Doors and Garden

I undercoated the ground floor back door and the internal basement door today.  I had been going to put the top coat on as well, but I realized that the paint I had bought for it was old style oil based gloss paint.  I hate this kind of paint – it gets your hands all sticky, you have to wash the brushes with white spirit which stinks and it takes ages to dry.  So I bought some water based stuff to arrive tomorrow (I am not doing well on not using Amazon).

After that I started having a go at the garden.  It looked attractive when we moved in, but on closer examination it is a mass of weeds.  Most of the flowers are wild ones aka “weeds” and although nice for a while, they tend to have a short window of attractiveness.  So I pulled out many, many weeds, including a surprisingly large number of foxgloves.  To me these are a weed, and they are all running to seed anyway.  I am going to spray the beds with weedkiller and then dig them over.  Come autumn we can do some planting.  One thing I do intend to have is a decent herb garden – I tried loads of times at Donich Lodge but my efforts always ended up being eaten by either slugs or deer.

The garden considered as an urban retreat really is surpassingly beautiful though.  It is almost completely surrounded by 12ft tall stone walls and is a real suntrap.  It is also surprisingly peaceful – you can hear the traffic on the road, but somehow it doesn’t seem to matter because you can also hear the birdsong and watch the bees and butterflies doing their stuff.