A gardening Sunday

Today was going to be a gardening day for me. We have bought loads of plug plants that need to be repotted into bigger pots until they're big enough to go into the ground, the window boxes and patio pots. The weather was so nice an hour ago and now it is looking decidedly overcast...again! We've had quite a bit of rain this week and have already repotted over 100 plug plants and still have as many again to do - we should have a lovely display in the summer! Peter is at work until lunchtime and I wanted to do as much as I could before he got home.

Our beautiful ceanothus has to come out, it's much too big and also it's right on the corner of the patio where the new conservatory is going to be built, subject to planning permission which hopefully will be granted any day now! I have been trying to get outside to start hacking away at the ceanothus for some days now but the weather hasn't let me. We were hoping to take some cuttings and start new ones but I think it's the wrong time of the year, we'll have a go though. Peter says I'm a nightmare once I have the secateurs in my hand! The difference between us is that he's afraid to chop anything back in case it dies, I keep telling him that it does the plants good.

Our week in France was very nice although we didn't do as much as we usually do. I now think that staying a week with our friends is probably too much. Arthur is an old war-time friend of my Dad's and we only met after my Dad died in 1996, he is English and married to Denise who is French. They love us going over there but of course the older they get the less they want to do. They're still very active, indeed they're hoping to come over to us later in the year, Arthur still drives and they're both in relatively good health. When we first visited them in the Alsace we used to go out every day doing the tourist things and then fitting in shopping the day before we came home, last time though we only went out on the Tuesday into Germany for the day to meet another friend, Dagmar, (Arthur and Denise came with us too) and on the Sunday to a lovely restaurant by a lake for lunch and after lunch we walked all round the lake which took us about an hour.

We now have a dilemma. Dagmar came to stay with us last August, and since then has been asking us to stay with her, well not exactly with her as she still has teenage twins at home and hasn't the room but her friend has an apartment next door that we could rent. Peter and I would really love to because then it would mean that we'd be able to see more of Germany, Dagmar lives in a little village in the mountains and there are some lovely places that she's told us about and we've looked up on the internet that we'd like to visit. The dilemma is that we get the feeling that Arthur and Denise would be rather put out if we stayed with her rather than them, they're always telling us that the door is always open and we can go whenever we like, we already visit them twice a year as it is. Peter thinks we should just go and not tell them but it seems rather underhanded to do that, he said they must realise that we have other friends that want us to visit them. At the end of April we'll be going to stay with Arthur's daughter Leslie who lives in the south of France, she and her husband came to us for a week in January. While we're with them though we'll be going into Spain for a week or so which we're really looking forward to. We went to Arthur and Denise's last week because if we hadn't they'd have been asking us why we were going to Leslie's and not theirs! Oh it's a nightmare just thinking about it! We do go on other holidays apart from visiting friends, we're going to Tenerife in September for instance, but it seems that going to France has now become a ritual and we don't look forward to it as much, which is a shame.

Oh well, that's my little moan for the day! I'm off to check the weather, I can see some blue sky but I bet it's really cold out there!

Have a good day!
Pat