She seemed to know a lot about paint

Towards the end of winter our Hicks Yews starting looking

a bit worse for wear – and brown and crispy bits started to appear.

This became quite alarming and we started fretting about losing them – and there are 20 of them. I put in an emergency call to our gardening person and she came this morning to have a look at them. She said they suffered during winter but expects them to make a full recovery.

We are waiting on Deckman to tell us when he is going to install our new deck. This is the one with privacy screens so that we can sit outside naked and read the New York Times.

Deckman said that we should paint the deck as soon as it has been installed – using diluted oil stain. He is the Deckman so we assume that he knows what he was doing. He knows a lot about wood and has built hundreds of decks.

Today I went to the paint store to buy the stain and the young lady – who seemed to know a lot about paint – said we should let it weather for some months before painting it. She gave me what seemed to be some compelling reasons for this.

So I did not buy the paint and instead came home and started researching painting decks. It seems that young paint lady is right – we should let it weather. So I need to have a more detailed discussion with Deckman and work through the issues.

In the meantime I have downloaded ‘How to stain a deck’ from the Amazon Kindle store – at a cost of $3.75 plus tax. This has received rave reviews so I am really looking forward to immersing myself in it.