Adventure is not always just bad planning...

... Sometimes it's just what you need.

Every now and then I like to go on city adventures, we live in an amazing city but occasionally when I've been so busy living in it I forget what it's actually like! 

So this week, on a lovely sunny day, we went on one of our explorations to try and go somewhere unfamiliar where we felt lost. We got lost alright, but look what we found...

...An unusually placed apple...

... A man buried up to his chest...

... And a sign to make everything better.

Our mini exploration was fun, especially this super slippery slope!

(Afterwards we saw a sign then said please don't slide on the slopes... woops! What do they expect if they construct a super steep slippery soft slope with a walkway up it??)

But as we sat on a bench watching other people slide down the slope, spot the sign and scamper away, we realised that what we REALLY wanted to do on such a lovely day was to spend some time in our garden.

We share our garden with 5 other flats, but no one else uses it except to hang up their laundry. It was a wilderness when we arrived and we have slowly tamed it over the past two years with help from a neighbour. So as a reward for our hard (maybe unappreciated?) work, we decided we were allowed to make one of the beds a little bigger and plant some vegetables in it, maybe our neighbours will be inspired to join in? I certainly hope so. 

First things first, I needed some new gloves...

... My old ones fell apart. So we set to work digging up the turf along the bed...

...putting my knot tying skills to the test by making a shelter for our spring onions...

...and finally relaxing with a glass of home made lemonade...

... yum!

Steve was inspired to mow the lawn so it looks really neat now. 

If only the mysterious vanishing builders would come and finish our wall then we could plant things out without worrying about having to leave enough room for them to trample over without destroying our plants!

=D

I hope you're all enjoying the lovely sunny weather and having some mini adventures of your own, whether they are far away or even in your own back garden!

xxx

New Camera!

Ok, so for a long time we'd been thinking of getting a new camera. The last few cameras we've had were found and repaired or bought second hand from friends, so we've never really splashed out on a nice one. 

We knew a fair bit about photography but not enough for our liking so we bought this great book to help us figure out the more complicated aspects of it.

During a quick trip home my Dad gave me a couple of old SLR cameras that he doesn't use anymore. They were gifts so he didn't really want to get rid of them, but my parents are moving house and so rather than give away his cameras forever we are taking care of them until further notice!

Olympus 10

Zenith 11     

So we played around with these for a while, and our book came in very handy for understanding what everything does.

We looked around for about a month and read a lot of reviews (and I mean LOTS)... but eventually we settled on this one. It's probably not perfect, and probably not what a professional would go for, but for an entry level camera it's pretty good! So far we've not found anything wrong with it at all.

We haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet, but these are a couple of photos from our garden for you until I go out somewhere exciting and take some really nice ones!

xxx 

   

Fantastical Botanical Exploration!

Oh the last few weeks have been so busy... Lot's of university deadlines, my first school placement (one week down, 3 to go!) and lots of preparation for summer jobs and maybe a visit home if I'm lucky! So I decided to skive for a few hours, and meet my best friend where he's working at the minute, the Botanic Gardens!

A few more daffodils first, they are so relentlessly cheery, I wish I could be that colourful...

...and some Fritillaries to match...

...a whole mini green house of colour, too bright for my poor little camera to cope with...

...we went to the Glass houses next, to look at some slightly more exotic plants...

...and found to our surprise and delight, that due to important maintenance work...

...it is free to visit the Glass Houses at the moment!...

...I am growing some of these Begonias from a cutting, but they'll take a long time to look this nice...

...I really like this metal frog, it looks so real...

...I think I'd like some of these epiphytes in my bathroom, so I could pretend I was under a jungle waterfall and not a shower head... Though I'm not sure my flatmates would agree...

Visiting the Botanics never gets boring, everything is different each time I go there and there is so much of it to see! I'm so lucky to have this on my doorstep.

x

Narcissus

For the past few weeks we've been enjoying our daffodil sea in the garden...

We planted a LOT of bulbs this year (two bags of bulbs!), and it turns out our neighbour did too! So now we have all kinds of daffodils of all shapes, colours and sizes, my favourite are the ones that have lots of flowers on each stalk but are teeny tiny...

The walls of our garden are very old and very worn (in some places you can see right through them!) so we've been waiting for a builder to come and fix them all year. We couldn't plant out any of our vegetables until they were fixed because we knew they would get trampled... We eventually decided that something had to be done, so we bravely planted out some sacrificial lettuce...

The lettuce is now thoroughly trampled, but at least the walls are getting done, and we have plenty more lettuce where THAT came from! 

It also meant that in order to save the daffodils from certain death, we got to bring some inside...

I'm so excited for when the walls are finished so we can get our vegetables outside! 

We have squash (butternut and regular!), spring onions, tomatoes, and of course the almighty, indestructible courgette! 

How cute is that butternut squash??

x