Boarding @ Home: Day 51/84: Today's Guest Editor is Avril ...

Good day to you all. A change today, Gordon is painting the picket fence - it used to be moss green and now is greenish grey. It will be beautiful again soon. Work in progress is on view … but there are another 12 sections like that to go! Forth Bridge job by the look of it but as long as the northerly winds don't blow, she'll be right. I have plans of course, modelled from Grafton NSW where we just love those jacarandas, to add pavers and white chairs from the old John Lewis furniture with two 1.5metre high potted Jacarandas Bonsai Blue available from Suttons.

My story starts just before lockdown. I went to do the weekly food shop in our local Waitrose store only to find all sorts of things missing. Items such as nappies and baby wipes which didn't affect me but a disaster for parents of young children. Also missing were all things tomato based and pasta of all varieties. Because I'm a goody, goody I just bought my usual quantity (this was regretted later). On the same site as Waitrose is a Dobbies garden centre,so this was my next move. I bought seed potatoes, and seeds of runner and dwarf beans, tomatoes, chillies, radishes, spinach and lettuce. The potatoes planted in compost bags and doing remarkably well plants are about 2 feet high, not sure if any potatoes underneath. Most of the rest will be some time producing anything useful, we will probably have a glut at about the time lockdown is lifted. Lockdown lifted what wonderful words.

Meanwhile we are going nowhere. Our shopping is delivered to our doorstep every week by our wonderful neighbours Julian and Laura, they spray it with Milton solution first! I remember the smell of that from a lifetime ago.

If you have to have the situation in which we all find ourselves at the moment a village is definitely the best place to be. The exercisers stop to talk to me when I am gardening, and I to the gardeners when I am walking. It helps keep us all sane. There is also the big give away. People put out all manner of things - pots, plants, garden benches, marmalade, bikes the list goes on. We are hoping to give away several hundred books, but seem to have stalled on about 30.
It would be good if the spirit of 'we are all in this together' could endure. [True, and we're all supposed to help paint that fence including those two grandsons and Jules is to fix the railings and clamber into the Dip where the barbed wire lingers …]