I haven't posted for ages... or rather I haven't published for ages, but there has been much activity behind the scenes. You see, I am accidentally writing a book all about herbaceous borders. Oh yes. Now I never intended to do this, it just kinda built up it's own momentum and now it has become this huge blog post that it seems like I'll never finish! I'm hoping either tonight or tomorrow it will be done and then I'll hit that magic publish button, but no promises...
Why am I doing this? Well, unlike most others at Houseblogs, I currently live on the other side of the world to the house I'm working on. This means that except for a few weeks each year, my version of working on the house is planning. This also entails a lot of learning, because frankly the more I get into it the more I realise I'm relatively clueless. The garden is a hugely important part of the house for me and I want it to have some lovely huge sweeping garden beds... aka the giant borders in old fashioned houses. Thus arose the idea of summarising everything I've learned so far - plus whatever else I can cram in over the course of a few days - about designing and maintaining this kind of garden border.
In other news... we've harvested the first vegetables from our allotment! We got the allotment last year also as part of planning, in this case to learn how to grow vegetables 'cos we'll be relying on them once we eventually move. Yesterday we picked enough shallots to make three plaits and a huge bag full of broadbeans. I have some pictures but I can't post them yet as Dave has annoyingly taken away the cable that connects the camera to the PC. He's promised to bring it home tonight so I'll post again then. I'm so happy with them; the broadbeans taste wonderful (we had some with pasta last night) and the shallot plaits look very "farmhouse-rustic"!
2 comments:
Lynne
How come your house and you are separated by 12000 miles? Are you overseas on a permanent-temporary basis?
Steve
Stephen, yes... at the moment we live and work in London, and we have a house here too which occasionally I post about. But, we're not working on it much anymore because we've done most of the things we wanted. We've been in the UK 10 years so far and expect to be here at least another 5. Mainly it's for work reasons - there's no way I could get work in my area of specialism in Australia that would pay me even a quarter of what I can earn here - and so, by staying put for a while we can save enough to eventually build the dream house & garden, and then hopefully do the whole "downshift" thing and have another kind of life. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how it goes! It's not as bad as it sounds... I love London and the UK in general and will miss it dreadfully when we leave. But you can't be in two places at once, and the downshift dream is only something that's feasible in Australia.
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