I have worked with the lovely chaps at Victoriana Nursery Gardens for nearly 5 years now, I was first approached by Stephen when we lived at our first house and where in the process of trying to make our garden productive after years of inactivity, he proposed the idea of swapping plants for artwork. I can safely say as a commercial illustrator that this has been one of the best working relationships I have. If as with a normal client I was to be paid in cash there is no way it would get spend on the garden, the money would end up going towards plumbing and tiles and a million other things we need for the house. 
As important as all that is the garden is equally important, the amount of pleasure and enjoyment we get from our garden is immense. Also the opportunity to make any outdoor space productive is always good but not always cheap. Being only paid in plants has meant that I can chose species that normal would be outside my budget, it has allowed me to experiment more. 

When we moved house two and half years ago we where yet again faced with a vast expanse of garden that had been neglected for years, without the support of VNG I would not be make the progress we are with our garden and more importantly I would be missing out on the pleasure and stress release it provides for me.

So it is always a pleasure when one of these arrives on our door step...

As we are so busy with the house and everything this year we have decided to concentrate on just producing fruit, instead of trying to grow everything like we did last year! So I had gone a bit mad with ordering trees and berry bushes this time.

We ended up being one fruit tree short when we did the fruit fence up last week so I ordered a pear 'William Bon Cretien' to go alongside the apple 'Devonshire Quarrenden', cherry 'Stella' and plum 'Stanley' we already have.

I have been meaning to get some raspberries in as we didn't have any last year, I have grown 'All Golds' before and really like them, we has also found that for some reason the birds around here tend to leave them alone, where as they decimate my neighbours red ones? 

And as I was in the mood for soft fruits I also ordered a Tayberry, a Loganberry, a Boysenberry, a Bilberry and another Blackcurrent!

Oh...and 10 more strawberries. I can see that my sweet tooth may have gotten the better of me there! Never mind, at least the garden will be producing something this year, fingers crossed we get a little less rain than last year.

So as ever a thank you to all at Victoriana for giving me an excuse to potter about in the sunshine when I should be tiling the bathroom.

Phew it feels good to finally get a project finished, so many things at the moment seems to get started only to grind to a halt (such is the way with all DIY projects!). We now have our fruit tree fence up and finished, Rich's back is buggered again and I've wrecked my knee, so not to bad on the injury front!

Heres where we where Saturday morning...

Rich heroically managed to hammer the posts we brought from the local garden centre in, these weren't cheap but it is a local independent place so I don't mind giving them my pennies! We brought three 8 foot poles and two 5 foot ones for bracing, which we bolted in place.

Our very nice next-door neighbour who shares this bounty with us (and who has spend the last 8 years having to cut the bloody Hawthorn, poor guy!) donated the galvanised wire we used which was excellent and saved us a small fortune.

I realise these two pictures make it look like this all took about 10 minuets, it actually book us from 9am till about 2pm to get this far!

Once the wire was up and in place I could finally plant the trees I have spend the last year training...

Wow, those trees where so ready to get out of their pots, I hope they will be nice and happy in their new homes with much more room to grow. We wont be able to let them fruit this year as we want them to put their energy into making good root stocks rather they fruiting themselves to death so it will be a while before they can be properly productive. As with any fruit trees they are a long term investment.

I am so so proud of us for finally get this little project finished as I have been going on about it for over a year. I love how it all came together in the end, a big thank you to my Mum for giving us a week of her holiday to come and be lacerated by our hedge and for making endless tea runs when we where flagging!  Another big thank you to the folks at Victoriana Nursery Gardens for supply us with these wonderful trees (which at one point over the winter I was sure I'd managed to kill!). I will put a list of the various trees we have used and some links up if it stops raining long enough for me to nip out and check the labels!

I cant wait to watch these lovely plants mature and grow over the coming years!

I had always though Hawthorn hedges where quite pretty when driving around the countryside, they have pretty white flowers in the spring and bright red berrys in the autumn, all very green and pleasant land...I was mislead, Hawthorns are the devil!

We have a lot of Hawthorn in our very small garden,  over 100 foot of the stuff marking our boundary on one side and it is a complete bastard to keep in check, it grows at a phenomenal pace and has inch long spikes all over it!

For well over a year I have been plotting to remove the hedge closest to the house, I have lost count of the amount of times I have scratched and spiked myself on this bloody plant and on several occasions actually gotten spiked through the sole of my shoe. I came up with the idea of replacing this with a row fanned fruit trees, so last summer I ordered several fruit trees from the ever helpful Victoriana Nursery Gardens and began to train them into shape.

We where originally going to removed the hedge last summer but other jobs and the rubbish weather got in the way, so this week we had my Mum staying with us, what better thing to ask a guest to do!

This was the hedge last Sunday morning...

Here it is by Sunday afternoon...

Holy crap did we have a lot of scratches! This stuff was a total nightmare to rip out, it was even worst stuff to try to bag up to take to the recycling centre. Then came a week of sheer enjoyment as we had to then dig out all the main stumps. Heres Mum and Rich hard at work (what can I say...someone had to hold the camera!).

On the up side it has been nice to be outside again and getting some garden jobs done, I was getting slight cabin fever working in the bathroom none stop. We also uncovered quite a range of wild life, the most exciting being the nest of Slow Worms.

I love Slow Worms, they are so beautiful, we have quite a lot in our area and I have seen them on numerous occasions, but never so many together.

Luckily we didn't harm them when removing the hedge, we very carefully moved all 6 of them to under the Box hedge which should be nice and damp and out of the reach of any of the local cats.

So tomorrow, weather permitting we will be getting the poles up of the fruit frame and hopefully planting my fanned fruit trees. We'll see how it does but I am beyond excited to finally be getting this little project completed...then its back to tiling!

I have been tiling up a storm until last friday, I had to stop as we have both run out of tiles and reached the ceiling!
Rich managed to get the loo cistern back on on friday evening (a horrible job which took about 4 hours and required some jiggery pockery to get all the pipes to fit) 

Its all looking pretty good, we had a break from indoor jobs this week as the weather has been lovely and we've had my Mum staying and you really cant have more than two people working in this size of room. We have also placed the order for our new windows which should be arriving in about 3 weeks, this will slow the bathroom up as we cant tile the wall with the window fully until the new ones in. Never mind, we'll hopefully get this lot grouted (in grey!) which will mean we can get the sink refitted and maybe even the shower!!! Am so excited, have had to put up with baths for 3 years, I really cant wait!

So although I haven't been working on the bathroom, check out my next post for what we have been up to!

Wow, I can see this is a subject that is going to very boring very quickly! Sorry but we have literally nothing else going on but bloody endless tiling right now! Rich finally let me have a go and it turns out I'm actually quite good at it. He's only had to pry two tiles off the wall so far which where imperceptibly wonky, never mind it keeps him happy!

Here I am in my tiling zone...

...and here we are after two days hard work.

Good lord, it just goes on and on! Slowly we are creeping our way around the room. It's very hard to be stuck indoors when Spring finally seems to have arrived in Bath. I keep getting distracted and wandering outside just for the novelty of not having to trudge through snow.

Rich escaped outside with the excuse that he would give our new car a valet, it does look all lovely and shiny now.

As the house is in total disarray we have decided to bite the bullet and get another major job underway, finally replacing our knackered old windows. The windows in our place where falling apart when we brought the house two and a half years ago, we always knew they would need replacing but they kept getting pushed further down the job list as other stuff was more urgent. Anyway  we have managed to find a local family company to come in and replace them all.

Our little cottage would have originally had sash windows in the front, so we will be replacing them with modern look-a-likes. So hopefully at the beginning of May our cottage will look a little different from how it looks now.

I'm posting this pic so after May I can come back and remind myself how crap our old windows where!  Fingers-crossed will be all cosy for next winter after their changed, it will also be nice to be able to open some of the windows that are currently rusted closed.

Anyway good to get some more big house jobs under our belt...and now back to the tiling!

So as predicted most of Easter Weekend was spend working on the bathroom, having finally been able to go and buy so skirting boards and architrave Rich set about fitting it (always easer said than done!). We had to build the skirting out away from the wall as the tiles are quite thick and would have overhung the beveled edge at the top of the skirting which would look awful.
We brought extra wood so Rich could bulk it out by 2cm, all of which makes no sense till you see it with the tiles as well...

Its amazing how much more civilised a room looks once you add little details like skirting, suddenly its starting to look a little tamer.

Rich managed to get as far as getting some of the yellow tiles on then unfortunately ran out of tile adhesive! I really must be more organised about buy stuff when we get near the bottom of the tub!

So that was our Ester, interspersed with chocolate eggs of course. I spend most of the weekend rush to get a peace of artwork done in time! Phew, one day we'll get to actually enjoy a bank holiday without doing major renovation work...thats the dream!

I shall bore you all with more tile pics soon!