I SHOULD be making curtains, but in fact I spent the entire day planning the new borders in the garden and ordering seed in an attempt to cut the cost of filling them. I think now I will have to spend at least 4 hours a night planting seeds. Though that means finishing getting the polytunnel up in order to have somewhere to keep them, and making benches to have somewhere to store them out of reach of mice and slugs, and buying vaseline, grinding egg shells and hoarding old coffee grounds in order to put off the few determined adventurers who do make it up to the Shangri La of rodent and invertebrate delights, the trays of carefully nurtured new seedlings. This may mean finishing the office clear out gets postponed to 2020.

This is also because, as with every job, when you set out to do something you find that 5 other things need to happen first. So on Saturday I had 8 hornbeam to plant, one day to form a beautiful pleached hornbeam screen for the polytunnel, and it took me about 4 hours to clear the knotted buried barbed wire, elaborate and YEARS worth of nettle root networks and creeping buttercup in order to get the ground clear to get the hornbeam in. Had it been drizzly I suspect I would have just painted the polytunnel green after 2 hours, but it was a day from heaven, so there didn’t seem any better place to be.

But still, I’m looking forward to my Jinny Blom inspired long border getting filled with tiny little plants any month now…