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Sunday 19 March 2017

Acrylic on canvas

An experiment of painting on canvas wth acrylic paints. It was very quick, approx A3 in size and just playing with some old paints and brushes. It is just a possible starting point as I want the characters to be much more interesting and quirky. Need to get a technique right first.

Thursday 16 March 2017

Monday 13 March 2017

A Useful Thing

Of all the things I have done in the past few days, the one I am perhaps most pleased with is adding this little wooden shelf to the pergoda in the vegetable patch. After all, one needs to have somewhere on which to place a coffee mug when admiring one's handiwork. The little bird house is an ornament from Poundland.

New Path

The back of the garden has always been a problem area. When we moved in a few years ago I cut down some leylandii and had been left with quite a few stumps to await removal one day. A couple of days ago I managed to dig up four stumps and then level out the ground a little. The job was made more interesting by the discovery of yet more concrete path buried under the surface. This I dug up and added to my annoyingly growing pile of yet more unwanted hardcore. The more I take to the dump, the more I seem to keep digging up! This time I decided to resort to my old trick of burying it as a base to a new path. So, in pouring rain, this is what I did. The soil dug up was used to level off the ground on the right and this was then sown with grass seed. The resultant trench was filled with all the unwanted hardcore and this was then covered with woodchip acquired from a local patch of waste ground where some overgrowth had been chipped. The path leads from the lawn to a wood pile and behind that is my compost heap. Ideally the path could do with some edging but I'm not too bothered at the moment as it is not in a prominant part of the garden. At last I have tidied up this area.

Bayleaf Planter

Made this planter today for a bayleaf plant on our patio that had outgrown its pot. The wood was salvaged from various places and the paint was left over from a project several years ago. The wooden hearts came from some Cristmas decorations and the planter was lined with thick polythene. Just had to buy a bag of compost.



The white table was rescued from my local dump and will probably be repainted sometime. The bench to the left was probably a temporary builders workbench which was found in a local skip.

Reading

Had longer to work on this sketch than expected and it went in various directions before I settled down on this. I'm not totally pleased with but it kept me quiet for a while.

Sunday 12 March 2017

Supermarket Trolley


Willow

Found this weeping willow in Homebase for £5.97 which seemed an unmissable bargain. B&Q had some half the height for £10. It is about 4ft tall, about to come into bud and looked quite healthy. I've placed it in front of the patio so that we have more to look at from the conservatory. The flower border was widened a little to give the tree room to grow and expand though it should remain a compact size. The lawn was entirely dug up last autumn as it was perfoming badly with bald patches, compaction and white fungus in the soil. I replaced the turf but after settlement over the winter I have filled in a few sunken patches with more topsoil and a touch of grass seed.

Saturday 11 March 2017

Spring gardening

My mini-greenhouse now at home in the vegetable garden. I added some ventilation holes at the top of each end panel with plastic netting windows. The advantage of having block paving paths is that I can move them around to suit how the garden is used. Here I have created a path that encloses the herb garden as well as creating easy access to the front of the greenhouse. I will start offf by sowing some sweet peas later today. My only slight worry is whether the mini-greenhouse is totally stable in any stong wind so I may stake it into the ground just to be sure.


Sunday 5 March 2017

Mini-Greenhouse

Finished making this mini-greenhouse today. I had been thinking what to do for ages as I wanted somewhere to get seedlings off to a good start but I didn't want a greenhouse as such. The advantage of this construction is that It has transport handles so that I can move it around the garden, it is off ground level and so should be slug proof and it has a removable front panel for access and ventilation on hot days. I have just realised I should have created some small ventilation windows so I may have to do some adaptive work. The construction was the first time I have used screws for something like this rather than nails: screws are so much easier to remove and adjust than nails and I had loads just lying  around that get recycled from time to time. All the wood was salvaged from various places and the only cost was £9.99 for the clear heavy duty polythene. Some left over paint was use to weatherproof exposed woodwork. It can hold around 7-8 seed trays or numerous flower pots and so should be ideal for starting salad crops, tomatoes, sweetcorn etc.

Thursday 2 March 2017

Ducks

Slightly improved version from yesterday.