Lawn workout

This azalea has been glorious - such a splash of vivid pink

I spend all winter looking forward to the long days of summer, forgetting just how long those days can be.  It's light just after 5 o'clock, and still light long past 9 o'clock at night, that 16 hours of daylight and at the moment I seem to be up and on the go for almost all of the time!  It's a question of pacing myself in these long days, not trying to do everything in one day.  That's the idea, anyway.  

Today I made the most of a lovely day to tackle the back lawn again.  It's more moss and weeds than grass, but I know that with a bit of time and effort (actually, quite a bit of time and effort) I could get it into better shape - and indeed it's quite a good workout for me, too ;)  Armed with my trusty sprung-tine rake, I have scarified the lawn to within an inch of it's life and now have two garden sacks full of dead moss and thatch to dispose of.  Raking the lawn in this way raises all those long grass stalks that have been flattened over time, and mowing straightaway cuts them all off short.  There are still big patches of creeping weeds and I shall just have to persevere with those, digging them up by hand.  I suppose it seems a lot of effort but just half an hour a day will get the job done eventually.  We've spent very little on the garden (not including the veg plot, and even that hasn't cost us much), making the most of what was already here.  Watching the Chelsea Flower Show programmes last week reminded us how much we enjoy plant-and-flower gardening - as always, there were so many wonderful ideas to store away for the next garden.

Quite a bit going on at the moment, and I don't always seem to find the time to record the comings and goings.  My mind is full of ideas and plans and at times life seems anything but simple, so just being able to walk around the garden, pull some lettuce leaves for a sandwich, see the first little green tomatoes forming, and the peas start to scramble up the netting is all I need to appreciate everything we have here.