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Things are plodding along quite happily, as they have been for the last three months, although this week they have certainly taken a turn for the better.

The bathroom is finally being worked on, and although the price has leapt from somewhere in the region of £2500 to £7500 for just one room - fixtures and labour included - I am glad to finally be able to see some tiles creeping up the walls.

Even better, I got back to the house yesterday evening to find the old bathroom dumped on the lawn. The nasty greeny cream is set to be replaced by gleaming white, and a fizzy jacuzzi in place of the luke-warm enamel bath that finally fell prey to a sledgehammer and a convoy of builders and helpers traipsing up and down the stairs.

And the garden is yielding up proper food now, too. After dismal results with the strawberry plants, which concentrated more on replicating themselves than they did on making fruit, the beans are now pumping out edible veg almost as quickly as we can pick it. On Sunday we threw 150 grams of French beans and 75 grams of runner beans in the boiling pan. Tonight, another 180 grams of French beans, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say they were the best beans I’ve ever eaten. 180 grams is pretty good going for three extra days on the vine, considering we picked off every suitable pod we could find on Sunday.

The broccoli plants are now a good foot and a little bit tall, and the sprout plants are not far behind. The first batch of potatoes is scheduled for digging up in two weeks’ time when Viv arrives, and the beetroot, although slow, is getting fatter by the day. I even had to thin my newly-sown lettuces yesterday.

The only flowers I have tried growing are sunflowers. I popped one seed in each of two pots, and they have both come up trumps. They’ve spent several weeks racing each other up to the six feet mark, and now are both in bloom, the slightly shorter one just a few days ahead of its two-inch-taller sibling. They make for a very cheery view from the kitchen sink.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Garden, Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.