Gardening Time!!

We were due to go to an agility show last weekend, but there was an outbreak of a very serious dog virus further up the country that a young pup had contracted, so we just decided to stay at home instead.  I'm reasonably quite certain there would have been no risk of our dogs being affected, but for the dogs sake - the fact that we have a potential lower immunity in Risk a young ish pup, and Yahoo a dog in his twilight years, and for my own sanity (as I just know I would have been scrutinising the dogs every movement even more than normal) we just decided not to go.

There was more than enough stuff to keep us entertained, we went for a huge walk with some friends and the dogs, and even sat outside a cafe on what was a surprisingly pleasant morning for some well needed breakfast when we got back. Not thinking that was enough excitement for one day, on the way home we started our gardening weekend - we bought two new water butts and dug out a new border for them, and connected them to the garage gutters. Two weekends later they are full to bursting with 380 litres of water, with all the rain we have had!!

We are lucky enough to have a beautiful long garden which we love and the dogs do too, they are always playing in it!! At the very back of it, it is very sheltered from both the wind and rain but along with this shelter, it can suffer a little from less sunshine than the rest of the garden does, not a lot will grow, bushes and hardy trees are better than grass and pretty plants in this case! We have some pretty bamboo on one side which I really like, it is very picturesque and is always green so looks good all year too. Behind that - and on our other day of gardening it was time for some manual labour; digging out the mud/mulch/leaf fall to level it, laying gravel and paving on top, which now houses our wheelbarrows, compost heap and will eventually have a shed too to hold my few bits of agility equipment and our gardening bits - its tidier, and clears space within Alex's garage for his truck toys and boys stuff!! It was a hard days work, especially digging out the earth - though Alex and Kiah found a comfy resting place in the form of our new wheelbarrow - though I'm not sure that's what it was quite designed for!!