Phew... this was a luxury! An entire day at home to try and get some backyard work done! Except... I had to go into get some other administration chores done in the morning, and so what I was hoping to be a full day of mucking around in the garden ended up being significantly less... but still, a few solid hours of getting things done. Plus, the plumbers dropped by and finished off the last of the drainage stuff and fixed up the remained downpipes. Just in time for some stormy weather in the coming days.

Anyway, I've been eyeing off this pile of woodchips in our front... the remnants from a tree or two that were taken down several months ago. With spring fast approaching (actually... it is technically already spring)I really got to get started on mulching the sunny exposed areas of the gardens otherwise we will quickly find ourselves over-run with weeds. I already did a batch of weeding today... and it is still manageable, but they are growing fast!

I also want to use some of the mulch to go under the swing set... to raise the ground level up a little bit so that the little one can easily reach the swing, and also to reduce the amount of muddiness that ends up being there when the rain comes. Kids and mud... well, doesn't really go well together if you want to keep a house that is relatively clean!

I also picked up some Dynamic Lifter when I dropped by the garden centre on the way back from the administration stuff. This is the really stinky stuff... even though this was supposed to be a reduced odour recipe. I had to leave the car open and airing out for a while afterwards...

I had thought to get some manure/fertiliser... but I didn't really read the thing properly, and had ended up with this stuff. I spread a bag out among some of the newly planted shrubs, herbs, and other plants to help them grow out a bit and to hopefully enrich the heavy clay soil... apparently it can also help with that, and at the moment, we are trying to do everything we can to break it up a bit!

Meanwhile... I had mentioned that there was a storm coming in... and I wanted to make sure that our roof and gutters were in tip-top shape to meet the challenge! We've actually not had any problems since the drainage was installed properly and this leaf guard has kept the gutters flowing nicely. But there is still this problem of smaller debris forming at the ends of the tiles when they come into contact with the plastic guard...

... I don't think it is a huge problem, but I could see that it would hinder the flow of water a little bit though. So, I figured I would just go around the roof and just clear these little blockages. After all, there was one huge storm a month or two ago that did overload our gutters for about 20 minutes and we had water in the eaves and pouring out of a light fitting. On the other, half of Canberra also had the same or much worse problems!

I did talk to one of the plumbers today, and he seemed to think that one of the gutter lines was drooping in the middle, and so the water wasn't channeling out to the downpipe properly. It was only clear in the heavy rain, as that meant that the bulk of the water was only heading down a single channel instead of two. So, add that to the list of house tweaks that need to be paid for!

... I have to say that I'm pretty happy that our gutters have been leaf free since the installation of the guards. It isn't completely perfect, but it does mean that I don't need to be on the roof quite so often... and when I do, it is just to hop up and blow away the debris with a leaf blower, and not needing to do all the scraping of the gutters as well!

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