Super progress in the garden!

Yesterday was a busy day, so even though the weather was good, there was no time to get into the garden. In the morning, we went into Sapporo to pick up Seiju's motorbike that had been fixed during the week. Then we came home, had a quick lunch, and got right into cleaning up the pig heap. It was HORRIBLE, so it took four of us a good couple of hours to get it under control.Yoshi then rushed out to meet some kids from school to make some CDs for the school trip - they ended up coming back to the house to do it, which was nice. I had to go out to an English teachers' meeting that was OK but went on late and meant two trips to Sapporo in one day. A bit much!

Today Yoshi had extra dance rehearsals which ended up going on all day. Seiju took him this morning and then we went to the home centre for lovely things like ant killer and lawn mower blades.

When we got back to the house, we found Seiju's mum and dad in the garden, with the house unlocked and gone through (grrr!) and they were both busily weeding away. We got right out and joined them, mainly so that I could control what MIL yanked up and where she decided to plant things! In the end it turned out very well. They were here for four hours and between the four of us, we got a huge amount of work done.


FIL weeded a corner of the lawn and along the edges, then went behind the fence to the house behind our garden which has nobody living in it and is a forest of weeds, and did a big slash and chop along our fence line, as the fuki was threatening to overwhelm our fence.

Seiju cut the back lawn, and MIL tackled the flower beds in the front of the house while I went at the veggie patch. We all had an hour's break for lunch, then afterwards Seiju finished the grass while FIL had a little snooze (well, he is 82!) and MIL and I went back to our respective weed patches.

I went out afterwards and took pictures!MIL - "No! Don't take pictures of me all dirty!"
"Stop!"
"Oh, go on then, just one picture."
The day lilies are in full bloom now.
The oriental lilies are about to bloom.
This was the back of the veggie patch this morning...
... and this evening! Nary a weed in sight!
The baby lettuce is growing bigger, and the space in the back has been taken up with two zucchini plants.
In the first box there are four tomato plants and two Swiss chard plants, bought from our local farmer's market. Baachan says she has some cucumber and pumpkin plants that will be OK to plant out in a week or so, so I'm planning to put them in the back box. I am sure it's too late but she swears not, so.....
After I finished the veggie patch, I turned to the flower bed under the trees. This has been a weedy mess for as long as we have lived here. Today I dug it all over carefully (hard because of the tree roots) and then moved some autumn flowering anemones (shu mei giku), hostas and primulas there from other parts of the garden, plus two pinks that I bought at the farmer's market.
This is what it looks like now.
A view of the roses in the back garden, looking down the back of the house.
I also bought two thrift plants (one white, one pink) and two red geraniums at the farmer's market, so I planted them in front of the yellow rose...
...... which is still going strong.