The Lull Before the More Storms...

The wet weather has brought with it some big old moths that are congregating in the garden around the outside light - that is my finger and I hadn't realised how dirty my nail was!!! I put it down to the fact that John has had me staining wood AGAIN!!!  The miserable weather continues although today we were lucky enough to only have a shower late in the evening.  Black clouds threatened but I managed to get washing out on the line and dry and we had sufficient sun to heat the water for a shower after we had finished all our DIY jobs which was a bonus but this is rather a prolonged period of stormy weather for this early in the autumn and I can't help thinking that we are going to have another awful winter in front of us (and as I write this John is busy drawing curtains and battening down the hatches!!).

 

On the subject of wildlife I had to liberate a minuscule little tree frog (which must have been brought in during the rains at the weekend and was living in one of the troughs) from the conservatory.   Always best to get frogs out of the way of Chivers as he would want to play with them and we think they are toxic and that may have been what made him poorly the time that the Vets lost him and we don't ever want a repeat of that episode.  I put him (or her) in the front garden - it will probably be awash with water again soon and the poor little bugger will probably find itself back in the conservatory! I have just looked up on the internet and the chances are that this was a male frog because apparently male tree frogs are considerably smaller than female ones.

 

I said that yesterday we had been to Kissos Nursery and bought two plants which we hope are evergreen Jasmines!  We want to grow something up and around the balustrading which John has put up around the decking.  I hope that this doesn't go the way of the Stephanotis but they only cost us €7 each so it wont be a great financial loss if they cop it!  We are really pleased with how the front garden is coming along - when I have nothing else to blog about I shall find some original photographs so that you can compare what it used to look like with what it looks like now!  Hopefully if we get some winter sunshine we will have a nice spot to enjoy it.  Sitting on the decking is a recipe for disaster as we take a good old look around and see more things we want to do!



As the weather was dry I had more staining to do as we are trying to mask the grotty wall between us and Paul's next door so we decided to cover it in trellis and then cover it with the Honeysuckle and Morning Glory that is already there - it will take a while but we know that the Morning Glory grows like buggery so next year should go wild in the aisles!

 

You can tell the weather has taken a turn for the worse because our thoughts have now firmly turned to heating in the winter and John wants to make sure that we have enough.  We have wood drying out left over from last year and we have been doing our pikey best to collect any that we see loafing around.  The only trouble is that we have limited space to store wood and keep it dry so whilst we would like to take advantage of all that we see around and about we have to be sensible.  We liberated some branches from the field earlier in the year and so we set about cutting it into manageable chunks - it looked a lot until it was cut and stacked!