Hello and welcome to another bonus episode. I do hope that you're having a fabulous weekend. Now, the weekend just gone, we had the most beautiful weather. Unfortunately, as has been the case for the last month, one of my children was sick over the weekend. So, we had to spend the entire weekend stuck at home, but it was okay because we have a lovely garden and actually over the past few years, we've neglected the garden a little bit because we like to go out. If the weather's good, then we escape the house and we go out somewhere on a little adventure. We like to go walking in the woods or in the hills, or go and visit a theme park, or do something that's very different, on our feet, moving around and exploring. So, being forced to stay at home over a beautiful weekend meant that we actually were able to get on and do some work in the garden, which was actually fantastic because what tends to happen is at the start of the summer, we spend a little time in the garden thinking we should tidy the garden up so we can use it properly because we have a lovely big garden. And we always think if we can tidy the garden up, we can have people over, we could have barbecues and picnics and things like that, but we need to tidy the garden up first. But then because we spend all of our time out of the house and not doing much in the house. We never get around to tidying the garden up and the whole summer passes and we never invite anyone over because the house isn't ready or rather the garden isn't ready to host people. So, this was a great opportunity to actually sort the garden out. Now, one of the biggest jobs that needed doing was the decking. We have a lot of wood in our garden. We made a rod for our own back. To make a rod for your back is to create a problem or a burden that you will have to then carry. We completely rebuilt the garden when we built a studio at the end of the garden because we knew that by bringing in diggers and all the builders to make the studio that we would tear up the lawn and destroy a lot of the plants and we'd be taking out the fences and things like that. So we thought, you know what, let's just redo the garden. Let's landscape the garden and make it how we want it to be. So, we decided to clad everything in wood. We created a wall and it's now clad in wood. We have a bomb shelter which has been, you know, here since the house was built about 100 years ago. We wanted to get rid of the bomb shelter, but a bomb shelter is built to withstand a bomb. And so trying to get rid of a bomb shelter is really hard work. We tried, but it was impossible. So, we decided instead of getting rid of it, we would just clad it in wood. So, the whole thing is now just covered in this lovely, lovely wood. And then we have the decking and the studio is also covered in wood. It's a wooden studio. And so there's a lot of wood that needs looking after. Of course, you can't just leave wood in the rain and the sun all year round and expect it to still look good and to last for a long time if you don't treat it and look after it. So, our decking hasn't been treated for a couple of years. And what we had to do was clear the deck because at the moment we have furniture on the deck. We have a little table and chair set and we have lots of pots on the deck. So, we had to take all the pots down, which isn't very easy when it's spring and summer and everything is growing. We have like blueberry trees and things and they're in full bloom and you're trying not to knock the flowers because the flowers turn into the fruit. But then you have to lift the blueberry trees and all the other plants as well, without knocking the beautiful flowers or the fruits off the plant. And then you're also trying to protect your back while you're trying to protect the plant. So, you're trying to lift in a safe way. It's not very easy. And you're getting spiders in your hair and cobwebs in your face. So, we did the back-breaking work of clearing the deck, taking down the furniture, and then my partner got the power washer out, the jet washer, and he power washed the deck to make it nice and clean. And then first thing in the morning on Sunday morning, we got the stain out and we stained the wood. So, there are three things you could do with wood. You can either treat it, if it needs a special treatment. For example, we have lots of little holes in our decking, which means there's probably woodworm in our decking. So, we should have started with a treatment for woodworm. But we didn't know that we had to do the woodworm first, and so, we haven't treated our wood. What we did was stain the wood, so you can treat stain or paint. Now, if you stain the wood, then you are painting on the stain and the stain colours and protects the wood, but still allows the features of the wood to be seen, to be visible. If you paint the wood, then you're covering the wood and the features of the wood. So, we've gone for a stain and we stained the deck. Now it's quite a large deck and it took quite a few hours in the baking hot sunshine. I did get a little bit burnt on my shoulders. I did put some sun cream on but I wasn't very thorough, obviously. So, the children were having a lovely time playing around in the garden while we were working hard, staining the deck, and then obviously it needed two coats. Most paint jobs need two coats, so Nick actually did the second coat on his own later in the evening while I was putting the children to bed. And just doing that little job afterwards, you look out and go,"Oh, that's so much better. Why didn't we do this a long time ago?" So, we're very pleased that the deck is now clean and has been stained and looks great once again; we've put all the pots back up on the deck and the furniture. So everything's back in place. I then spent the second half of my Sunday afternoon laying a little path at the end of the garden. So, at the end of the garden, we've got this very small patch that we were initially thinking of having a fire pit on. So, it's just like a patch of like a gravelly material, but it's not like gravel-like stones. It's like a clay and it's awful. We thought it would be a great material and it was cheap. That's why we bought it. We thought it'd be a great material to put down on this part of the earth. But it's turned out to be terrible. It's covered in moss and it's very messy. So, we were thinking, what can we do? Because we're not going to buy a fire pit. That's just not going to happen. But I did remember that we have some paving slabs left over from when we did our initial garden transition. These paving slabs belonged to our old version of our garden, and they were just piled up in a corner of the very back of the garden behind my studio. Covered, absolutely covered in every type of insect that you'll find in an English garden earwigs and centipedes, spiders, slugs, snails... ugh! But I was brave, in my flip flops, very impractical, and armed with a brush. I went back there and I brushed away all the creepy crawlies. My son had a great time, he loves bugs. So, he was coming back with me every time I lifted a slab to see what bugs were underneath the slab. Lots of worms and things. And so I clean off these slabs and I was picking them up one by one. Many of them have broken actually, but that was fine because I was doing a kind of crazy paving design. Now crazy paving is a phrase that we use to describe paving that's not linear. It doesn't sit together in a very perfect way. It's kind of lots of bits of broken paving that's arranged probably with big gaps in between. And it looks a bit crazy. It's not well-ordered. It's not aligned. So I did a kind of crazy paving-style path and it's all winding. So, there's no straight lines with my path. It's a bit windy, which I thought was nice for the children. You know, it's quite exciting. And on either side of this little path that I created, I've arranged some of our pots that are down at the bottom of the garden. So that was fun. A lot of heavy lifting. I did get myself stuck. I got into a little predicament at one point because I lifted one paving slab that wasn't broken. Now this is probably about three and a half feet tall, quite thick, very, very heavy. I lifted it and I thought to myself,"Oh, this is dangerous. I could end up breaking a toe or a finger or falling over and breaking a hip or something here." But I am quite silly and decided to go for it anyway and I dragged it down to the edge of the studio. And then I got myself pinned. My hands were hurting from lifting it. And I wasn't wearing any gloves. And so I couldn't lift it, but I was leaning it against my body. So, then it was pinning me up against the studio wall. I couldn't lift it. I couldn't move it. So I had to call my son,"Jacob, Jacob, tell Daddy I'm stuck." And so Nick had to come and save me with his big strong hands and lift this paving slab and place it down to complete the path for me. He was my hero. I don't know what I would have done otherwise. So, that was my weekend, sorting out the garden and making it look beautiful and ready for hopefully hosting a few people over the summer. So, I thought maybe in a couple of weeks I would invite the neighbours over and have a few of my son's friends and their parents over to see us as well. So, yes. Do you enjoy spending time in your garden? Do you have a garden? Some places don't have gardens. Some places have yards or balconies. Anyway, whatever you're doing over the weekend, I hope that you're having a wonderful time and hopefully you've enjoyed listening to me talk about my garden. Alright, until next time, take very good care of yourself and goodbye.