Busy, busy, busy!

It’s been a while since my last blog and I have had a few weeks off work, which has kept me very busy, and I mean very busy!

I, like so many people, found myself at home and as one of kids was still actively engaged in school work with online classes etc, my wife was very busy working at her health food store and my eldest had more or less completely finished school just before doing his A levels. I thought I needed to occupy my time productively.

The weather was fine so I washed just about everything that was washable and walked the dogs for miles every day, but in addition to that I set about my patio area with a view to cleaning and setting it up for the summer.

I jet washed the whole area and then treated the wooden decking with several coats of protector. I’m not that enamoured with the water based products (much prefer the older oil-based ones) but new rules dictate that it’s about then only choice now.

I also treated the paving with my favourite product – Wet & Forget. This stuff is so brilliant as you spray it on and forget about it. It will clean up the moss and algae, if you haven’t jet washed it, and keep it clean and new looking for up to six months. I was quite pleased with myself.

I then set about my herbaceous border (which I had been thinking about for several months). With my sons help we edged, dug, planted and transformed the border and most of the rest of the garden. The border wizard from Plants2Gardens was a great help, as was the radius fork I ordered from Tommy Cross.

Time to tackle the lawn and really it was all about the moss and weeds. Richard Jackson was my main helper here (not in person) with a variety of products. I had treated with his Moss Killer and it was working beautifully, but I still had a patch of lawn that I hadn’t treated and it was full of moss and weeds.

So, I used his recent TSV – the three in one moss, weed and feed treatment. Early days yet but the moss is going (and going well) and the grass has really greened up. My son has been co-opted into being head green keeper (complete with rap music blaring through his headphones!)

I also tended to my ‘orchard’ – which is really just a random collection of fruit trees that the deer seem to have a particular penchant for. I just had to put some chicken wire around the base of the apple trees (oddly the deer have no interest in pear or or cherry trees), and give ‘em a bit of fertiliser and prune off the broken branches. I used Richard Jackson’s natural fertiliser as it’s a nice concentrated chicken manure-based option, that keeps me pretty organic. I did have to water the newest addition which was a pear tree from Plants2Gardens.

The kids and I set about a spring clean the first day of the Easter Holidays and we used the Kochblume microfibre cloths, which are absolutely the best I have ever tried. I was quite excited about them and how good they were, the kids, on the other hand, didn’t seem to share my enthusiasm … for the cleaning! My daughter normally loves cleaning so she was relatively willing helper, my son was just puzzled as to what spring cleaning was.

I’m back at work now and, as you will have noticed, we have made some big changes to the way we do things in order to keep everyone safe. We have a lot more recorded items and a lot fewer guests. It does take away some of the fun and spontaneity of the job but we are all so aware of what needs to be done to keep people safe and to continue the work that we love to do, so there have been no complaints.

I hope you had a nice Easter weekend despite the restrictions and managed a few zoom/Facebook/Skype chats with friends and family. We had a big ‘ol roast and carried on as normally as we could. Hopefully the situation will return to some sort of ‘normality’ soon.

You take care stay safe and stay at home with QVC.

Simon x

@simonbiagi