Friday 16th September 2011

The last four days have been pretty much all about gardening - my favourite occupation in the spring.
It is a very busy time as everything has to be weeded, fertilized, sprayed and mulched in preparation for the hotter weather to come.   I love this time of year when the garden bursts into colour and all of the roses open up for the first time.  I have been very busy with the golf club gardens as we had to be ready for the garden competition inspection this week.  We have entered into the "Best Commercial Garden" section which encompasses the whole of the golf course.  That inspection happened on Thursday so I am now back finishing off my gardens at home so that they will stay in good order while we are away in China for our golfing holiday.

Tuesday 13th September 2011 I had to fore go my golf in order to be able to finish off the golf club gardens ready for judging on Thursday.  We collected another trailer load of mulch and finished off the native garden at the 6th.  The I cleaned up the wedding garden area which is part of our "Theme Gardens" that are going to be judged on Thursday.

Wednesday 14th September 2011 I was up very early so that I could weed & mulch the garden at the side of the house before we had to leave to attend a funeral at Palmdale at 11 o'clock. My old work colleague Neville Pickering lost his much loved wife Irene after a long illness which was very sad.  The wake was held in the tea rooms at Palmdale where we caught up with a few friends that we had not seen for a while. In the afternoon we had some time at Erina Fair where we took the old 12 year old vacuum cleaner in to be repaired and much to our surprise it was fixable and only cost $100 repair rather than $1400 replacement cost - so that was good news.  We had a wedding gift to purchase from the Bridal Registry at Myers so we took care of that without any problems.  My three year old colour printer/fax/scanner has been spitting it's dummy.  We had a five year warranty on it so the retailers replaced it with a brand new one without even looking at what repair work was required - so that was more good news.  I checked out the lap top computers so that I can select one to replace the notebook that was stolen.  That is still with the insurance company.  Shane is building me a new home computer which I should have in place next week so I should be up and running with all the latest technology by next week.  On the way home from Erina we picked up another five bags of mulch so that I can finish off the home back gardens.

Thursday 15th September 2011 I was up early so that I could be over at the Golf Club by 8.30 am to meet up with the judges of the garden competition.  I took them around the club gardens in a golf cart showing them each of the gardens that we have worked on and also each of the theme gardens that we have created. Hopefully we have done enough work to get a mention on presentation day. I was home by 10.30 am and worked in the back gardens,getting four if the back gardens done.  The weather has been beautiful so it was a pleasure to be out there.

Friday 16th September 2011 (today) it was more of the same.  I managed to get most of the rose gardens done before coming in to watch the Davis Cup Tennis.  I plan on having another full day in the back gardens tomorrow which should have everything up to scratch. I will need to spend some time getting all of my old photos still on my computer organised, archived and backed up on external hard disc so that I will be working with a clean slate when my new computer system takes over.