Today was fantastic!

We had 11 adults and 7 kids (plus Cygnet, who pretty much slept for most of it) turn up over the course of the day. So much got done! Far more than I had really anticipated:-)

I put up a list of jobs to do, vaguely sorted in order of preference. This was a good idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, it gave us a real sense of what had been accomplished. Secondly, it meant that people could look at what jobs were going and choose what suited them:-) It also meant that I didn’t have to ‘direct traffic’ all the time:-)

The list
Move pile of rocks from ‘Front’ yard to outside fence. Done!
Spread newspaper and mulch in ‘Front’ yard, from footpath towards road. Mostly done (we ran out of mulch—I was expecting newspaper to be the limiting factor)!
Spread newspaper and mulch from footpath to lemon and grapefruit. This didn’t get done, because there was no mulch left…
(If there is excess mulch, it will be going around the mulberry and apple). Or this.
(If there is still excess mulch, it will be going in the raised beds—once they’ve been whippersnippered.) Or this… although some of the area around the beds did get whippersnippered:-)
Put up a trellis for the grapevine in ‘Front’ yard. Done!
Remove Lantana from near porch. Done!
Prune Broom from near porch. Done!
Plant Red Seedless Grape near porch. Done!
Mount tool racks on the wall next to french doors (driveway side). Marked, but not done owing to a somewhat less than straight drill bit. We’ve borrowed another bit from my dad, but ran out of time. This is top of my list for tomorrow:-)
Plant Jasmine near street end upright of carport. Done!
Prune Roses. Largely done, well, not really pruned, but reduced somewhat so it will be possible to get in and prune them in a couple of months!
Whipper Snipper ‘croquet lawn’ (around roses). Partially done! I need to work out how to re-thread the whipper snipper so I can keep going with this.
Prune/remove Dollica. Done!
Plant dragonfruit (in place of dollica?) Not done, but we’ll do this tomorrow.
Plant peas and beans around teepee. Done!
Plant herbs in pots. Not done. People seemed strangely reticent to plant! The things that did get planted were pretty much the result of me specifically directing someone to do so. Also a job for tomorrow—I anticipate Puggle may be far more interested when there are fewer kids to distract him (although, they were distracting him towards work for a good part of it:-) )
Spread tea and coffee around peas and beans. Done!
(Investigate gate hanging… Not really serious, but if we get this far, it seems reasonable:-) ) Done! I wasn’t really expecting that this would get done, but I thought I’d put it on the list so that if we got through everything (being really optimistic!) we could all stand around the gate and ponder and posit… I didn’t count on a particularly enthusiatic helper:-)

Not on the List!
Fixing up paving at the end of the driveway.
Trellising the neighbour’s grape that comes over our way.
Pruning the bougainvillea and honeysuckle (and possibly other things?) in the patio.

So, lots done!
The only problem is that I don’t feel as though I did much gardening myself. I did do a lot of feeding of people. The Gulaschsuppe was popular:-) We went through near enough to 2 litres of that—and the same of the Pumpkin soup:-) We ate all the Chocolate Simplicity Cake, there are a small number of Gingernuts left, and about half the fruit cake. Other than that, most of my time was sorting out tools for people or finding things or answering questions. (There was a little bit of rounding up children in there, but not much… they worked well, because their friends were working. Or the oldest child [13] organised games or something!) Or standing around chatting… I feel as though I did far more of that than really seems fair!