As I said in an earlier blog, the house and certainly the garden is a work in progress. We have grass, which is growing surprisingly well considering the heat here, we have a wall around the garden and gates but there is still a lot to be done.

We found a local nursery who sold trees, accustomed to this climate and they came around and made a plan, so now we have a lot of small conifers and also a couple of yukka’s to give it that tropical feel!

Because our house is built on the top of a hill we have views all around us but it also feels as though everyone can see us! This is thankfully not the case but we did have an open-ended garden. In these photo’s you can see the fence at the back; well believe me, that didn’t get there on its own accord!

Blood, sweat and tears… well no tears actually but blisters!

We had looked around for something to put up here, there are small trees which will eventually grow taller but that will take a while so we needed something temporary. We found these ‘ fence/hedges’ which we thought would do the trick. Now, considering the average temperature is 35^o C and in the evening when it cools down the mosquito’s would eat us alive we had a few choices, one was to get up early and the other one was just to rise above the heat. Well we did a bit of both, we rose above the heat and the mosquitos .. armed with a lot of suntan lotion, anti-mosquito spray, bottles of water and grit and determination we headed to the bottom of the garden to start.

It tooks us 2 days but once we had got the technique right we managed to get it all in place, and apart from sweating out our body weight and in my case getting quite a few blisters we were pretty proud of our achievement!

The front garden is also coming along nicely, and Johan is very happy to come home from work and spend an hour or two clearing his head doing some good old physical work.