Happy (belated) Mother's Day!

I hope all the mums out there had a very happy Mother's Day yesterday :-D

It was an odd day for me. My grandmother passed away last Sunday, and her funeral was on Friday, so it was a day of happiness but also reflection, and sorrow for my own Mum who was going through her first Mother's Day without her mum. Nan was 93 and had been quite ill for some time, so there was some sense of relief that she isn't suffering any more when she passed, but I feel sad for the lost opportunities I had when she was well to be able to probe her skills and wealth of knowledge of "Nana technology". Before the Alzheimer's Disease took hold, and well before I considered any of those skills as potentially useful...

Anyway, my family asked me what I wanted to do for the day, and of course I couldn't go past an opportunity to spend the day pottering in the garden, especially since the sun was shining :-) I wandered outside just after a lovely breakfast of buckwheat pancakes, and didn't come back in until dinner time! Although by that stage I was starving hungry and busting to go to the loo as one member of my family had inadvertently locked me outside when they went off visiting family for three hours!!

Nevermind, I did stacks of those jobs you never seem to get the time to do, like moving everything under the pergola (lots of pots!) and sweeping it out, and tidying up the plants before putting them back. A bit like decluttering, only outside, LOL.

As far as presents go, I decided in the end to ask for the Home Brew Kit for my birthday next month, as I still had several fruit trees that needing potting up. So two large pots were on the cards, and one trip to the nursery later, we came home with two pots that almost match the two existing pots in our front yard and several bags of certified organic potting mix. DH then potted up the two dwarf Golden Dorsett apple trees I purchased some time ago from Daley's Fruit Trees, and stuck them out the front next to the dwarf Anna and dwarf Tropic Sweet apples. They all look a bit dodgy at the moment as the weather is cooling down, but come spring time I am hoping they will grow into a lovely looking apple tree "hedge" in front of our north-west-facing front windows, providing some additional shading to our lounge room.

Next step out the front is to dig up the grass between the pots and plant something useful: I'm thinking Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) at the moment? I just need to organise myself and get some seeds, LOL, although I presume you wouldn't sew them before spring anyway. Must go back and check Molly's great info about soapwort!

P.S. If you want to see more pics of my garden over the weekend, I've uploaded a heap to My Garden Diary.