House & Garden - Update

I feel like a BBC 2 programme with these sorts of posts, which is not a good thing for a woman of my young years. But I am very excited about our new house (and the garden).

We've rented in apartment-land for so long that it's great to have the extra space and comfort of a whole house. We've also rented the new place unfurnished so we now own some nice bits of furniture, and will continue to add to our collection over time. Despite the fact that there are only two of us in a three-bedroom house, we've managed to fill up all the spaces - mainly with junk and boxes we are too lazy to unpack. Most of those unpacked boxes are filled with books and we have no bookcases. Although, I imagine to store our collection we would require a room of wall-to-wall book cases (MGB knows where I'm coming from). To date we have bought a bed from Swan Beds, a kitchen table and chairs from Whites on North Main Street and 2 sofas from Caseys on Oliver Plunkett Street. I'm hoping that this shameless plugging of local businesses will earn me a discount the next time I go in (note for locals and Limerick people: Caseys are beginning their Summer Sales this Thursday, June 14th).
A thumbnail of one of our sofas is to the left, more photos of the interior of the house can be found here.

The other joy about our new abode is the garden! Especially on sunny days when you have a private space to sit and enjoy the sunsine, with a glass of wine and some BBQ! As an update to a previous post about gardening I have some pictures of the plants I've been killinggrowing.

This (left) is my 'Money' plant (known as Jade plant. I get pretty impatient about these things and in the last 7 days have not witness nay progress so believe that the thing is dying. Although there are no obvious signs of death on this plant, so I'm trying to be positive.
These (right) are my Giant Sunflowers. They have reacted very well to the rain the last few days, so I must now be the only person in Ireland who is happy that it's forecasted to rain for the rest of the week. The rain is doing good for my plants, it takes the pressure off me when I can blame external forces for any potential failures here. I also have some Evening Sun sunflowers, Teddy Bear sunflowers and some kind of dwarf sunflower. At this stage they all look the same except, as might be expected, the Giant sunflowers are somewhat taller and bigger.


I have been informed that the large bush in this pot is an 'ornamental' redcurrent plant. The most disappointing thing about this piece of news is that I am not going to get nice red berries which will make the plant look even prettier. It may not be clear in the photo but the leaves at the top have a nice redish tinge to them. And here is a close-up of the pretty mini trailing petunias that I bought in B&Q.
There are also some herbs but I'm fairly certain that the chives are going to die soon (they and the parsley got severly water-logged before I managed to get them repotted) and only 2 small bits of parsely have survived so far, so I'm not holding out great hope for them. It's kind of embarrassing since chives and parsley are some of the easiest herbs to grow and herbs are some of the easiest plants to grow.