House within a house

This year the garden is lacking any winter vegetables.... because just as the autumn planting season arrived I was hospitalised and therefore didn't have a chance to plant anything.  The neighbours are very kind and often bring armloads of spring onions or Chinese cabbage, but it is always nice to be able to go into your own garden and harvest your own vegetables.  

Last year I had good success in the tunnel house from about now on, but this year our tunnel house is looking a little worse for wear - with holes in many places, and one door that has basically fallen off.  The new plastic has arrived to re-cover the entire house, but finding time to actually do it is going to be a bit of a problem.  In the meantime I have created a house within a house and have managed to get a few radish seeds to sprout.  Hopefully the spinach and lettuce seeds will also follow soon, but I'm guessing the huge temperature range that they experience each day may not make for a highly successful experiment.  Roll on spring...

Lack of planning

I'm back... actually I've been back home for well over a month now, but I am finally back in this blog spot.  The hospital experience is hopefully all behind me and although I am still struggling a bit with the medication I have to take I am slowly getting back to "normal" life.  I have bi-weekly visits to the hospital where they drain a bit more blood and check that all is okay before deciding whether to reduce my medication a little more or not.  I'm hoping that eventually I will be down to zero, but only time will tell.

One thing that was reinforced for me during my hospital stay was that planning too carefully only leaves you disappointed.....  In 2013 I made big plans to start my cookie/jam business and my mother-in-law died turning everything upside down.  In 2014 I made big plans to start my cafe-style English conversation classes and I got sick and ended up in the hospital for close to 2 months with some still unknown auto-immune disease.  So my big plan for 2015 is to not make any plans!  The only plan I have is to do zero teaching until at least April... and probably not again after that too.  I plan to take each day as it comes and hopefully the direction I really want to head in will become clear.  

This afternoon I decided to spend some time in the garden following my "no plan" idealism.  Unfortunately my muscles may not thank me tomorrow for the direction my no planning took!  First I decided to trim the trees in front of our house as I was sick of them hitting our bedroom window in the middle of the night and waking me up thinking a mass murderer was trying to break into our house.  I forgot to take a before photo, but I gave them a huge haircut, which of course then made the weeds under them a little more noticeable.. which meant I felt the need to remove the weeds.  

And then when I went to throw the weeds in the weed pile I had to walk past the big pile of rubble that we had removed from our old bbq spot and saw the old carpet that was sitting on top of it and thought that perhaps I could kill two birds with one stone by using the carpet to keep the weeds away and piling rubble on top of the carpet to make it look pretty.  And of course cleaning up the big pile of rubble at the same time.  

The main problem with this is that the rubble needs to be smashed into small pieces before it can be put under the trees... and smashing rubble with a hammer takes a long time... and a lot of energy....  Fortunately Emily came to help for an hour and between the two of us we may have completed about a fifth of the area under the trees.  I'm hoping a few more family members have no plans tomorrow and we can make some more progress - otherwise I guess I may need to plan to have a lot of hot baths ready to soak my aching muscles over the next few weeks!

If anyone has any ideas about hiding the septic tank covers please let me know... unfortunately they still need to be accessible as the poo truck always comes unannounced!

Rubble pile