So. Next week school starts again. Lectures and whatnot.

I had so many plans for the summer. I seem to have spent most of it feeling tired and dazed, staring at the rain, and generally not doing all the things I'd hoped. It's felt a little like I spent 4 days at work (yes, 2, 2.5 hours of travelling to and from work have probably added to this), then spent Friday in a total daze, hopefully catching up on a little washing and washing up and gardening, and then the weekend proper dealing with cricket or social stuff.

Disappointing.

Still. There you go. I've not really started my dissertation (other than doing some thinking), I've not played with any of the software ideas I wanted to. I have dreamt up some... ambitious... garden plans. And got a bit of a grip on what I want to do next.  

Main aims for the next 6 months? Enjoy the opportunities for sitting on the sofa in front of the fire with my gorgeous girlfriend. Try and keep up with the uni work to avoid crunch periods (yeah right!). Find a new job. And start those garden plans. Keep it all simple and enjoy it, and try not to get hung up on the weather and the lack of light.

Well, gotta have something to aim for.

Around April, May time I lost all the borage plants I'd grown from seed to mildew. I wrote it off as a bad experiment and too late to plant more, and left them.

Then I started to find seedlings in the herb bed. I'd been warned that borage self-seeds rapaciously, but I wasn't sure my plants had had time to get to that bit before they keeled over! Anyway, they're pretty easy to spot so this time I took out all but 3 to give them enough air and space. They've been gorgeous...

I find them perculiarly beautiful. The flowers are individually pretty, but it's actually the red stems they sit on and the light catching the hairs that seems to add even more.

I'm not the only one to appreciate them either:

I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself right now. Today, we finally installed another water butt. Just a little one, nothing (some might say) to write home about particularly, but it is a real case of taking a problem and turning it to our advantage.

See, our neighbour's downpipe (from their gutter to the drain) had come adrift at the bottom. Broken. Every time it rained - and it's done that a lot this summer - the water comes gushing down that downpipe, fails to find the drain and instead runs down the bottom of her house and onto our sidewall.

We could have asked her to fix it, but I had a better idea. Because at the moment, I'm carrying water from the back of the house, through the house, on to the veg patch. So we spoke to her and asked if she'd mind if we put a water butt in place instead. The diverter fits over the roof end of the broken pipe, then inside the drain end of the pipe. It solves the leak. And now I have 100l of water available to me significantly nearer to the veg patch and the herb patch, and still have room for the bin. It looks quite neat.

Our wall is safe, we've not had to make demands on our neighbour, we have more water saved, and it only cost £30. Win all round I say!

My gorgeous girlfriend also made a start on our next big (huge? Enormous?) project - terracing the slope between the house and the veg patch. It's going to be hard, hard work. We need to dig in, so they form steps up to the veg patch, but we have some serious chalk to hack through. I'd like to grow more stuff in them, but GG's dug down to where we need to and it doesn't look great. We'll have to see what winter and some muck can do I think. I drew up my plans anyway for the patch next year. I'm starting to think slightly more year-round, but don't want to try too much - the soil's still a bit rubbish so I don't want to push my luck.

I've learnt some lessons this year. The peas were eaten, so I'm going to move those somewhere I can keep a very close eye on them, and my bean poles weren't stable enough for the wind. The sweetcorn didn't really work, but the squashes produced a few. The onions need something else to help them look good. Oatmeal seems to be the best (organic) slug protection I've found. In the back garden, I've learnt that my sunflowers need to be grown closer to the fence, sweetpeas are great, and nasturtiums taste great. It's all being put to bed by the change in seasons now, but next year's plans are coming together. It's great!

Today I got to work in Brighton not Burgess Hill. It makes the trip to work shorter by half an hour, and I got to walk down and see the sea at lunchtime. It's even been lovely and sunny all day.

Back to Burgess Hill tomorrow, but today has been a good day so far. Off to the dojo tonight too!

Having spent Friday geeking out, I then spent the weekend in the garden and didn't turn my computer on all weekend. I did check my email on my phone when I was waiting for a friend's train, but that wasn't until 6.00 Sunday night and hardly counts. It was a lovely weekend!

Today I've treated myself to a new fountain pen. You can't see in the photo, but it's got little monkeys all over it.

Now I just need to get some of the to do list done, and I can use it to tick things off...