Watching my garden grow...

It's been SUCH a gorgeous weekend! I love the sunshine, and it makes such a nice change when it's here at the weekend rather than in the week when everybody is stuck in the office!

We have a shared back garden - us and five other flats, but only us and the next door flat really use it, which is great! I do any gardening that gets done, aside from the occasional grass cutting, which the management company does. I know very little about gardening, but I would like to learn a bit more. I love going down to Columbia Road flower market on a Sunday and trying to soak up some of the knowledge that those guys there have, and I always come back with bags laden down with plants. I did my window boxes last weekend - simple pink geraniums - and this weekend I planted some tomato plants and lettuce. I haven't grown either before, so fingers crossed in a few weeks we'll have some lovely fresh salad ingredients.

I planted the lettuce in a pot - they said that 3 plants could easily fit in a 12 inch tub, and I used a peat free compost too, so hopefully that will work. The tomatoes I put in a window box that I've got hanging from some railings, and I just used normal compost. I'll let you know how I get on...

Millie being curious about the lettuce -


Little tomato plants -


Some shrubbery -


Some bluebells in amongst the weeds (though as they're quite pretty weeds I decided to leave them there!) -


Some window boxes, which are actually on the back wall rather than the window ledge. Pictures of other window boxes out front to follow another time

An attempted return to the blogging!

Sorry! I know I haven’t written for an eternity, and it’s for a mixture of reasons. I’ve been busy at work; we’ve been busy at home (with the boy preparing for the launch of album number two); we’ve been on holiday and also, I realised that when I was writing blog posts I found that they weren’t really coming out quite the way I’d originally intended when I started the blog!

I guess in the beginning I was feeling all gung ho and inspired by a few things that I’d put together cheaply for the house that people had commented on, but then once I’d written about DIYing pictures; what a difference some cute cushions can make etc etc I was kind of stuck. We’re not great at the DIY, and so even though our floorboards, for example, are only from B&Q the fact that we didn’t lay them ourselves seems to preclude them from being truly ‘thrifty’. Luddite that I am, I don’t really fancy re-naming the blog as such, but maybe from now on in my own head I’m going to think of it more as ‘thifty stylish homes & random inspirations & some room reorganisation & the odd bit of decorating’. I hope this will encourage me to carry on writing, because I was really enjoying it when I was doing it, and also mean that I feel I can write about a broader range of things, too. Having just had 10 days off for example, I’ve also come back all buoyed up about some great books I’ve just read and longing to see our cat, who I realise hasn’t been pictured on here nearly enough! Books and cats – both inspiring in their own way!

Here's Millie, in the studio, sitting on the printer! (More pics of the studio to follow soon, as we've just had a little move around in there).



And here are 3 of the 5 books I enjoyed on holiday! I wasn't so keen on the new Maggie O'Farrell (not pictured), which I also read (though I adore After You'd Gone and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox), but I loved One Day; Brooklyn and I also really enjoyed The Group by Mary McCarthy, which follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan...