Shed Electrics and low-Voltage Lighting ...

Firstly, a little quiz.    Take a look at this photo of these brand new light fittings I've bought, and the sealed boxes they came in, and see if you can identify what's wrong here....

can you see it ?

I only posted this photo because I thought it was so bleedin' obvious, and I just shook my head while muttering about the decline in educational standards, but then I showed it to a couple of other people.   

The first, like me, spotted it immediately but the second, after ten minutes of staring at it, still couldn't see anything wrong until it was pointed out to them....

Just in case, the answer's at the end of the post !

First harvest of the year...

Well, not strictly true, since we've already eaten a few radishes...

This year we did something we'd often read about, but never tried before, i.e. growing potatoes in containers.

We'd planted up eleven 30 litre buckets filled with multipurpose compost, each with only two or three small seed potatoes, the first five batches of which were started off in the greenhouse towards the end of February before being transferred outside in April.

We'd bought twenty of these large white buckets, which had once held ice-cream, for a fiver in an eBay auction.   The seed stock was procured from Wilkinsons, for £1 per packet with each containing around five or six small tubers.  They were of different varieties; Casablanca, International Kidney, Charlotte, Nicola and Red Duke of York.

Each container was initially filled to around a third of its depth, and was topped up in two further stages as the tops grew.

And today we harvested all the potatoes from the first five containers, around 110 days after planting.

first two containers were a mixture of red and white varieties....

Building a (big !) Shed

Ever since we bought the piece of land a few years ago to extend our garden, we'd been thinking about building something at the south end under the tree canopy.

the area in question, in a photo from 2013....

We'd considered a summerhouse, or a half-shed half-decked area, but in the end decided to go for a full length shed.  

Investment Review - March 2015

It's been two months since I lasted shared the combined portfolio, mainly because most of the immediately preceding posts were all very much on the same theme and I don't want the blog to become a strictly personal finance offering.

However, for the record, here's the data at the end of March compared to the last posting at the end of January ....

Building a Cold Frame....

I thought I'd use some of our remaining static caravan windows, originally procured as a joblot a few years ago to make solar panels, to construct a cold frame to increase the amount of space we have to grow stuff under glass - as if two greenhouses weren't enough.... 

For the main framework, I'd previously found a source of used 6-foot scaffold boards from a depot a few miles away, who sell them off at a fiver apiece.  They had boards for sale of up to 13 feet long, which would have worked out a little cheaper on a per-unit-length basis, but then I couldn't have carried them home in the car.

So, after knocking up an outline design, I collected fifteen of these boards.  

the raw materials....

Financial Planning - 2015 Review

It's now two full years since the implementation of my '...Grand Plan...' (for an explanation and last year's end-March review, see this link), and the latest annual results are in ....

More Landscaping Works...

It was time to tackle the one remaining corner of the garden we'd hardly touched since we moved in here four years ago, i.e. the southern boundary of the original back garden.

The old fence had been in a sorry state for a long while, and was leaning over even further after the winter winds.   Inside the boundary was planted with a mishmash of old trees and shrubs which weren't flourishing at all.  It was quite a dark and forbidding place, even in the summer months.

before we started.....

As a related project, earlier in the week we'd bought around twenty used paving slabs in an eBay auction, and these would be used to finally cover over the old pond we'd drained and half-filled-in during the autumn of 2013, which can be seen behind the apple tree.