Grandad's Greenhouse

So at long last I have returned to the land of the blogger, I'm not about to bother you with the reasons for my absence such as they are they are boring but I am going to launch straight in with a layout.

I am currently really off cardmaking and so where possible I try to scrapbook with the materials I am given at Craft Club every week. Yesterday I was successful and this is the result.

The materials we were given were from the Boofle range by Papermania (he's the character in the bottom right corner) and I decided that I really wanted to do something with the blue and brown colour combination (the shaped patterned piece is actually a card blank). I added core-dinations cardstock, kraft paper, ribbon and letter stickers and this is the result.

The photo is of me and my younger brother back in the summer of 1988 and as I started to write my journalling I realised that to me the real star of the photo was in the background; my grandad's greenhouse. It couldn't have been there all that long when this photo was taken, before that the spot had ben used to house their little caravan when it was home and before that I don't recall what was there. However for a good decade or more the greenhouse stood just behind the house and produced the most wonderful crops of tomatoes and cucumbers. I think about it every time I smell the scent you only get from freshly picked tomatoes and it is one of the reasons why I grow my own little crop even though himself doesn't like raw tomato.
The house was on the left just out of shot, that greenhouse really was squished in, and to the right was a drop down to the rest of the garden. Two or three steps took you down with a rockery on either side. Well we called it a rockery, really it was just two steep banks covered in the purple and white flowered varieties of a plant called rock. Beyond the drop on the right was grandad's shed, I think at that point it would have been two sheds joined together and it was a place both intriguing and out of bounds to little people. I never quite knew what grandad did in there but he had lots of tools and the like, I learnt later that he did metalworking in there making parts for vintage cars and suchlike. Past the shed and on the other side of the path that ran to the end of the quite long garden was his vegetable patch. There were for a time a couple of old apple trees down there and I remember picking raspberries and blackcurrants, but he grew all kinds of vegetables in amazingly neat rows. One of the nicest things when I was student at university was being sent back with a care parcel of produce from grandad's garden.
Of course it is all gone now. In his later years grandad couldn't manage the garden and now it's pretty much all covered with gravel, his sheds and the greenhouse have gone too. I like to think that a little bit of him lives on in my little vegetable patch though.

The photo was taken by nan, it's not of the best quality but I am so glad she gave it to me.  No doubt in front of the greenhouse just happened to be a convenient spot to have us stand. I had just finished primary school and had only been wearing glasses for a few months, heaven knows what I thought I looked like wearing those training shoes with that skirt! Steven's sweater would have been one that mom knitted herself. Amazing really how what was at the time just a snapshot of the grandchildren possibly taken to finish a film can trigger such memories. And if you have sat through my self indulgent whallowing you deserve a pat on the back!