The first Monday in September was a public holiday, Labour Day. However, there was plenty of work going on around the pool over the whole of the holiday weekend. In particular, TJ and his two sons came to clean up the concrete deck. During the week, a retaining/planter bed wall was built and filled with rather better topsoil than our red clay. The ground around the pool deck has been covered with gravel or with mulch – hard landscaping is really taking shape.
The whole week was a very busy time as the great Master Gardener Conference happened at the weekend. We were both busy fetching, carrying and organizing, culminating in a before-dawn presence at the conference site on Saturday to arrange the vendor marketplace. Inevitably, some things went wrong (the elevator between the unloading area and the marketplace square broke down just as we started). We were busy all day long, helping people, running a storage area for visitors to leave their plants and so on. We were very lucky, the weather stayed cloudy and dry – we could not have asked for more.
Apparently, this was rated as the most successful annual conference that the Master Gardeners have ever had.