5.30am. An early morning start in the garden shed. Had a good night’s sleep and saw no point in staying in bed. The lawn remains mostly green although there is some sawdust in front of the decking. Left over from the build. The area around the fire pit has scatterings of charcoal from the barbeque on Saturday. It will soon disappear. I will have to start watering the lawn properly though as the next few days are going to be hot hot hot.
It will be interesting to see how the new office fares in the heat. It’s meant to be cool in summer and warm in winter as it is well insulated. If it comes to the crunch I can always dig out the air conditioner, purchased during a heatwave about five years ago when I was in the office at Lincoln University but little used. That business incubator building at the university was not very well designed when it came to insulation.
I can hear the birds outside and the fridge inside. The fridge contains bottled water. The philosophy is that it should contain beer but it doesn’t, yet.
Lunch out today at OleOle. We will be sat outside, presumably consuming chilled white wine with our tapas. I normally prefer red but when the temperatures are expected to be in the 30s as is the case today I suspect white will be preferable. I like the occasional bit of tapas.
The Garden Shed, as my new office is formally to be known, is mostly finished but not quite. The network cabling needs terminating and running back to the router in the loft and the furniture has not yet been ordered. When I say furniture I really mean chair and desk and a suitable cupboard needs sourcing for the patch panel and switch in the corner of the room.
In the garden I need to spend some time thinning the apple trees. I did this last year and it really paid dividends. The apples turned out to be the biggest we had seen in our time in this house. This year we have no cooking apples. The frost must have caught the blossom. Ah well. My experiment with onions is going well with the greenhouse based ones performing better than those I planted out. The cherry tomatoes appear to be developing a bumper crop which is exciting. Moreover we are not away for more than a few days at a time for the rest of the summer so we should fully benefit from the harvest.
We don’t have much space for vegetables in the garden with the raspberry and strawberry patch almost running rampant. Perhaps I need to discuss some veg space allocation in the raised beds planned for the autumn.
There is an empty beer barrel on the deck. A firkin of Castle Rock Harvest Pale. Just the right thing for the barbecue and indeed there was just enough left for a very pleasant drink or two on the Sunday when we had more or less finished clearing up. Talking of drink it’s time to make the tea.