I have joined the realm of part time work, part time
furlough!
Work
This week I started back at work three days a week, and will
be working this pattern for the foreseeable future. I am working from home in
the front bedroom. I bought a desk and David and I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon
putting it all together and then I’ve spent a good few days faffing and
organising plants to get it Just Right. This involved making a plant shelf
using offcuts of timber from the allotment and now the desk is only just big
enough to fit my laptop on…
Garden
It’s still there. It feels like it is in limbo. The early
and late spring flowers are going over but the summer flowers are not out yet. There
are pockets of colour. Lots of courgette and pumpkin flowers this week which is
a good sign. The gladioli stems are now mostly over a foot tall. Some of the
sunflowers look like they are about to open. The strawberries are putting out
lots of fruit and more flowers. The shed sweet peas have started to flower!
I bought a load of fresh herbs this week. I’ve wanted a new rosemary as the one I bought a couple of months ago arrived half dead and hasn’t improved. The box arrived on my first day back at work so I opened the box and sat sniffing it during my lunchbreak. I had rosemary, lemon verbena, woolly thyme, orange thyme, lemon thyme, oregano, chocolate mint, and pineapple mint. We have been using a lot of fresh herbs in cooking, so I have also bought another basil from Sainsburys too.
The herb collection is growing! In the garden I now have 8 clumps of thyme, 2 pots of basil, 3 rosemary, 1 bay, 2 oregano, 4 types of mint, 3 pots of sage. I split the new herbs down the middle with a sharp knife to get double the plants, and I also chopped some of the mint to take cuttings. I might buy some marjoram next. I also want some big fluffy showy lavender plants to chuck into the borders.
I planted most of the new herbs into new hanging baskets. I put
them on a bird feeder pole but the ground is soft so it sank quite far, so the
baskets are barely off the floor. The front basket is planted up with mixed salad leaves on the top.
All of the tomato plants have little tomatos on. Some went
flying over the back fence as they had signs of blight. These ones look like
titties. Titmatos.
Mental Ill-Health
I had my two-week follow up call with the doctor and he is
amazed at my progress – I don’t know what I’ve done but outwardly I sound a lot
better. On the inside I still feel shit. I still can’t focus on this damn
jigsaw and it is still sitting on the floor in front of me. I am still not leaving
the house unless it is for the allotment or shopping. I have been having stress
dreams this week but I think that is related to going back to work. Self neglect
is high (I’ve done my e-learning this week, I know all the words) and I’m still only showering
once or twice a week. I only wash my hair once a week. I haven’t done my
eyebrows for over two months. I have started hula hooping this week which makes
me feel better.
Homelife
The jigsaw isn’t done. The patchwork square blanket isn’t done.
The baby blanket isn’t done. We are still cooking and eating big healthy
dinners and I have resolved to stop buying snack and junk food for me. I still
buy him chocolate bars for work which I might also eat…!
We invested in a shiny new blender toy to make pasta sauce more easily. We (I say we, it was always David) were having to decant the mix into the smoothie maker and it took four blitzes to do the whole batch, and David kept burning himself on the sauce, so we decided to get a proper blender. It’s well good. Haven’t used it yet but it has a potato chip maker, a slicer, dough hooks, cutter uppers. Everything! And it came with a smoothie maker jug thing too. Only cost £64.
We have definitely decided to sell the mattress but are not really sure how to go about it. It won’t easily fit into the car for us to deliver to anyone and it is going to fall to me to both a) sell it and b) package it up for transport. I don’t want to do either. It wasn’t my idea to have the bloody thing in the first place, but it is now very much my problem.
I am trying to grow the baby spider plants that I cut off
momma plant. They are in a shallow bowl of water but they might not put out
roots as I severed them. We’ll see.
Allotment
I spent an afternoon on Plot 4 with Momma P-dawg, sorting
out her new pumpkin patch. We dug it over, weeded, removed plastic and glass
rubbish, then planted 21 plants. 21! She now has loofah, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, blue
pumpkin, orange pumpkin, green & white pumpkin, green courgette, yellow courgette,
and yellow stripey courgette. The patch is nowhere near big enough for this number of plants, so it is going to be a right tangle.
This week on my plot I have de-weeded the pond. It was getting very slimey and gross, so I sat and untangled it best I could, removing the weed that I do want and chucking it back in. I left the pile on the side so any critterbugs could find their way back in, and the birds can come and pick it over for morsels. I had a froggo friend!
The solitary bees are back! These are boy leaf cutter bees. I had two in the silver birch bee house, just roosting. I also saw 2 other things – not sure if they were yellow faced bees or a type of nomad bee. They were smaller but didn’t come out of the hole for me to look at properly. There was also a tiny tiny tiny tiny little thing behind the front door of a mason bee nest, so I think this tube has been parasitised.
I hope they are leaf cutters as I haven’t seen any activity yet this year and I do like watching the ladies cut out chunks of leaves.
The sweetcorn are doing really well, getting quite thick in
the stem now. I have lots of baby yellow courgettes coming, and the loofah
looks like it has set fruit and it is surviving!
The potatoes are huge and flowering. I have done some exploratory digging but haven’t found and decent potatoes yet. The sweet peas are glorious – I thought they were going to be a huge failure and that I’d put in 8ft canes for no reason, but now I am glad that I did. They have picked up and put out LOADS of flowers.
I am working three days a week now which means I have less free time to go to the allotment, but I am having a four day weekend every week for the next two months which is nice. Bit weird. I am required to take annual leave whilst I am furloughed, but I can take my furlough day as leave, so I’m off anyway but it is classed as annual leave. Furlough days are paid at 80% whilst work and annual leave days are paid at 100%. So I could take a day of annual leave every week and only have four days a month at furlough pay, which would give me more money at payday. Hmmm. Ideas.
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| This is a ragwort plant. It is huge. |
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| She hates me :'( |
