Oil Me Up!

So it's that time of year again when the sun comes out for three days in a row, and I bake outside on the balcony with a good book while Kevin stays inside swearing at his X-Box.  Yay summer!

Our balcony flooring survived the long winter and rainy (so rainy!) spring, but was looking a bit duller than this time last year. 

We popped to Homebase to look for some oil suitable for outdoor use and the cheapest they had was their own brand Teak Oil, less than a fiver.  This made us very happy, because a few weeks ago we spent about £15 on oil for the kitchen worktop (post coming soon!) and we were expecting to pay a lot more for the outdoor stuff.  Anyway, this Teak Oil says it's suitable for using on outdoor furniture, and we sit on the floor all the time so it totally counts.

It said to apply it on a day when it wouldn't be raining (hah, why are they selling it here then?!) so after a week or so we had fine weather forecast for a couple of days, but it wasn't so sunny that we'd be missing precious outdoor time too much. 

I whacked some of the oil in a jug, grabbed probably the only clean paintbrush we have, and got to work.

Check out my giant thumb, it's like the size of three fingers!

You can see the difference it made immediately:

The oil smelt delicious to me, but I do really like fumey smells, and Kevin didn't like the smell so I shut the door while I was working until I got to the last bit.  It only took about half an hour, if that, and then it looked all lovely and slick and shiny.

I do still need to do a small patch where I put the plant pots out of the way, but other than that, behold now the oil has soaked in and done its job:

This will hopefully last another year.  It does say to do it every six months, but our balcony is quite sheltered and I'm quite lazy.

Also, after the passion flower we had on the trellis got frosted to death, I bought a shiny new clematis, and it's still alive and growing strong! 

It keeps trying to grow towards the door, and I think it wants to eat us, but that might just be be my imagination after reading this Kenneth Ireland book as a child...

The Plants, the Bag and the Wardrobe (not necessarily in that order)

On Tuesday it finally stopped showering for long enough for me to plant up the rest of our new plants, and today I've finally stopped procrastinating for long enough to actually write a post about it.

It took a lot less time than I expected, primarily because I didn't actually have to replant the lavender or the pieris, as the plastic pots they were in fitted perfectly into the decorative pots we already had, so that took all of five minutes.  I did plant the sweet peas in a new pot, complete with trellis jammed in the back for them to climb up.  I've put them all together in one large plant pot, I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not, but I can always move some of them to another pot if it gets too crowded.  Anyway, without further ado, les plants:

Sorry for the close-up-ness of the picture, our balcony's only just over a metre wide so it's the best I could manage.

Progress on the wardrobe is slooooow, mostly due to me.  I thought I was being really clever in painting the back of the doors first so that the front wouldn't be subject to drips coming through when I painted the back.  Except while I was painting the back first, I wasn't checking for drips on the front.  Cue a tonne of drips.  So many I nearly wept, but instead I thought maybe painting over them might make them less obvious.

Long story short, it didn't, so yesterday morning I first tried sanding them down and then when that didn't work I got Kevin's amazing razor scraper and scraped them all off.   Luckily repainting over the bare patches where drips used to be looks way less obvious than the drips did, but it's taken a long time (waiting for coats to dry properly so I don't mess it up again) and I'm a couple of days behind on my plan.  Oh well, I foresee a lot of sanding and painting in the spare room this weekend, and perhaps sometime next week a white wardrobe?  I really hope so!

I also did a little bit of sewing this week, made myself a nice new tote bag using this pattern, from some on sale, super cheap Ikea bed linen (not actual linen, poly cotton, but still).  So that's another thing from my Things to Make and Do board that I've done.  That's two in one week!  Woo!

I'm going to use the rest of the fabric to make some covers for our enormous outdoor cushions, and we're going to Ikea this weekend (Kevin doesn't know this yet, I bet it makes his day, haha) to look at some possible decking for the balcony floor.  All we'll need then is for summer to arrive, and hopefully last longer than two weeks!

I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee... Covered In Bees!

Now that summer is nearly here we've decided to go gardening crazy!  If only we had a garden *sigh*.  We do have our balcony though, on which many a plant has succumbed to lack of watering / aphids that just won't die.  We were out enjoying the sun a couple of weeks ago (remember that sun... where did it go?) when a lovely fat bumble bee came to visit us.  It was love at first sight for Kevin, who now wants as many as possible to come and enjoy our balcony with us.

To say I'm not very good with plants would be a huge understatement.  Everything that's been out on our balcony has died, and at the moment we have four houseplants, two of which are succulents, and they're only all alive because they're indoors so we notice when they need watering.  So whenever I get all excited and suggest to Kevin that we should get loads of pretty flowers for our balcony he just flat out refuses, which is probably a good thing.  However, now he's all excited about bees, he's the one doing the suggesting, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, so on Saturday we spent a couple of hours at our local garden centre looking for some bee friendly plants.

We'd done some highly scientific research beforehand into what would attract bees (i.e. looked on the internet a bit and asked my mum, thanks Mum!) and apparently they like blue flowers, because they can mainly see colours at the blue end of the spectrum.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half wandering around the plant section we came home with these beauties:

• 10 trailing light blue Lobelias
• 6 F1 blue Petunias
• 1 blue Scabiosa
• 1 white and pink Campanula
• 1 purple Sweet Pea
• 1 pink Sweet Pea
• 1 Pieris (forest flame)

The garden centre had very helpfully put some 'Bee Friendly' stickers on some of the plants, and the others we bought because we saw bees landing on them while we were there.

I am madly in love with the Forest Flame (the tall one at the back with the pink leaves).  It's my new favourite thing in the whole flat, so I'm gonna be uber-careful not to kill it!

I planted half of the plants today in two lots of tiered planters.  Space is at a premium on our balcony, so when I saw the idea of making your own tiered planters on this website I pinned it on my things to make and do board, and it's the first thing on there that I've actually done (woo, go me! haha).

I still have the sweet peas and the pieris to plant up tomorrow, along with a gorgeous lavender plant that my mum got us (thanks again Mum!), but without further ado, our new tiered planters:

Bee's-Eye View

The lobelias are in the bottom tier, petunias in the middle and then the scabiosa and campanula in each top pot.  The lobelias are trailing, so hopefully they'll spread out and down over the pot, I'm really excited to see what they look like when the plants are blooming.

I shall post pics of the rest of the plants tomorrow when they're all nicely potted up and I've swept the balcony a bit (compost gets everywhere), and hopefully, possibly, maybe, by the end of this week there may be a white wardrobe in the spare room.  Maybe.