A good weekend of gardening, crafts and cooking...

Some weekends you feel like the time has passed you by and you got nothing done, other weekends feel like you got loads done. This was the latter. We visited my parents yesterday (Saturday) which took most of the day, and it was good to see them as always, plus my older sister dropped by as an added bonus. Yesterday evening however, all the essential chores were done and Rachel, our daughter was asleep in her cot. So I took the opportunity to make some notebooks. I make handmade notebooks out of old books, board games, maps, and anything else of interest I can get my hands on. The term is 'upcycling' - reusing old materials that might otherwise be thrown away, and put them to a new use. I'm currently binding them with a metal wire binding, but am intending to hand stitch some soon, and at some point do proper, leather bound notebooks in the tradtional way they've been making them for many hundreds of years. For now though, I'm doing the relatively easy wire binding. I sell them online through a website called folksy.com, a sort of ebay but for hand-crafted products (a UK version of etsy). Some of my early notebooks can be found on our shop, which I share with my wife. Am intending to launch my own separate shop soon though, and am trying to make enough to sell at a craft fair in a couple of months. Anyway, Saturday evening I made seven notebooks, which I thought was quite a good effort.

We've been busy cooking today to put food in the freezer so on the days when we come back from work too tired to be bothered cooking, we can get lovely home cooked meals out of the freezer rather than paying lots of money for frankly not very nice takeaway. My contribution to this was a large pan full of chilli, a bit spicier than I'd intended but nice all the same. Kate did a beef casserole and two different types of sausage casserole. All told it should do a good six or seven meals for us both at least.

Next was gardening. Sunday seems to be my gardening day of late, and today was no exeption, although hopefully will be able to do some in the weekday evenings now, as the clocks have gone forward an hour this weekend and it's light until 8pm now. Anyway this morning Rachel had a sleep late morning for more than 2 hours, a rare treat. So I tackled the front garden again, finishing digging over and clearing up all of the stringy roots and bits of twigs from digging out the bushes last week. What's left is now a nice dug over bed of about 120cm by 140cm. I added some soil from our compost bin (a new experiment last year, putting all our left over food in a compost bin at the end of the garden. It's amazing but we have compost now - not perfect as there's some bits of eggshells and onion in the bottom in the compost, but still pretty good). In one corner by the front door there are some daffodils and crocuses in flower, and there's a perennial flower plant growing on the next corner. When the spring flowers have finished flowering, I will dig them up, leaving the bulbs in the soil for next year, and plant something else in their place. For today, I've planted the curly parsley plant in the ground, and planted a couple of rows of flower plants (Aubretia), and sown a row of garlic bulbs. Next weekend is Easter weekend, 4 days off work, so plan on planting more then. I may draw a plan of the front bed to put on here, and update as I plant more things.

I haven't done anything in the back garden as of yet, though did an inspection today, The blueberry and blackcurrent bushes have loads of buds, and some of the raspberry canes have buds too (As recently as last week I thought we weren't going to see any raspberry action this year). The strawberry planter needs some attention, but there are a few strawberry plants with new growth in it. In one of our 'L-shaped' (raised) beds I found to my delight that there are a few garlic plants growing. I planted these last year and they didn't do much, but have only now realised that garlic is a perennial so has come back stronger this year (there's almost as much growth already as there was all year last year). Also, for Christmas my wife bought me a 'veg box' with soil and loads of seeds in different compartments. The idea is you plant the box in the ground and things grow. I planted around 31st Jan, and nothing was growing, but now there is a couple of shoots. Accidentally threw away the paper that says what everything is, so will have to wait and see what comes up. Anyway, lots of work to do in the garden over Easter next weekend. May plant some things in pots mid-week too.