After a very busy period at work, and my last week off being for my honeymoon back in April, I was very relieved to have a week off this month. Well, technically it was four and a half days, but it was still time off work and I was grateful for it as my brain was starting to get a bit bogged down!

Monday

This was the half day part of my leave. Popped in to the office in the morning, which might have been a bit daft as I have a long commute (live near Colchester and work in Cambridge) but I had things to sort out around the office. Once I'd done everything on my list I then started my holiday by driving over to Cambridge's Grafton Centre, had a little lunch in Bella Italia (I had two starters, pork and beef meatballs in tomato sauce, and carbonara croquettes, delicious!) and then strolled around the charity shops outside the centre. I managed to get some DVDs and a nice top, so my next charity shop haul post will have some good bits in it! Keep an eye out next month.

Started the week with a good book!

Once I'd worn my little legs out with all the walking I drove home and had the rest of the afternoon with a nice cup of tea and a good book, heaven!

Tuesday

Sadly my car needed work done so I dropped it off at the garage Tuesday morning and spent the day confined to my town. But that's not too bad as the town isn't huge and the walk down the high street to the river is quite pleasant. There have been some changes in bin collections recently, which mean that we can now get free sacks for garden waste! Excellent news as they were £3.50 before. But you can only get them if you fill out a form online and get an emailed voucher. Unfortunately having jumped through the respective hoops, I got to the Town Council offices to find that they had run out of garden sacks.

Quite frustrating but there you go. I was asked to phone on Friday to check if sacks had arrived before walking down, and I walked back home to spend the rest of the day reading my book, playing online, and planning what to do with the rest of my week. I intended to go for a drive up to a village called Coggeshall, but when I went to pick up my car they showed me where my suspension coil had snapped! Not good, so I had to book the car in for Friday for more work and be careful with my driving for the rest of the week.

Wednesday

Mirror for £4? Yes please!

Despite the car trouble I used Wednesday to drive in to Colchester and have a long walk around. I popped in to numerous charity shops but sadly couldn't find anything I particularly wanted to buy, not even a book or two! However I did manage to get some nice hanging baskets from Wilko, for our garden, and a bathroom mirror for only £4! We've been really struggling to find a bathroom mirror we both like, so at only £4 I figured this will be a handy placeholder to use, and then we won't rush in to buying something we don't like just because we need to fill the space.

I also managed to get some nice birthday presents for one of my sisters. Her birthday isn't until September, but I think I might have all her gifts sorted now, getting that done early is a big bonus!

Thursday

I decided to call off my trip to Coggeshall due to the car problem, and instead went up to Marks Tey. I drive by Poplar Nurseries here every day, and it looks like such a big garden centre that I've wanted to go inside for months. Now I had my hanging baskets I decided it was time to get some plants and get gardening!

I wasn't disappointed, it was a lovely big shop. I spent quite a lot of time mooching around the "grow your own fruit and veg" section before coming to my senses and realising it was far too late to be planting tomatoes and strawberries (but I'll try to find a budget for them next year) and instead wandered over to the outdoor section to see what flowers I wanted. I knew I wanted some lavender plants, and then something nice for the hanging baskets. 

Tiny lavender and little petunias!

But there were so many other beautiful plants that in the end I had to go eat some lunch as I was just wandering around in circles trying to work out what I wanted to buy. After filling up with a lovely cheese scone and a nice cup of tea, I had my head on straight and went back out with a trolley. Three small lavender plants for £1.50 each, a box of six dark pink petunias for £4.50, two small trough pots, and two bags of compost, and I was ready to come home! Buy not before I popped back in to their farm shops to get two enormous slices of cake for me and my husband (chocolate loaf for me, carrot and walnut for my husband). I really liked the nursery so I think a second visit is on the cards so I can write a proper review of it!

Once I got home I got everything potted up and placed, ready to surprise my husband when we came home. I ended up putting two petunias each in the hanging basket, and the other two in the smaller trough. The three lavender plants fitted nicely in the larger trough, despite being quite small and spindly. I've been told in the past that lavender can get quite larger so hopefully they'll grow a bit and won't stay quite so small.

Friday

Car went back in the garage in the morning, and then a quick call to the Town Council meant that I could hurry down and pick up some newly arrived garden waste bags! Then all I had to do for the day was wait for the call to say my car was done. I decided to use the time to sort out my clothes, we out our wardrobe from IKEA back in June and my clothes were still in bags in the spare room. I sorted through them I realised there was a lot there that I hadn't even missed despite not seeing them for a few months. I ended up filling a few bags to donate to a charity shop and then hung up the rest, so now all my clothes are sorted out and the spare room looks a lot clearer!

So that was my somewhat productive week off! I didn't get as much done as I'd intended (sending off more forms to change my surname for example) but I'm especially happy about getting the plants sorted. Gardening doesn't come naturally to me so getting plants potted is an achievement to me!

My next week off is at the end of August, and since this week off really wasn't long enough I'm really looking forward to it XD

Chelsea Physic Garden

As I mentioned in yesterday's post about Greenwich Park, I visited various bits of London during my week off. On Thursday me and my friend paid a trip to Chelsea Physic Garden.

The garden was founded in the 17th century as a way for apothecary apprentices to learn how to identify medicinal plants. It has various beds with particular themes, and the signs in front of the plants tell you the english and latin names and where the plants are normally found. A lot of them also tell you what ailments they were used to treat, but as my friend pointed out, it would have been interesting to find out if extracts from these plants are still used to treat the same problems in the modern world.

It was very interesting to see the various plants, although my friend kept laughing at the number of flowers I stuck my nose in. There were also a collection of poisonous plants, which were mostly confined to one bed with large red "Poisonous" labels around it.

After the walk around the garden we stopped for tea on the patio, which gave us a lovely view across the garden in the sunshine.

We walked from Sloane Square tube station to the garden, which also took us past the Royal Chelsea Hospital, where the Chelsea Pensioners live. It's a nice area to go for a stroll, the Garden is near the river so if you can also go for a walk along the Thames.

If you're in the Chelsea area then you really should take a look at this small green space.

SNOW!

My first year living in London and I've been lucky enough to get some snow! My main worry about leaving Hertfordshire was that I would miss one of the best bits of winter, the village I grew up in gets snow and in previous years me and my siblings have had a lot of fun building snowmen in the garden but London is always a little bit warmer than the rest of the country so snow isn't that common.

I will confess to staring at the weather forecast all week waiting for the good news. Then on Friday afternoon everyone was announcing that it was meant to snow this weekend. On the one hand I was incredibly excited and on the other I was very worried that it would miss us and hit the rest of the country, my luck has been terrible recently so I expected lack of snow to follow suit.

Imagine my excitement last night then when a few flakes fell, and then a few more, and then the snow started properly. I was bouncing between my bed and the window on a regular basis to see the progress of it settling. I even slept with my curtains open last night so I could occasionally lift my head up and see the snow falling, although this didn't work very well as I'm short-sighted and don't sleep with my glasses on so every time I tried it all I could see the orange blur of the streetlights XD

When I woke up this morning it was already starting to melt, so I downed two cups of tea and ate a biscuit, pulled on a multitude of layers, grabbed two cameras and went to Kew Gardens. I took quite a lot of photos with my Dad's old Canon Digital Rebel and two with my aging pocket Nikon, the Canon ones are in RAW and will need to wait until I get a new PC before I can edit them, the Nikon ones are simply awful quality so I won't be posting them up on here. However regardless of photos the actual Gardens were beautiful covered in snow.

I also ended up going to Marks & Spencer to buy a scarf as I don't have one and since the cold is due to hang around a while longer I figured I should get one, and then I also ended up buy 2 cheese scones XD

I've already had chicken soup and a lovely fresh roll and more tea, this afternoon will feature baking some cookies and then I'm doing roast beef for my dinner tonight!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and if you've got snow, have fun with it!

Kew Gardens

It's another Bank Holiday weekend! Sadly no Royal Wedding accompanying it so it was only 3 days off rather than 4 (I think we've been spoiled by that this year XD), but it's still nice to have a Monday off work.

So I went home (aka back to my parent's place) for a few days. Which meant that they brought me back to Kew yesterday (Sunday) and since they were here we decided to make a little trip to Kew Gardens.

And as it turns out, there's several people on Etsy who have been to the Gardens and received a bit of inspiration from them!

Kew Garden Gates by lindabutterfly

Palm House Kew by FlaxInk

Palm House at Sunset by 4artssake

Clearly they're not the only ones, we saw several photographers and at least one artist (complete with paint and multiple sketchbooks) as we were wandering around, although potential visitors need to be aware that Kew does not allow "commercial photography" without prior consent.

It's a lovely place to visit, there's more information on their website. If you're in London (namely south-west London, it's a bit of a trek from the center) then check it out!