck into fertilizer to aid the process...