My gardening wall of shame!

Another week flies by and lots of average excuses for posting this late! I won't bore you with them all though ;)

Hubby and son returned from their Boy's Own Adventure, crossing the continent and back, covering 3500 miles and with thoroughly sore rear ends LOL. I survived being Farmer Piper again (apart from a seriously trying morning moving cattle with two 9 year old girls helping - I'll leave that to your imagination!) - luckily the split water pipe didn't appear until the morning after hubby's return as that's really something that I couldn't have fixed!

I started the mammoth job of weeding my rose garden last weekend. And if you wonder why, after a week I've only weeded half of it, I will now post a photo on my 'wall of shame'! I need a lot of coercion to get into the garden at the best of times so I ignore it all through summer, apart from watering if required. Well this year we have been blessed with regular rain, so I haven't even had to do that. This is the consequence though.



Yep, that's a tangle of weeds folks, and in the centre of this photo is supposed to be a path - you can see it at the top of the photo, in the half that's weeded. No, it's NOT a pretty sight. My keen-gardener-mother-in-law has to force herself NOT to look when she visits as she is totally appalled. Amongst some very spiky rose bushes there is a mixture of 'paddy melon'-like vines, kikuyu and rye grasses, lucerne, a variety of burrs and thistles and the odd nasty patch of 'sticky-beaks' that are even taller than the roses!

It's taken quite a bit of persistence on my part to get as far as I have. If you had been watching me I'm sure you would have opened your eyes just a tad wider at my numerous vocalisations, which basically centered around the word 'OUCH' and the odd, colourful adjective. Luckily roses are hardy and some lovely blooms are still coming forth in what will be probably their last flush before the cold weather closes in. This is a David Austin double pink with a terrible, rangy habit, but gorgeous scented flowers.



I'm feeling a little floral at the moment ... the roses in the garden, photos of spring blooms at every turn on the web and my girls have been making paper flowers which currently have pride of place in a vase on my dining table.

Have you ever made flowers with some sort of medium? I've made some floral designs with gems in the past and I saw today that Phersmay had posted a photo of some organza flowers that she has made to attach to headbands, brooches and hairpins.

Totally NOT floral, however, today's jewellery piece is a wonderful long, long (did I mention it was long!?) strand of lustrous peacock freshwater pearls in semi-baroque, stick and coin shapes. It's so long it makes a decent length 2 strand necklace or a brilliant shorter length 3 strand. I've added in a sprinkling of amethyst, iolite and tanzanite gemstones to enhance that purple-blue hue that I love so much, and a gorgeous starfish sterling clasp. Do you like it?

Till next
Annette :)