Facing the chop.

Thanks to Luke we now have a fully stocked wood store and a pretty clear patch behind the shed. Out came the chainsaw (he loves that thing - says it makes him feel like a real man) and two hours later he had sawed and chopped the entire log pile. He got a shock when he uncovered the carcass of a large bird. Who knows how long it had been there or how it had died but I waited until he nipped into the house before I scooped it up on the spade and got rid of it. I was thinking he would be amazed that it had disappeared of it's own accord but my clumsy shovelling gave the game away as he saw the ridges in the ground. Foiled again! Now the area is clear we have the broody box and the small chicken run tucked around there, ready for any new chickens. All very tidy. The wood store looks great too with it's jigsaw of logs.
In Luke's honour I built a fire and took the evening chill off the room. I also added some of the dried stalks from the cut back lavender and that produced a wonderful aromatic aroma.

After so much DIY this week (including me taking a while to sand back and then repaint the newel post on the stairs only to lose my balance and land head first  into the carefully painted post that resulted in a hairy post and a shock of white in my hair!) it was lovely to kick back, put on an old film and enjoy the lavender scented fire. All we need now is apple and blackberry pie and thick custard!

Tulips, but not from Amsterdam.

Luke had the chance to go to Amsterdam last weekend for work but we have a fortnight off so he passed on that opportunity. Last year he came back from there telling me how great the tulip bulb selection was and I liked the idea of actually having tulips direct from Amsterdam. However I did spend my loyalty reward vouchers on buying 70 new tulip bulbs. As they cost me nothing I didn't mind buying them at full price. I have potted most o f them up now and the tubs are hidden from view behind the greenhouse. I just hope they don't get dug up by any visiting wildlife.
I bought ten of each: Black parrot, Blue parrot, Flaming parrot (a super vivid yellow and red striped fancy flower), Monte Carlo (the nearest we are getting to a holiday this year), Exotic Emperor (don't they have wildly grand names?), Sorbet ( pink and white which is new for me) and Rems Favourite.
This will give me flowers from April till end of May and should offer me the chance to enjoy not only patriotic red, white and blue but also splashes and stripes of purple, yellow and red. Chaotic but after what may be a long wet winter we will be crying out for furious riots of colour and these chaps should fit the bill.

Up in smoke.

The new chickens are confused. Is this their first taste of snow? Sadly it's not. There was a lovely wood just down the road that has recently been cleared to make way supposedly for arable farming although the talk is that a housing estate is planned in a few years time for it. We walked through the field only two days ago and felt sad for the demise of the trees that were bundled up in mountains of wood. Now we are enveloped in thick white smoke and falling ash because the wood is being burned. What a waste. It does smell like a lovely Autumnal bonfire though but those dancing pieces of ash, falling softly into the garden is all that is left of a vibrant environment that used to house nesting birds, rabbits, badgers and bunnies.

Red hot!

So I'm obviously not talking about our temperatures this summer, having been the wettest one in one hundred years, but there have still been splashes of racy red in the garden. Not so many on the raspberry canes as the new chickens have developed their jumping skills to attain the giddy heights of the juiciest berries. I'll get a video clip of them jumping later this week for you.

Nature has a cheeky side

Or possibly just a vivid imagination on my part but when I strolled past this old tree recently it seemed like nature had attempted a little joke by putting boobs on the trunk. See for yourself.

Next year's flowers.

We have strayed into next Spring already. The sacks of daffodils and bags of tulip bulbs have arrived at the garden centre already.



I have washed the pots ready for planting up but the cheap side of me is waiting for late deals in tulips. The bulbs can be planted from now till as late as Christmas by which time the garden centres should have reduced the price significantly. If your bulbs are going into the beds and borders (or those sweet little crocus bulbs, into the lawn) then it makes sense to plant them up before the stiff cold winds and freezing temperatures make planting into the ground a chore. Nothing wants to have to start it's journey from bulb to flower in a cold, unyielding soil. But if you are planting bulbs into compost then it will be perfectly acceptable to plant much later than normal. The good thing about pots, as I've said before, is that you can place them wherever you need the colour and that's not always apparent when planting bulbs. A couple of cheery pots framing the front door is always a welcome sight after a long winter and I love to plant two different colours (black and white or purple and orange sound as if they will jar but in fact work well together) or the same shade but different shapes (fringed and fluted or neatly shaped petals alongside the flamboyance of parrot tulips make for an interesting display). So, with a spare few bob, there's a world of possibilities at your fingertips.

I shall be waiting for the sales, I calculated that I have spent almost £400 this summer alone on the garden. I shan't consider myself a proper gardener until I am penny pinching and growing things from seed in my own compost and leaf mould. All things Nature readily gives us for free and it seems silly to pay so much once the garden is established (but so easy to do when seduced by a colourful beauty you feel you have to have - I wanted this plant in my garden but resisted - blimey, what's come over me?)



Like turf over grass seed, it is lovely to be able to occasionally overspend in order to get instant results but gardening is a patience game; to every thing there is a season. To truly enjoy the garden I would love to be able to work with it and it teaches me valuable lessons in life. Lessons like accepting failure when my lovingly clipped box topiary, just forming a beautiful border around the herbs, developed box blight. Ingenuity when something obviously ailing in one spot can be transferred to delight again in the right conditions. Lessons such as you get out what you put in, that nothing lasts forever and that each small kindness (a drop of water on a hot day) will probably be repaid by a cheerful flower head later on. But I'm running away with myself, whatever you get out of gardening, whether it's a lone pot on a windowsill or an expanse of lawn to play ball with the children on you will usually get much more pleasure out of it than the effort it took in the first place. That's my theory anyway.