What we did on our holidays!

We came back from a week in France on Saturday. We took some more plants (for the new bit of garden) and a lot of bulbs, so it was another round of gardening! If we didn't have to weed everywhere first, we would be less pushed for time. And equally, if we didn't have to plant anything, there'd be loads of time for leisurely weeding (very therapeutic when you don't have loads else to shoe-horn into a limited time)!

We planted over 800 bulbs, so we're keeping fingers crossed for a lovely display in spring. There are a few autumn flowering ones, but that's not likely to be much of a show. The hope is they will all naturalise and spread. We also had a delivery of gravel - hopefully that will keep the weeds down. We had gone to Bar-sur-Aube on Wednesday to see when our patio was likely to be available for delivery, and they had got it in stock and could deliver it on Friday! As they were coming to our place anyway, we asked if they could bring gravel as well, so by 4pm we were the proud possessors of 270cm of paving circle (in kit form, of course!) and 1m³ of gravel.

I don't think it will be enough, but we shall see how far it will go, and then will have a better idea of how much more is needed. It's quite interesting to have finally found gravel: being used to the English system (and no I'm not one of those people who thinks everything is done better in England!) of choosing what colour of gravel (green, purple, pink, black, white, brown, gold etc, etc), what shape (round, rounded flat, grit, chips), what size (5mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 25mm) and what material (granite, slate, pebbles, marble, glass!), I have found it frustrating going round garden centres and bricolage and builders' merchants not being able to find anything other than aggregate (rough stone chips mixed with sand). M. Lorin had left a pile of red grit (he said it was road grit), so I knew it must be possible to find that, but the thought of the garden looking liking a badly-laid road wasn't appealing! So when David found some flat rounded gravel at Duchesne, I was delighted. They look like mini dunkers!