and what was I doing...........?

......... and what was I doing whilst Himself was playing in the pond?!
I was doing a whole load of other things in that very specialised multi-tasking woman sort of way!
You might remember that back in July, I made redcurrant vodka - purely as a means of using up the redcurrant glut you understand! Anyway, once it was ready, I bottled it (as you do!), but it seemed a shame to just throw away all those lovely redcurrants. We had friends coming over for dinner that night so, in a spark of inspiration, I made redcurrant vodka jellies!
They were awesome!
The only minor glitch was that, although I 'watered down' the jelly mix with a jolly nice sparkling rose, I forgot to allow for the potency of the redcurrants that had been sitting in neat vodka for a couple of months!

I also spent time picking the last of the vegetables.

Anyone know what these are?!

....and when I wasn't pottering around the garden I was coating each and every piece of wood for the tea house with three (yes - THREE!) coats of 'stuff'. It's non-toxic eco-paint that looks just like semi-skimmed milk and you can't see where you've painted it until it dries - when it gives the wood a very slight sheen. The only trouble is that once you've done the base/sealant coat, you only have an hour to get the first top coat layer on, then up to 12 hours to get the second top coat layer on. I learnt how many pieces I could paint in just under an hour, then would do all 3 coats straight off. As my teenage Gnomelets would say..... "Boring?Much!"

The Nutty Gnome hard at work ....... I calculated that I painted approximately 350 pieces of wood x 3 = 1050 pieces!(but it felt like more some days!) Who says building a tea house is all fun eh?! It was an incredibly tedious task - but at least it was sunny whilst I was doing it!

I also started to clear a path to the back of the tea house. We (well, I) wanted to have the filter well out of sight, tucked away down the back of the tea house. But I also wanted to block the view back beyond the verandas by planting tall grasses, so that meant that I had to create a path where none had previously existed!

I cleared away all the hedge, weeds and vegetation down the gap between the fruit cage and the boundary - which had been impassable.I levelled the ground and lay 'Weed Stop' matting down............

then covered it with stones I'd had piled up from digging out the pond - which, as usual I'd not worked out where I'd finally need them, so I had to cart them in trug loads from where I'd dumped them to where I needed them (having first carefully extracted frogs, toads and newts from the pile!)

This is from the tea house end of the path.......

and this is from the other end of the fruit cage, looking back to the tea house

I also tied up all the raspberry canes,

then weeded and edged the raspberry rows - a 'little' job which took a whole day!

(*sigh*, I LOVE nice neat rows!)

.... all of which looks like it happened very quickly, but in actual fact took me about 8 weekends to complete because - as usual, I found other jobs that then needed adding into the equation and took what seemed like forever to complete. But that's a tale for another day!