Monday, August 6, 2007

Neighbours

When we were looking to buy a house a few years ago we never imagined we would live in a street like we do now. Actually when we I first found this house Joey didnt want to come look at it as it is a weatherboard. I convinced him to come look and we both fell in love with the place straight off!

We live in a court (or cul-de-sac) and we live down the bottom in the bowl. I remember in the early days of living here a few of the neighbours came by and said hello, they all introduced themselves if they saw us in the street. In quite a short time we soon knew everyone in the bottom half of the court and had met the rest of the street also.

In the 3 years that we have been here we have made wonderful relationships with our neighbours.
I have made 2 wonderful female friends, our kids play and we get along fantastic. We have street parties and bbq's at each others places, dinners and drinks and lots of plays with the kids. We have babysitters that we very much lacked before moving here (a godsend for us especially as both mine and Joeys mums are no longer with us).
People help out, they help with the house, the garden, fixing things etc, with the kids and more!
We dont just live in a court, we live ina community, it really is great!

So back to today biggrin
Today we had a working bee at the neighbours house. My sister was over for the day so she helped too as did another neighbour up the street.
We worked on extending her vegie patch. The men built the fence (it has to be fully closed in as they have 2 large dogs who would love to dig it up!) and we weeded and dug out all of the beds and added compost and manure and dug it through. We also painted the lot and dug out a dead tree form the front and planted a new tree. Took most of the day but it feels nice to be working outdoors and even nicer working together with others.

After the days working everycame to our place for tea. There was heaps of salad in the vegie beds sprouted form ones gone to seed last season so the kids had salad and sausage rolls and i cooked up a lentil shepherds pie for the adults which we too had salad with.
(my neighbour said her husband wouldnt eat it as it had no meat and so many vegies in it, I told her that we wouldnt tell him til after he ate it that it wasnt meat, we just said it was shepherds pie, he ate 2 platefuls and shocked when we told him it had no meat in it! LOL)
I have 5 bags of salad to distribute at school tomorrow morning to the mums (they were all complaining of the price of it today and there was such a surplus even after each neighbour taking some for themselves, that is seems only fair to take some and share it round.)

Then after dinner i went for a jog, yes a jog!!!eek with another neighbour, just in our street which is hard enough as the court starts at the top of a hill and we live at the bottom so we jogged up and down!

A good day!

Well thats another rambling post :)

8 comments:

Robin said...

Hey Susan

Have nominated you for the Frugal Award started by Rhonda at Down to Earth....Congratulations and i do enjoy reading your blog

Susan said...

oooh thanks Robin :)

Polly said...

Congratulations on the award Susan :-)

You are very lucky to live in such a friendly neighbourhood. We've moved a lot and haven't really found that sort of friendliness other than when our children were little and the street was full of young families.

It's great to know you can count on your neighbours.

Unknown said...

your street community sounds great and I love the idea of working bees. Your post sounded so happy which is great :)

Kez said...

Wow, that sounds lovely!

Lucy C said...

The lettuce harvest is inspiring.
And so are the working bees.
I think I need to get my vegie garden happening again.

casso said...

Hi Susan - I can't grow anything at all, but have been working hard at keeping some lettuce and carrot seeds that we planted a while ago alive. And they are actually little plants now! We have to build the bed up though to plant them in, it's making me a little nervous truth be told, because I don't want to kill it now!

I had to laugh at the lentil shepherd's pie guy. Where's that rolling eyes emoticon? :o) Some people are so silly about meat (or lack thereof).

I also love reading your blog!

Cheers, Cass

Roy said...

Thanks for this blog postt