Tuesday 28 April 2026: Pottering in the garden

As I hadn’t lost any weight since going onto plain water during my fasting hours, I went back to the dirty tea first thing. If it wasn’t having any affect, then I couldn’t see the point in being miserable anyway. So I went back to having a cuppa with milk and sugar in, not stopping at one cup but having 2 during the morning. What a rebel!

My reading hour was mostly online reading, articles linked to from social media, as well as catching up on social media. But my housework hour and my publishing hour were merged together and I did some work in the garden instead.

I had a day off from republishing on Friday in the end, giving not just me the day off but the book selling platforms too. I decided to start again yesterday and do the next 5 this week.

I emptied out another 2 trough planters onto one of the borders, rescued a bucket from the dog, put all the buckets together (these are what the garden centres call trugs now, but they’re builder’s buckets), put the 2 plastic troughs with a third one from the same set, and put all those together in one place so the dog couldn’t snaffle any of them and race around the garden with them. The 2 troughs I emptied were badly pot-bound and I couldn’t break the compost up and spread it out. That will be a job for when the bladed tools come out of the shed.

I decided to throw all the cheap plastic pots away, but every time I put some to one side, the dog stole one and raced around the garden with it. In the end I let him keep one and put all the others straight into the recycling bin at the front of the house. There were 2 more troughs I put together, these clay, and I added some clay pots to those. Then I put all the very big decorative plastic planters together in one stack and left the potato tubs we’d emptied the day before in another stack.

I saved a load of small crock flowerpots that go together in 2 sets. One set is bright, primary colours, the other set are all clay but they’re in a wire basket. These sets were once for herbs and I’d like to use them again when we move.

And then I disposed of all the plastic drip trays I didn’t see the point in taking with us.

There is an award-winning garden centre literally within walking distance of where we’re going, but when we last lived in the same area, they banned all dogs from all parts of the centre, even the landscaped grounds. I mean, even stately homes allow dogs in the grounds, why does a garden centre think it’s so special?

There’s another garden centre within driving distance that has gone completely the other way. Not only are dogs welcome everywhere, they’ve even got a new doggy café, where you can take your pooch with you if you want something to eat and drink and from where you can buy doggy snacks and treats, like doggy ice cream and ‘wuffins’ and things like that, so they can have something to eat or drink too.

Guess which one we’ll be using…

But, it means that if I find we need plastic pots or drip trays once we move, then I know where to go to find some. No point dragging them around with us – again! – as I’ll be mostly planting direct into the ground. Once the new garden has been completely cleared of raised patios, some kind of bird accommodation (possibly a hen house and chicken run), and a couple of coal bunkers, that is. (We won’t be getting chickens again…not without ‘staff’ to look after them while we’re out in the campervan.)

There are still some crock planters I want to take with us, but those are a bit difficult to get to at the moment, and one pile has stingers (stinging nettles) growing around them. No point taking plastic pots that are cheaply, quickly and easily available, but the crock pots are a lot dearer so I want to save those. I wanted to do one thing every day, and that was my one thing on Friday.

By the time I reached my desk, it was time for my midday breakfast. Once I’d had that, the first job I did was finish and post Friday’s blog post. It was written, again, the day before, but I hadn’t scheduled it. So that happened on Friday. I started today’s blog post, and I wrote yesterday’s book review…

I did think we’d have the weekend to do a bit more, but the poet surprised me on Friday morning with a confirmation email for a camp site in Scarborough for 2 nights. Saturday night and Sunday night so we didn’t have to leave to come home again too early on Sunday. That was unexpected and a nice change, but it meant as soon as he finished work on Friday, he had to go and get the van so he could fill it with water, food and other supplies and give it a clean.

I only had 9 pages left of the editing job to do, but it was all bibliography so not very exciting, and I allowed myself to be distracted several times by doing things for our very short break. I asked for an inventory of the bathroom cabinet and the food cupboards, I put new pillow cases on the pillows, I packed a bag for the dog, and I had to do a shopping list, using the inventory so I knew what we needed to stock up with.

While I finished my work, he gave the van a good clean and filled it with water. He took it back to the compound for the night, and he did the weekend shopping on his way home. When he got back, I put some of the shopping in the fridge and some of it in a different bag, the size and shape of which is more suited to the space we have in the van. I moved my car off the drive as well, as we usually drive to the van in my car so he isn’t doing all the manoeuvring.

I finished the editing job and sent it back to the author, and I sent an invoice to the client. Then I wrote yesterday’s book review, made the graphics, posted that where it had to be posted on Friday and scheduled it for Monday where I could.

I finished today’s blog post. As it was already quite long, I decided to do the weekend, Monday and today catch up for tomorrow’s blog post.

Friday was a good day for finishing things!

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.