Hello, first I would like to briefly introduce myself to you.

I'm Andrea, married, have a 23 year old son who studies in Münster and two dogs.

In 1987 I started my apprenticeship as a pharmacy assistant, which I successfully completed in 1989. Then I learned the profession of PTA until 1991 (pharmaceutical-technical assistant) in Essen. I did my PTA internship at the Bedburg Hau hospital pharmacy. From 1991 to 2016 I was employed as a PTA in Kleve. For four years now I have enjoyed working as a PTA in the Sonnen Apotheke. My areas of responsibility include advising customers, testing and manufacturing medicines, checking prescriptions, making direct purchases, preparing offers, decorating shop windows, looking after Facebook and all other tasks that arise in a pharmacy. As you can see, it's a very versatile profession.
In my free time I like to camp, go out with my dogs, ride my bike, I like to cook and bake for my life (especially with the Thermomix), I am very creative and love my garden and the work it does there.

My passions are my garden and cooking:

In my garden in particular, I keep getting new ideas to redesign it (sometimes to the chagrin of my husband, who of course always has to support me actively). Our garden does not have a lawn but a lot of stones. To loosen it up a bit, we built two raised beds from pallets this spring. I got the pallets cheaply on the Internet. 4 pallets were required for each raised bed. The pallets were screwed together, lined with pond liner from the inside and then filled with various materials (rough pruning at the bottom, chopped material and leaves above, half-ripe compost and finally soil and ripe compost). We painted one raised bed with gray paint and scorched the other with a scorching device. We planted the gray raised bed with herbs (basil, chives, parsley, rosemary, mint, sage, bay leaf and a tomato plant). In the flamed raised bed grew lettuce, chilli, a cucumber plant in the middle and in the small containers on the edge we planted strawberries all around.

During a garden tour in autumn we considered where we could improve our garden. In the back of the garden is an area of ​​approx. 40 to 50 square meters with six large bamboo plants, which took up an area of ​​approx. 8 x 2 m. The bamboo keeps losing its yellow leaves, which you have to sweep away all the time, and you have to cut the bamboo regularly because otherwise it will simply become too big. Since this area was unfortunately somehow unused, took up a lot of space and made work, we decided to dispose of the bamboo to make this area nicer. That was easier thought than done. First we cut the bamboo close to the ground, which brought us a lot of green waste (it was only the first bamboo). After that we thought we could dig up the bamboo - that was almost impossible, fortunately it was a bamboo that does not form runners, but the root was so firm that we had to use an ax and split it into several parts.
From this work we had a few days of serious back pain and sore muscles. Unfortunately we don't have a bathtub, the warmth would certainly have been very good. I then brought a warming, circulation-promoting ointment (Finalgon) from the Thermacare pharmacy for the day and night.
Since I thought with horror of the remaining five bamboo plants, I then advertised the bamboo on the Internet as "to be given away to self-diggers" and was lucky. A permanent camper from the Netherlands was looking for a privacy screen for his permanent plot that should already have a certain height. Then he came with a friend and dug up two bamboo plants and took them with him, and two more weeks later, so we only had to dig one. After that was done, we put the picket fence that ran in the middle of the bed to the rear, transplanted 5 grasses a bit and planted two butterfly bushes. The picket fence is about 50 cm from the fence of our garden neighbor, we would like to use this gap behind the picket fence to dispose of leaves and other garden waste, and hedgehogs can also build their winter quarters there in winter.

In spring we would like to plant a perennial bed on this now really large area, because, as already mentioned, we have many stones in the garden. It should be bee and butterfly friendly perennials. There are a lot of snails in our garden, so the perennials must also be snail-resistant. In addition, we will set up an insect hotel.

I would be very grateful for tips on design and suggestions for perennials, feel free to email me your ideas.
Bye for now

Andrea