Cabbages and cherries and things that go slime in the night.

Despite being at the tail end of sick in our house - Himself was the sicker and was taking killer antibiotics - we managed to have a nice weekend and get lots of yard work done.

I suppose I get to do the flower beds because I am a girl. And girls like flowers.

I am not one of those girls particularly.

I mean I like a nice herbaceous border as much as the next person, but you can't eat one nor can you donate it to Feed Nova Scotia come harvest-time.

Having said that, someone who used to live here put a lot of thought into the flower beds in front of the house. So I feel like I should resurrect them.

Currently they are buried in buttercups (hundreds of stringy roots with nothing to pull onto), dandelions (we all know about those bastards and the way they snap off and grow back), and some feathery weed thingy that has a root system comprised of interlocking elastic bands with a plant popping up every three centimetres along the elastic.

Really.

It has me stumped. I've never seen it before.

So I weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and eventually cleared most of the weeds from one bed and saved about six plants, a hosta, some silver lace and a couple of gladioli that sat shivering in the cold tundra that was the newly weed-free zone.

Which meant of course that I had to go to the garden centre and buy fill-ins. I got a tray of Creeping Jenny and Allysium and some foxgloves (I am determined to have hummingbirds this summer) and hopefully they'll cover the bare ground before the buttercups rebound.

Mmmm, planting bedding is sooo much funnn.... not.

Himself and Justin who was over for a visit were playing with power tools nearby, in order to avoid weeding.

PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..... 36 volts, man... that's a nice piece of iron, dude ... PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.................... listen to that, man.... hey, let's 'fix' the deck......

Prob'ly shoulda dug the bed out, said Justin, in between drilling holes in the deck.

Prob'ly.

The second bed is so much worse than the first one I don't know how I am going to even start.

Prob'ly should dig the bed out...

Goddamn, I hate giving into weeds.

As well as the beds in front of the house, we have four big deep beds alongside the driveway, made of old railway sleepers, which are quite nice but are painted a disastrous shade of rust.

To hell with flowers I thought. Just got in and dug the dandelions out and we planted veggies there.

Himself put the fully loaded 36 volt drill down and made himself available to supervise this, as veggies are much more interesting than flowers.

So I/ we/ us planted cabbage, broccoli, beets, chives and parsley.

Ho hum, a couple of hours passed and I was passed out in exhaustion on the couch with a nice glass of pinot noir when Himself went out to check them for the umpteenth time and realised that crumbly old sleepers are where SLUGS live.

So now we are on slug patrol.

Apparently, in a rare episode of garden alignment, slug genocide was taking place in Ireland at the same time.

Poor slugs.... there's nowhere for them to go.

Firstly, we cooked a big pot of mussels and ate them on the deck and then we smushed the shells up and sprinkled them round the cabbages.

Didn't work.

Not enough mussels.

Last night, we were out at 10.30pm with a torch killing them with a kitchen knife.

Thirty eight.

If you're interested.

This evening we found two, so we have put beer in jar lids and are hoping that the slugs will die happy rather than at the hands of Himself the Slugvader.

Of course, none of this healthy constructive positive gardening activity can call itself the real action of the weekend, which was the official planting of the cherry trees.

While I was deciding between the yellow bedding or the blue, Himself found some CHERRY TREES.

To go with the tomatoes, no doubt.

So we've planted our first trees here. A nice little milestone.

Saturday night, we tested our fire pit (built for Polly's visit in August). First impressions are pretty good - nice draught, not too much smoke, hopefully we'll have a wind-free week and we can have a couple of nice evenings in the yard.