This has been a busy week end! We did plenty of gardening as a family, and Stylish finished making the cover for her frog tank. We also put a lay-by on a heap of camping equipment for our upcoming xmas camping holiday! We are now the proud owners of a camp kitchen and a table with built in chairs.
The frog tank looks amazing now! Stylish put so much hard work into it, and it really paid off. For some reason or another the lid that the tank came with (she bought it with pocket money, off ebay) was no good so she needed to make one. She did lots of research - google is her friend - and worked out that with some wood and some fly screen she could make a more suitable lid. It was an exercise in many areas .... but it was a PRACTICAL exercise in them, and she enjoyed it because she wanted to do it. The measuring is maths, the budgeting was maths, the whole process was artistic, it is a science lesson to care for frogs .... I could go on, but I will spare you.
After a trip to the local hardware shop to buy two planks of wood and a metre of fly screen, she set about measuring the tank, cutting the wood to size, nailing the planks together, and then attaching the fly screen. She was a bit disappointed with the finished product but I think it's great! She is unhappy because it is a tight fit over the tank, but it's not TOO tight at all! And it slides on tightly enough to keep the little froggies in!
The garden is going really well. We transplanted all our mustard and rocket seedlings yesterday. They're now in a big, was-unused, black recycling box, surrounded by organic sugar cane mulch. They seem to have transplanted really well. The only problem we had was the sun was too hot for them the last few days, so we put Spikee's umbrella over them and they were doing fine ...until our CAT SAT ON THEM!!! Suffice it to say he will NOT sit on them again because I have put bbq skewers all the way through the box. I suspect it will be an uncomfortable resting place now!
We also turned our compost heap into a new garden bed, planted rock-melon, corn, and pea seedlings in it, covered it in mulch and news paper and tied blue wool all around the patch to keep Spikee off it. We have started a new compost heap at the back of the garden and will aim to have it in use as a garden in the next month, as our current seeds sprout and get to a good size to go out into the wilds of the garden where there are snails, cats and children everywhere!
I feel like I spend my whole life saving water from our washing machine and carrying it out to the garden beds. We have an elaborate system of plastic juice bottles, and buckets, that I catch the water in, then I tip it into the watering cans and lug it out. It's a time consuming process, but I know that I've saved hundreds of litres of water simply by using our grey water on the garden beds.
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