It's been a week of form filling, building societies and Mr C's birthday!
The house is still progressing with solicitors involved and lots of paperwork being generated. This also means that we're starting to spend money, so fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong from here. Mr C and I have been to visit a couple of building societies about mortgages. We're waiting for one final piece of information from one and then we should be able to decide once and for all as to which we are going with. They will then need to get the survey done – fingers crossed that it won't throw up any show stoppers – and then things swing into action even more.
None of these building societies have branches in St Albans (they actually are all Yorkshire based ones) so we ended up having to go to Watford yesterday to visit one of them. Quite excitingly though I managed to spot five charity shops in the same street and they provided plenty of opportunity to go looking for bargains.
As well as picking up a humorous book for a friend whose birthday we celebrated last night, we also came across a hardback copy of Monty Don's
The Complete Gardener
for only £4.99. The RRP was £25 and Amazon seems to be able to do no better than £9.93 for a second hand copy so feeling quite pleased with my purchase. Mr C and I don't really know much at all about gardening so we figured that it was about time to learn. If the house purchase goes through then we should find ourselves with quite a large blank canvas. I know that I want to grow some vegetables, but other than that we don't really have any clear ideas. Hopefully this book will give us some inspiration, and tell us how to do things.
The Complete Gardener
for only £4.99. The RRP was £25 and Amazon seems to be able to do no better than £9.93 for a second hand copy so feeling quite pleased with my purchase. Mr C and I don't really know much at all about gardening so we figured that it was about time to learn. If the house purchase goes through then we should find ourselves with quite a large blank canvas. I know that I want to grow some vegetables, but other than that we don't really have any clear ideas. Hopefully this book will give us some inspiration, and tell us how to do things. After more than four years living here I also finally went and joined the local library last week. I can;t believe it's taken me so long. A quick look at the shelves suggests that they've got a reasonably large selection of gardening books (as well as quite a few sewing and knitting ones) so I'm sure we'll be making quite a bit of use of my library card over the next few months.
Yay, somebody else who’s been bitten by the growing-your-own-dinner bug! I remember the first year I set out my vegetable plots, I got all detailed with a timetable of when to plant the seeds, which were going in which bed for optimum rotation etc. That lasted about the first 3 months.. About the only thing I’ll suggest is not to lose much sleep over what will grow and what won’t or the specific varieties. I know what’s worked slightly better for me and what I won’t bother repeating, but really just plant stuff that looks interesting to you.
Get a paper copy of the Organic Catalogue (dot com) and you’ll soon be wondering if you can fork over bits of the lawn to put in 1 more pumpkin 🙂 Fingers crossed that all the paperwork converges for you.