A pretty spot of normal and calm amongst the chaos

Hi All,

Well, the last few weeks have been positively insane.  What with bubs threatening to come early, then changing his mind on a near daily basis and suddenly finding out one of our kids has Type 1 Diabetes, life has been utter turmoil.  Most of a week full of having our boy in hospital, learning about diabetes and then managing dietitian and nurse appointments, along with working out dietary changes...  Utter insanity!

But then, over the past few days, Papa Sam and I managed to regroup and get back into some of what we love and haven't been able to do much of yet at this new house - gardening!

So a few weeks back, Papa Sam built three of the planned 4 raised beds in front of our house, but they sat empty until this past week, when we finally organised soil and plants.

3 sisters

The closest to the house has been filled with the 3 sisters (beans, corn and zucchini), as well as some errant parsley seeds that were in the envelope of bean seeds from our old house.  It looks a little sparse due to the fact that a lot of it is filled with seed, not just plants.

Brassicas and celery

Next to the garage is a mix of cauliflower, celery, broccoli, red cabbage and celeriac, with a fair amount of herb seeds scattered in between.

Onions, carrots, tomatoes, chard and capsicums

And the middle bed has onion seedlings (what a pain to plant!), interspersed with carrot seeds, and surrounded by tomato seedlings, basil seeds, capsicum and chard seedlings, and a few other herb seeds to boot.

The rhubarb patch

It's raining and getting darker at the moment, so I'm not going outside to take a picture of the gorgeous Dublin Bay rose climbing up the frame at the back of this garden bed, but I weeded and composted the rhubarb patch, and removed the flower heads from my poor starved rhubarb plant.  Eventually we'll remove the other plant from this bed and fill it with more rhubarb and garlic plants.

And finally, the garden our youngest will be the most excited to see.  Under his bedroom window, I've weeded, composted and planted out strawberry plants.  Soon I'll add more strawberries, a few raspberries along the back, and mulch the garden with straw, but it was already raining by the time I'd finished.

Absolutely loving the feeling of having been out working in the garden again.  As the blog title says, it's been my spot of calm and normal.  Now just to wait and see how long bubs is going to take to come, so I can be even more mobile and go back to planting trees and digging holes!

Love to all,
Mama Fern