Catch Up Time

Even though there has been the odd post I really haven't got totally back into blogging since the holiday time. Hopefully I can get this sorted as the pictures are mounting up in my file waiting to be loaded into a post.

Grow Your Blog Party

Firstly, welcome to all my new followers. It is so great to have you here and thank you for stopping by. You are most welcome whenever you feel like it, please don't think you need an invitation to drop on by, the door is always open.
It is lovely to meet new people and see how the other half are doing things, with this in mind I still have a lot of blogs to go and visit (something like 400 in total) so I may be busy for a little while jumping around the place saying Hi to people.
If any of you are interested in meeting some new people, then pop on over to Vicki's Place and go on a little blog hop to meet some new friends.

Work

My first week is going well and the people are making me feel right at home.
They are trusting me from the word go and so each new day I go in I am being allowed to do a little bit more. This is helpful as it is making me feel like I am there rather than spending a whole week just standing around observing and getting very bored and frustrated because I am not allowed to touch anything or anyone (patient that is)

Garden

Our garden, as I am sure you will see throughout this year is a work in progress. At some stage I will do a rather long post about our back garden and where it was when we got the house 5 years ago and where it is now.
It is easy to just say that at one point the far end was 1m lower than the top end and there were no steps to get you there, just a nice slope down.
So over the last year we have been shipping in soil on a slow basis and leveling it off. As this is a work in progress then we have also been making sure other areas of the garden are kept looking nice.
This past weekend we tackled an area that I had always wanted to get tidy but just never did anything about,
The succulents sat outside the garage.
The next 2 pictures show you the area in the distance and the mess it looked. Please note these pictures were not taken with the succulents in mind, I forgot to take a before picture at the weekend, so I went back through my files to find something that showed you the area, sort of.

There were several of them, all sat around in pots. We had had lots of succulents when we lived in Auckland 5 years ago. When we left we took little pieces of the ones we liked and potted them when we got here in Hamilton, however that is all we have done with them so they have become right at home in their pots and nothing else has happened to them, well apart from living outside the garage door that we don't use. Many of them had out grown their pot and 1 or 2 had even become root bound in the pot!

I wanted to build a wooden flower box to house the succulents in just where they were but when we started looking at it the price was slowly creeping upwards and I only wanted to keep it simple.
So I discussed with hubby what I wanted and he made a few suggestions and suddenly away we went.

As we took the chimney down a few years ago then we still have several hundred bricks in a pile around the place, so he suggested we use them. Glad we did in the end as it is now in keeping with the other flower areas around the garden.

We culled a lot of the plants as some of them had become just too big for what we required. Even though we separated them to smaller pieces we just didn't need so many of the same thing around the garden.

I got given the Pukekos as a leaving present when we moved from Auckland. I was telling the boys how I would like some garden ornaments (maybe a frog) to place round the succulent area and hubby remembered we had these. So he found them in the garage and I think they look great in their new home.

Really happy to have finally cleaned up an area that we see and pass every single day. Lets just hope the succulents are as happy in their new bed as they were in their pots.