Projects go slow.

As you can see, yesterday evening it was still over 30 Degrees in the shade and not much cooler in the house. Today it's peaked at 31.2 Deg C. It's not so easy to get anything done in this heat, so the weekends not been as productive as hoped.

Mint Garden, Part 1 - the story so far.

The mint garden idea began last summer, with Garden Mint and Peppermint from our favourite garden centre. The basis of the plan was to replace the nettles, couch grass, docks and other nasty perenniel weeds, on the bank down to the neighbours field, with an altogether more pleasent (and useful) set off weeds which were more than up to the competition.

Any of you who have grown mint in their gardens will be aware of mints tendancy to take over. This is the reason that many people keep it in pots, but for us this is a great advantage. The eventual plan is to set the mints bounderies with gravel clad weed mat paths and let it all fight amongst itself (with a little bit of helpful regulation now and again).

During a late spring visit to the garden centre this year, I was delighted to see that they had 2 more mint types, Apple mint and Pineapple mint. Another bit of bank was duly dug over and space was made for these plants.

Since then a visit to a herb garden at Domkirkeodden in Hamar during our two weeks in Biri provided another handful of mint types. Here how the mint garden looks now.

So far, we've got

• Peppermint
• Green (Garden) Mint
• French (Spear) Mint
• Apple Mint
• Pineapple Mint
• Eau-de-Cologne Mint
• Yellow (Ginger) Mint
• Cat Mint (which isn't really a member of the mint family, but so what, the cats like it)
• Curly Mint

The two most established plants are the pepper mint and green mint that were planted last year. They give an idea of how the whole area will hopefully end up. There's over 200 mint types out there, I'm on the hunt!

Sitting in the sofa....

on Dads tummy.

Before I start with a catch up of everything that's happened and been done, so far, during the some what hectic summer period, here's a bang up to date photo of first born son, taken today.


As you can see, he's growing at a rate of knots, well over 7Kg and 63cms long already. He's developing everyday and "talking" more than his mum and dad put together, if that's possible!