Just before I went off to work this morning the latest Practical Poultry plopped through the front door and Luke read out my letter that had been published. I'd written it in response to a photo they had published with a chicken dressed up as Father Christmas. I don't like the thought of chickens or any animal being mishandled and to dress the chicken in that outfit meant pulling it about a bit. Wait till the backlash next month!! Tonight I got home an hour late after staying on to do some work so only just got to see the hens before they took themselves off to bed. I shared a piece of bread and hummus with them which they loved.
Luke heard a rustling in the border today and thought it was Jack's grandson on a surprise visit only to be surprised himself when Jack's cat, Socks and the 'nasty cat' from across the road tumbled out clawing and scratching each other so now Luke has relented and let Socks in our house where she is curled up in a perfect O shape by my side as I type. She seems fine and is certainly not complaining about finding herself on a throw in front of a log fire. Than again, neither am I.
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Sunshine and happiness.
Thursday 24th March.
Oh, the joy of having time off when the sun is out. After eventually having a warm and dry couple of days I could happily slap paint on the long overdue to be finished wall that Luke rendered back last Autumn. It looks much better now.
Once I'd completed the painting I could indulge my love of planting by turning over the monochrome border and replacing the plants I lost in the winter. It's hugely exciting for me when the ranunculas are in the shops as these to me signify the start of choice and colour and a long summer season.
Anyway, after a hard afternoon's digging I treated myself (having already spent fifty pounds in 24 hours in the garden centre) to an apple crate-planter for the front door with the house name on it. I may repot the Box ball into it and see what it looks like. Alternatively, I'll plant it up with some lobelia to trail over the edges and an assortment of flowers. The joys of planning and planting, it never ends.
Oh, the joy of having time off when the sun is out. After eventually having a warm and dry couple of days I could happily slap paint on the long overdue to be finished wall that Luke rendered back last Autumn. It looks much better now.
Once I'd completed the painting I could indulge my love of planting by turning over the monochrome border and replacing the plants I lost in the winter. It's hugely exciting for me when the ranunculas are in the shops as these to me signify the start of choice and colour and a long summer season.
Saturday 26th March.
If we lose an hour when the clocks go forward this weekend when am I ever going to sleep? It's five thirty am and I've been up a while already. The birds are singing their morning chorus and whilst it's too early to be singing they really are creating a lovely background noise. Another sensory delight.
I'm back in work now after two lovely days off in the glorious and very unexpected sun. We've had temperatures of 15 degrees here which is clement to say the least. There's the saying, “March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.” which has proved true this year. Does that mean the old saying, ”March winds and April showers..,” is going to bring a change in the weather as we approach Mothering Sunday and my birthday? I well remember my 21st, birthday when I lived in a tiny lodge. It tipped down the entire day and I got soaked every time I ran to the gate to see if Mum had arrived yet. A good dry spell makes all the difference and I took full advantage of it on Wednesday and Thursday, out in the garden for hours in just a thin strapped top and trousers, how nice it was to feel the warmth of a spring day.
I still haven't planted all my purchases; I like to deliberate over where I place them. After all, they need to go in a suitable position, with the correct space and conditions for that particular plant. If I studied horticulture my garden would obviously be so much more productive but I trundle along, buying what I like and piecing it together to form a patchwork of shape and colour.
Currently, one year into the garden, we have a very typical area; a central lawn surrounded by borders in different colour schemes, the corner border we look out on is black and white, the other side of the steps is my friendship/pastel border which contains mainly blue, pink and purple plants that were purchased with birthday vouchers (it is very handy having a birthday just as the garden centre gets stocked up with this summer's beauties). Along one side of the garden are the roses and raspberry canes although the roses are still in their pots, buried into the ground, till I find a permanent position for them. In the top corner are a multitude of pots, planted up mainly with tulips which are now promising to open up and give us a bright and colourful show. Stretching along the back of the garden live the hens and in front of them is Luke's fledgling vegetable patch. We have designs for this patch, hoping to edge it in box and give it a little gated entrance to discourage the chicks from going in there and eating the new shoots. We hope to have a central feature, maybe a pot of lavender or a standard bay tree but for now this is a year or so off. Having got the bare bones of the garden sorted we can now leisurely plan the rest as inspiration and necessity takes us.
In front of the shed sits the greenhouse with the water butt and compost bin between them. There is a gap of about three foot from the shed to the greenhouse in order to plant up things which need shelter and warmth.
Sitting in front of the greenhouse is my topiary edged herb garden, still very much a work in progress and already I know it needs to be wider to allow for the spread of my herbs. The only casualty of the heavy snow is my standard bay tree which I'd had for years. I've watched it die off and had hoped there would be some sign of life but as yet there is nothing. I'm afraid it will soon be time to admit it's had it's day and dig it up.
The last bit of cultivated garden is the long border with a mature Acer which I have used to grow a climbing rose against (it should have been a rambling rose as they will bend in all directions but there weren't any in the garden centre when I needed one). The long border is the show off of the borders, with it's orange and deep purple clashing colours. This year I am adding a stretch of light blue and yellow to sit between the pastels and the brights. It sounds horrendous as I type it but we will see. The great thing about gardening is that in most things, if you don't like the results you can undo them.
Back to Thursday's planting.
I always feel unjustified in getting rid of a perfectly good plant and will try to reposition it in the garden if I can but a lot of what was left here when we moved in had either been badly planted so had produced weak, unproductive growth and no or bad pruning had left the plants misshapen. The holly was just a five foot high trunk with one holly branch on it!
With the unidentified shrub out I had room to reposition one of the original plants. I'm aware that I still have things planted too close together and as I have a lot of hollyhocks in this section there will be a huge amount of ground covered with their mass of leaves. I already have signs of rust on these leaves and whilst it's mainly cosmetic it does spoil the look of the plant. I removed the worst of the leaves. Hollyhocks do well in full sun and overhead watering can make rust on the leaves worse but what a spectacular show you get from these blousy Bet Lynch type of flowers. I do have shy, retiring plants in my garden which you almost trip over before marvelling at their delicate blooms and tiny veins tracing their petals but these hollyhocks shout, “Look at me” and I can't help but oblige.
A plant I adore which my grandmother had the traditional version of is Dicentra Spectabalis (what a grand name), also known for obvious reasons when you see it, as Bleeding Heart. I have the Alba version. This little plant will last for months and is a real sweetie tucked away so you discover it by chance and then get seduced by it's trail of miniature hearts perched along delicate stems. It's very easy to snap the stems so do be careful but left to it's own devices I've known this plant to grow at a tremendous rate.
Anyway, after a hard afternoon's digging I treated myself (having already spent fifty pounds in 24 hours in the garden centre) to an apple crate-planter for the front door with the house name on it. I may repot the Box ball into it and see what it looks like. Alternatively, I'll plant it up with some lobelia to trail over the edges and an assortment of flowers. The joys of planning and planting, it never ends.
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Who is the fairest of them all?
This was the first time Shakster ever saw herself in the mirror. She was only eight weeks old and we'd just introduced them to their new home.
All sorts.
I heard Luke exclaim this morning and he came out of the front bedroom to tell me that a heron had flown right past the bedroom window. What a wake up call!
I had some evidence of another visitor when I cleaned out the shed today. It is the same one as we had in our old garden and I'm holding Luke responsible. He's done the same thing as he did before when we first encountered this problem. Remember a few weeks ago he bought 20kg of wild bird seed? Well we couldn't fit it all in the container that Luke normally puts it in so he plonked the bag in the shed and two weeks later we have three bite sized holes and a pool of spent seed husks! Who can blame the mice when there is a free lunch to be had? I've had to clean out the shed, put all the seed in a metal container and weigh it down to stop those pesky mice getting into it.Still, it meant I had to do a proper tidy in the shed which was good. I had to shoo the chickens away from the few seeds that escaped when I swept them up as there was a chance that the mice had urinated over them and I'd only just read about this problem in Practical Poultry (my bedtime reading - no wonder I don't sleep well)
First thing this morning, I took a few photos of the plants in the morning light and then the lure of the garden centre grew too strong. It seemed to me that all of Cardiff was there which confused me as it was only midweek but when I arrived home, having spent £32 on plants (many of which were reduced or on offer) I discovered my garden centre vouchers had arrived that morning in the post. Sigh!
This is what they should look like when they flower. Striking in an unusual way, not what you expect from a flower but I hope they will look great grouped together in the black and white border.
Having woken at 5am I came downstairs to check on my work email so I can have the day off today just to garden. I have a lot of planting and preparation work to do. If I'm lucky I may get to finish painting the front wall Luke did such a good job rendering last year but that's being rather hopeful.
By 6.20am, work over with, I realised it was light outside so I nipped out to find out what I had purchased yesterday. I can now tell you that I have bought:
1 Alcea (aka Hollyhocks) double white,
2 Alcea double yellow (All images below have been taken from the internet)
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Squirrel nutkin.
This lunchtime, to keep awake after another broken night's sleep, I took myself off for a walk. Just behind where I work is a babbling stream and a wooded area. Just before I got back onto the street I started to cross the little bridge when I heard a rustling in the tree tops. Looking skyward I couldn't see anything unusual but as my eye followed the trunk downwards I realised what the sound had been. Two grey squirrels, racing down the trunk in a clockwise spiral! At one point they both stopped, as if getting their breath back before it started up again. The first one jumping and cling onto the bark whilst the other followed from a distance of about three foot. Ever upwards they chased until the front runner had reached the branches of the tree and there was no way up. With a leap it was into the branches of the closest tree and the whole procedure began again.Exhausting business. I went back to work and told a story about Springtime to the pre-school children who had arrived for story time. Sometimes, on bright, clear days such as today, with the sun on your face and the breeze in your hair it seems that life can't be any better.
There's the saying that squirrels are just rats with good P.R. and my friend once bought a pair of 'tree rabbits' (aka squirrels) at a farmer's market which she could then never bring herself to eat. However, I just enjoyed standing there, witnessing them racing after each other and leaping between trees. It's a magical world we are surrounded by, isn't it?
There's the saying that squirrels are just rats with good P.R. and my friend once bought a pair of 'tree rabbits' (aka squirrels) at a farmer's market which she could then never bring herself to eat. However, I just enjoyed standing there, witnessing them racing after each other and leaping between trees. It's a magical world we are surrounded by, isn't it?
Zombie nation.
Morning......, although I did get a little more sleep last night I feel like a zombie this morning. In 12 hours time I will just have arrived home again. Uuuhhhhhhhhh.
The mist from last night has dissipated although the grass is glistening with dampness. Our hens have realised there is no escape this morning and are huddled together at the far end of the run. How can battery chickens have any decent life (the answer is, they can't) living in a space the size of an A4 piece of paper, standing on racks and feeding from conveyor belts? It's no wonder they get stressed. I feel guilty when our hens are left in their run which is probably big enough to advertise as an eight chicken run. Battery hens are normally changed after their first year of production, when their egg laying is at it's most frequent. After that they are usually crated up and sold to restaurants for mass market meals. You can approach the farmer to see if you can buy chickens from them once they have finished with them. You'll still get regular eggs and with a bit of attention the feathers soon grow back and their combs perk back up. For between 50 pence to two pounds a hen you can get a good few years of life (and eggs) from them. Much better for the pocket and conscience than buying expensive, less productive breeds but each to his own. We started swith pretty chickens but their egg laying is irregular to say the least. Ah well, time to leave for work. The sun has baked off the morning mist and it promises to be a sunny day; shame not to be out in the garden - for me and the hens. We're all lucky though that we aren't confined to a tiny space with no natural light. Our chicks have a pretty good lifestyle and when we bite into an orange-hued omelette made with superbly fresh eggs they pay us back tenfold.
The mist from last night has dissipated although the grass is glistening with dampness. Our hens have realised there is no escape this morning and are huddled together at the far end of the run. How can battery chickens have any decent life (the answer is, they can't) living in a space the size of an A4 piece of paper, standing on racks and feeding from conveyor belts? It's no wonder they get stressed. I feel guilty when our hens are left in their run which is probably big enough to advertise as an eight chicken run. Battery hens are normally changed after their first year of production, when their egg laying is at it's most frequent. After that they are usually crated up and sold to restaurants for mass market meals. You can approach the farmer to see if you can buy chickens from them once they have finished with them. You'll still get regular eggs and with a bit of attention the feathers soon grow back and their combs perk back up. For between 50 pence to two pounds a hen you can get a good few years of life (and eggs) from them. Much better for the pocket and conscience than buying expensive, less productive breeds but each to his own. We started swith pretty chickens but their egg laying is irregular to say the least. Ah well, time to leave for work. The sun has baked off the morning mist and it promises to be a sunny day; shame not to be out in the garden - for me and the hens. We're all lucky though that we aren't confined to a tiny space with no natural light. Our chicks have a pretty good lifestyle and when we bite into an orange-hued omelette made with superbly fresh eggs they pay us back tenfold.
It's all a fog.
Waking up yet again in the middle of the night (it's now ten to four) I decided to come downstairs and make a cup of tea. Usually I go into the other bedroom so as not to disturb Luke but I've stripped that bed down of it's mattress protector and as it's a water bed I'd be sliding about on the vinyl 'bag' that contains the water. Not a nice thought. So I am downstairs, quietly tapping away on the laptop and sipping my tea between yawns. I've got an after-work reading group tonight too so it could be a very long day if I don't get some rest. I wonder who else is up at this hour, plenty more people I'm sure. Possibly my lovely cousin's even lovelier fiancee, up tending to baby Lila. Maybe my friend Rosie who seems to be constantly posting on Facebook.
Normally when I am up at this time I stand outside in the back garden and marvel at the myriad stars lighting up the blackness but not so tonight. There's a hazy mist outside and I can barely make out the hen house and shed at the end of the garden. The budding magnolia in the garden across the road has disappeared in it's wispy haze. It's not the pea souper of Victorian London's smog which was immortalised in the Basil Rathbone 'Sherlock Holmes' films of the forties (a mix of fog and industrial smoke I think that was) but it is all enveloping none the less. Not one star blinks out at me and the moon is a blurry-edged disc glowing in the distance. The ground will be wet and I can imagine the little field mice with their clown-like ears and inky black eyes scampering around in the field beyond. The owl we've never seen but nightly hear will be out on the hunt and who knows what else raises it's nose and sniffs the scents to be found on the night air. It sounds so peaceful outside but there's a whole world awake whilst the rest of us try to sleep.
My tea cup emptied of it's contents and my yawns getting bigger and more frequent leave me to think that sleep may be still on the cards for me so I will stop my night time imaginings and slip back off to bed.G'nght.
Normally when I am up at this time I stand outside in the back garden and marvel at the myriad stars lighting up the blackness but not so tonight. There's a hazy mist outside and I can barely make out the hen house and shed at the end of the garden. The budding magnolia in the garden across the road has disappeared in it's wispy haze. It's not the pea souper of Victorian London's smog which was immortalised in the Basil Rathbone 'Sherlock Holmes' films of the forties (a mix of fog and industrial smoke I think that was) but it is all enveloping none the less. Not one star blinks out at me and the moon is a blurry-edged disc glowing in the distance. The ground will be wet and I can imagine the little field mice with their clown-like ears and inky black eyes scampering around in the field beyond. The owl we've never seen but nightly hear will be out on the hunt and who knows what else raises it's nose and sniffs the scents to be found on the night air. It sounds so peaceful outside but there's a whole world awake whilst the rest of us try to sleep.
My tea cup emptied of it's contents and my yawns getting bigger and more frequent leave me to think that sleep may be still on the cards for me so I will stop my night time imaginings and slip back off to bed.G'nght.
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Where are those lazy weekends you hear about?
Not for me those long hours poring over a Sunday newspaper (although I do seem to find myself drinking a proper coffee in a coffee shop every week). At 7.00am this morning I was opening the hen house to let the ladies start their day. Luke finished off what I had started yesterday by clipping the conifer a little more and then we paid a visit to the city dump to dispose of the garden waste before hacking back an errant conifer behind the shed. It has been blocking out the light so we decided to cut it back whilst it was still manageable.
Jack came home and said I could go into his garden to finish off the conservatory roof. He's such a gentleman and a wonderful neighbour so once I'd cleaned my roof I started on his conservatory. From his gutter I pulled out half a bucketful of soggy leaves which I've added to the compost. Taking the lid off the bin was like opening an oven door, the heat generated from it ensured that it was well on it's way to providing crumbly compost for our veg patch.
Jack came home and said I could go into his garden to finish off the conservatory roof. He's such a gentleman and a wonderful neighbour so once I'd cleaned my roof I started on his conservatory. From his gutter I pulled out half a bucketful of soggy leaves which I've added to the compost. Taking the lid off the bin was like opening an oven door, the heat generated from it ensured that it was well on it's way to providing crumbly compost for our veg patch.
The garden bites back.
Having been told we'd be having a beautiful Saturday I vowed to be up and about in the garden early and I'm pleased to say that I had a productive day. From scrubbing the conservatory rood with a long handled brush whilst teetering on a step ladder to digging over the pastel border it was a joy to be out in the sunshine. My favourite of all things though was hacking back the overgrown confier boundary between ours and next door's garden. It's only three conifers but they have bulked up and because we have no decent ladder had been left unchecked for over a year. Now was the time to 'nip them in the bud' and ensure the tops didn't develop thicker trunks which would have resulted in a bigger job.
As it was Luke and I spent an enjoyable hour giving them a short back and sides. We took up to three foot out of the top and lightly trimmed back the rest of it. I made a little dippy in the middle of the top so that if we had settling snow next winter it wouldn't splay out the edges as much and spoil it's shape. I suggested (tongue in cheek) that we shape it into a train but in reality we just wanted it tidy and straight.
It took it's toll though and whilst halfway up a ladder with Luke keeping it steady as I leaned into the mass to get the ever elusive stalks I was victim to quite a few needle scratches. In fact this morning I got a pin to remove THIRTY little pine needles from my hands. The sillliest thing I did was to pour some vinegar over my burning arms (in the hope that it would neutralise any infection from dirty lacerations. Wow, did that sting?! It was like having boiling water poured on me. What possessed me to do it in the first place I don't know but should you ever want to feel absolutely wide awake I would recommend it. Youch!
Here are the photos of my endeavours up the ladder. The first one soaked me and the second one left me with all those cuts and scratches. It's not always a friendly place, the garden.
As it was Luke and I spent an enjoyable hour giving them a short back and sides. We took up to three foot out of the top and lightly trimmed back the rest of it. I made a little dippy in the middle of the top so that if we had settling snow next winter it wouldn't splay out the edges as much and spoil it's shape. I suggested (tongue in cheek) that we shape it into a train but in reality we just wanted it tidy and straight.
It took it's toll though and whilst halfway up a ladder with Luke keeping it steady as I leaned into the mass to get the ever elusive stalks I was victim to quite a few needle scratches. In fact this morning I got a pin to remove THIRTY little pine needles from my hands. The sillliest thing I did was to pour some vinegar over my burning arms (in the hope that it would neutralise any infection from dirty lacerations. Wow, did that sting?! It was like having boiling water poured on me. What possessed me to do it in the first place I don't know but should you ever want to feel absolutely wide awake I would recommend it. Youch!
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