They come, with the Waverley pen, in fact, as well as a boon and a blessing to men, as sometimes a curse. At least for this old fart they do. I love gardens. I love to have one, to look at one, to stroll into one, but you gotta look after them and that is getting a lot more like hard work.
But, planting the 4 Garlic plants my wife had brought on from simply planting a single clove of the stuff and waiting no great time at all, was very pleasant and took less time than my knees require to play up. The plants, whatever they may look like below ground level are now over a foot tall and I just spent a happy half hour digging the ever present grass out and cleaning the ground next to the Honeysuckle and planting them straight from pots to ground, which, despite the dust dry top is reassuringly moist 2" below.
Woodland strawberries replanted into a nice big pot, placed in a garden bed (the garlic has gone into where we penned off a section for fruit and veg). Fuschias are already flowering in hanging baskets.
The wildflower section has some huge results from the haphazard scattering of seeds meant for birds and bees, well, bees, anyway. Gawd knows what they are, but they have heads on them, so something's about to happen.
And so goes the gardens. Constantly requiring attention and watering this time of year, although tomorrow night is set to be a heavy storm, they tell us. I can quite see how this lark could become a real hobby, but it would still leave you doing little but reading seed catalogues (whatever they are!) for half the year.
With that in mind, I have been getting on with my model of the yacht "Vanity", on which I used to live when I was young and stupid.
The hull has come off its building board and is currently being fitted for its deck, having had its insides coated with epoxy resin. Soon, I will be doing the same plus cloth to the outside to ensure I have a waterproof, strong hull. Vanity was always painted black so a good finish is essential. My somewhat hurried hull building has showed up in some lumps and bumps, which will be filled first.
Meanwhile, back in the indoors workroom, I've been making deck furniture and spars.
Here's the aft decklight:-
And here's the forward companion and bitts in roughly the same relationship to each other as they will be on the deck.:-
The companion is nothing fancy as this was where the crew entered their quarters. It had lift out boards, rather than doors. The sliding lid is yet to be made. I have used the same Cuban Mahogany as I did for the hull, sawn from some old chairs my Grandad made. The bitts are made from a piece of steamed pear I found.
As you can see, the corners of the casings are made with real dovetail joints and the corners of the lids of the decklights are made with mortice and tennon joints, so every part of these structures held together without glue initially. I used superglue for these which, to my utter surprise, worked very well. I figured, since they would be varnished after these first two coats of cellulose sanding sealer they'd be waterproof.
Damn! I didn't water the front garden!...
