You say tomato.

 After the hens had been put to bed and Luke had finished all his jobs (mending the pressure washer and then cleaning the decking, washing and vacuuming the car, putting new shiplap boarding onto the shed then painting it and digging over the veg patch before adding two more rows of potatoes) it was onto his beloved tomato planting. Instead of relying on late planting as he hasn't till now been able to find the tomato variety (Rosada) he likes. So, he has given himself a helping hand by purchasing five pots of tomato plants as well as a pack of seeds. Let's hope this strategy rewards us with a longer fruiting season. After all, with the raspberries such a hit with the chickens who will use all manner of tactics to get to the higher raspberries (jumping up and down and flying up onto the planters for a little extra height are their two favourite options) we have to have something just for ourselves. Sharing the garden with our feathered friends is great fun but we have to take a hit on the produce stakes. Never mind though, we do get to eat their eggs, made all the richer with their varied diet.

It's a white out.

How amazing it is to know there is a drastic change in the weather forecast but to still not believe your eyes on awakening to it?
I called Luke this morning to see the beautiful scene from one of our bedroom windows. It was a like a Christmas card (especially as our neighbours across the road, in their chocolate box house, have decided to leave their blinking Christmas decorations up all year! I'm guessing they find it too much of a hassle to unhook them from the front of their house each January but it will look out of place if and when we experience a heatwave (see, hope springs eternal!).



The sky was a very pale rose-white, the trees - a row of skeletons dusted with icing sugar and the roads, well the roads were a skating rink that only the bravest four wheel drives were attempting to drive along.
And how slowly those fat flakes of swirling snow fell. It was almost as if they were enjoying their slow descent from the clouds and wanted to elongate it by taking a longer circular route. Silently it fell and surprised all of us by blanketing the ground with a carpet of white.
All four bird feeders were put into action and food hidden under the steamer chair for the ground feeders to peck at.
The first to visit were five blackbirds, their silhouettes standing out in contrast to the virgin snow. They've made a crinkly edge to the fence where they landed in the snow and knocked it off.
Next to come was a fat thrush and a robin, quickly followed by the finches - gold, green and crested along with the chaffinches.
We also had the first visit from a single wagtail, twitching in the snow and looking like an Everton mint. At one point we had twelve finches fighting for a place on the sunflower feeder and then the Jay, a flash of cerulean blue and beige, glided through the sky.
We took lots of photographs as the morning light brightened the day and the rosy hue disappeared, leaving only a mass of white everywhere.
Finally, two collar doves gracefully and softly beat their gentle wings across the garden sky and a large wood pigeon landed on the hammock and then plodded into the snow, looking for food.
I sat indoors with a breakfast of pain au raison and hot chocolate and enjoyed the show.

The white stuff

Oh how ridiculous it must appear to people in Alaska when good old Blighty is forecast a few inches of snow.
I went to the supermarket at lunchtime and as I was at the bakery counter I heard one sales girl say to another, *We're out of fresh bread already today*. So much for the 'Keep calm and carry on' slogan that is appearing on everything from tea towels to mugs. Nope, everyone and his dog seems to be buying up bread and milk and stocking up with bottled water. We're only forecast two days of snow!
Luke can't wait for the little hens to be out in the snow, Ive cleared away the ice sheets from the bird baths (although I expect it will be frozen again by the morning) and we'll ensure that the chickens have access to the dry ground in the greenhouse and plenty of high fat food to keep them warm.
Fortunately we can just enjoy the snow here tomorrow as it's my day off but on Saturday I need to venture into the city centre for an event I am hosting. Let's hope the trains are running.
I'm hoping we wake up to a frosting of snow but I'm guessing it's going to be more than that. Check out my 2010 Christmas photos for he last big freeze we had. Luke and I trudged over snow bound fields to buy a turkey for Christmas as our road was cut off and after that the visitors who were meant to be staying couldn't get out of their own drive in Cornwall.

We shall have snow.

Very glad am I that the fork and I got acquainted yesterday as at least the raspberry patch is turned over. I started in the quagmire under the tree that has been compacted by six pairs of chicken's feet as well as those from the wood pigeons and robins that eat the spilled seed from the feeders hanging from the branches. When I turned the soil there it came up in great clumps, and there was a multitude of worms wriggling their heads or tails (who knows which end is which when they are so tiny?) in the newly exposed daylight. When I did my annual trick of unearthing several spring bulbs I decided to leave it all alone and just tidy away the deadheaded detritus. Even just an hour in the garden produced an entire binful of garden waste and made the garden look much tidier.
Not before time too as only a few hours later the snow fell, slowly and silently against the inky blackness of the winter sky. It hasn't settled overnight but we are expecting a few frosty starts this week. Nature will break up the soil with her frosts and the bulbs will start pushing their shoots up. Not long till the first snowdrops appear, I hope.

Ugly fruit.

Yes, these are tomatoes and not actual ugly fruit but I wanted to show you what Mother Nature has done to these very late tomatoes. The photograph above shows a variety of mouldy tomatoes - we shan't be eating these!

So, once we have thrown the tomatoe plants into the compost and emptied the compost bags the hens will have the entire greenhouse to bath in - not that it stops them now!

The garden fights back

I know this could be an opportunity to plant up all the things that love wet conditions but I don't want to tempt fate by succumbing to this idea. I want to think that later this year or most definitely next year we will have sunshine and dry conditions. Plus who has the money to chop and change according to the weather? So, like almost all gardeners in Britain this year, I will grin and bear it although sadly not really with good grace. As the barista in the coffee shop said, "We are all just hanging on to our sanity but another day of this weather and the British public will all turn into serial killers! I must start buying my coffee from a different place!

Anyway, we can escape indoors and bemoan our fate but the plants have to battle on. Here are the flowers in the garden, some caught on a rare sunny day this July.

 Aconitum and a rose.

 Only one of the three plants I bought last year have come up but this gives lovely long lasting Autumn colour.

 Bear's Breeches and the aconitum with a Hibiscus

 One of my favourite, longed for plants. I bought this two years ago only for it not to flower last year and this year, when it did flower the rain has knocked it to the ground. Angel's Fishing Rod is it's common name but whilst it is wet enough to keep fish alive I've sadly seen no angels using them!

 This is part of the friendship corner, looking rather bedraggled after the downpour today.

 The hydrangea is changing from blue to pink. All dependent on the type of soil it is planting in.

 A close up of the hydrangea.

 The Eryngium (sea holly) has done well but it's used to harsh conditions. The Echinops (globe thistle) isn't doing quite so well.

 The star of the show, a huge Agapanthus blowing it's many little trumpets whilst the Gypsophilia fills the space in the background.

The white clematis has done well, head in the sun, feet in the shade.

 The spotted foxglove is a personal favourite of mine.....,

 and the bee too, can you see it up the tubular flower? If you click and enlarge the photo you can see the fine hairs on the inside of the flower that brush against the  bee as it climbs in and out.

In the wild area this plant is doing it's job - attracting insects.

 Detail of the Giant Scabiosa head. A great mass of this bendy stemmed plants at the back of a border really do create a lot of movement and long term interest. I love this skinny chap.

A victim of the weather; this lupin was overcome with greenfly, another infestation has stripped my blue lupin within a day. You snooze, you lose, as they say and I caught both of them too late. What a shame.

 My very favourite, Crown Princess Margarita rose. She always gives a good show. The blue in the background is a clematis.

 Evan with the rain, my roses have done their best and as soon as the sun dries them out a little, up they come.

 My second favourite rose, Munstead Wood. This photo doesn't truly reflect the richness of this glorious rose. I moved it earlier in the season so it could climb against the shed and it's doing very well. Such a reliable rose.

Here, the water damage is quite apparent. I pulled gently on the head of this sodden rose and the entire petal structure came away in one piece. Yet the bud by the side has had the benefit of a good dry day as it unfurls so if the rain stays away it will not suffer the same fate. As I type away the rain is back for the fourth time today, heavy as always, and my hopes for the roses fades somewhat.

This bush has one head with waterlogged petals too but still makes a good show. C'mon, Blighty. Show that weather who is the boss (yes, we all know. The weather wins every time)

 My new purchases for this year; I have five or six of these beautiful Verbascums, this one has a sprinkling of rain drops on it's petals.

 So, the Salvia Patens Blue have been planted - in the monochrome border! Well, something is better than nothing and if these handsome chaps flower they will be a delight to view from the house.

 Remember the bargain annual plants we bought when we met up with Luke's dad a month or two back? For five pounds I filled this large blue pot with fuchsias and upright and trailing lobelia. At least these gives us some interest and can be moved around to fill a boring spot in the garden - if only they weren't so heavy to shift!

The half barrel (still smelling slightly of beer!) sits out by the front steps and has spilled over the edges to soften them up. This barrel was filled by Jack next doors' 8 year old grandson and me a few months ago and is a very cheap and cheerful welcome to the house.

 What a graceful arch to the yellow flower stem of the humble tomato. It will be such a shame after Luke's tender cultivation of these plants if they do succumb to blight. It's a miracle though if they don't - conditions (wet and warm) are ideal for it. He's going to get some resistance spray and fingers will be firmly crossed.

Here is a lovely tiny tomato with beautiful curlicue bits adorning it's 'head'.

A room with a view. From our loft you get a slightly better idea of the shape of the garden. With fruit bushes along the left, the vegetable patch behind the white bed and the chicken run and wild garden behind that we move over to the shed and the greenhouse, fronted by the herb garden and then down past the hammock to the clashing corner, the long border, the tree with the bird feeders that our chickens make a run for every time we let them out of their run and down to the friendship border which is obscured by the conservatory roof. Further on down is the monochrome corner, the deck and the wood store. Our compost bin and water butt reside in between the shed ad greenhouse and our bits and pieces, including logs to be cut, hide behind the shed.

If you think I have exaggerated about the rain we have endured this 'summer' just look what has happened to these keys in five days! I tied these to string and hung them over the peas to act as a pigeon scarer (well, really just because I wanted to hang these old curiosities up actually and I needed an excuse) and already they are rusty. Happy days!

People in glass houses

I'm a bit confused about this blog. I've been writing for one week now and I'd really like to just write about gardening but everyone else's blog seems to just be musings on life so should I write about what I want to or just mooch along, whittering on about my day?
I think I will stick to what I originally intended. Gardening.

So, here we are again - the immortal greenhouse. I just said to Luke, "If we saw where we had got to by now a week ago we would wonder what on earth we have been doing all week. But I promise you we have been diligently working on it. We have had Luke's Mum staying with us for forty eight hours and although she didn't need any looking (we made her tea lady whilst we did 'gardening stuff') we still didn't want to be rude and just concentrate on the greenhouse so we slackened off quite a bit. So we have left it as a frame, partly constructed, on a breezeblock frame with a concrete foundation. We need a full day together to finish off the framework before clipping in the glass panes and erecting the staging. It all sounds so simple!

On the plus side I sewed some wild flowers in a rough patch of ground (at least a month too late but let's see what happens). The great thing about wild flowers is that their ideal growing conditions are poor soil and sunshine; so all I had to do was create a little drill and sprinkle them in. I'll keep you updated.

The greenhouse - the saga continues.

Ho hum, this greenhouse is NOT going to beat me. So, a week off and we now have the foundations dug, the area cleared and a layer of breezeblocks being cemented together as I type (by ever hard working Luke). He's been at it all day as his Mum and I have chatted. BUT, ta da! All this hard foundation work means that tomorrow we may finally get around to actually putting the framework up. Our tomatoes are rapidly raising their heads towards the conservatory ceiling and will so love their new home which is still a collection of metal and glass in the shed. Everytime I stray in there for the lawn mower or spade or whatever I worry that I am going to stick my wellie through some panes and then will have to 'fess up to Luke. So far, touch wood, that hasn't happened - there is still tomorrow though!
Talking of lawn mowing, I bought the cheapest strimmer I could find (two pence under a tenner) yesterday and put it together today to have a go. Whilst strimming the edge of the lawn I beheaded a pelargonium and hacked a great clump out of my golden thyme before I finally got the hang of it. It now languishes in the shed. I told Luke it was the worst tenner I've spent on the garden in a long while. It just goes to prove yet again that buying the best you can afford always pays. Of course most of us would buy the best we could if we had the money but it's not that simple, is it? However, when you work out how much the thing will cost you in the long run the good stuff often pays for itself, is more comfortable to use and ends up saving time and money. I think I've bleated on about this before so I will hush up.

I was up early this morning, 4.45am, as I couldn't sleep and I didn't want Luke's stepdad, Chris, to miss his early morning start (he's a wildfowler and was appearing at a Welsh show this weekend so had to be up and at the showground early). All well and good but now there are TWO birthday parties going on either side of the road and they are very, very loud. Dance music through speakers on one and karaoke from the other. Not a happy bunny!! Good night!

The next day - all Luke's hard work is not going to waste as you can see from these photos. First off, the hens have a messy dust bath in the overturned ground. They all budge up together and scrabble around, flicking dust up and over their bodies, they twist and turn and end up almost upside down and unrecognisable as chickens - there is often no head to be seen; possibly just a foot sticking out of a ball of feathers. Once finished they stand up and have a jolly good shake when a huge cloud of dust rises from them. Job done, they wander off though the falling dust in search of more food.





On the other hand, Socks (Jack's cat) makes use of the ready made litter tray - we need to get this greenhouse up and sorted quickly before all Luke's hard work just becomes Poo corner!





July 5th
This greenhouse milarky is turning into a saga. I keep grumbling to Luke that if we ever buy another greenhouse it should be new (which totally goes against our mean streak) but now, finally after weeks of digging, concreting, foundation building, frame erecting and glass and clip (a huge thanks to my Mum) cleaning we are on the final stretch and now it looks like a real greenhouse. We even planted it up before the glass went in as the tomatoes were in desperate need of some root space and had all flopped over in their pots. We have quite a bit of glass to buy as there were some missing panes when we bought the greenhouse. We have to wait until the weekend before we can get them, no time in the weeks. Somehow, Socks the cat has decided to stop using the greenhouse base as a litter tray which is a relief (but not for her).
I'm looking forward to putting the staging in so we can pretend it's Mr McGregor's greenhouse and start potting up.



The view from the conservatory.

And now for the greenhouse.

No real garden is complete without a greenhouse. It allows you to garden much more cheaply and ensures you have a wider range of plants and a longer growing season. Now we have more space we have invested in a second hand greenhouse, bought on EBay for £265 from a lovely guy, Leighton, in Devon. We've gone for the largest we could find and afford after careful investigation (the complete gardening book by Geoff Hamilton is still my bible). He suggested getting the largest greenhouse you can as you soon run out of space in it. He also stressed how important ventilation is so you need an adequate amount of windows that actually open (second hand ones need to be checked to ensure they work correctly before you buy them). Leighton helped take the greenhouse apart and we parted good friends. We hope he'll pop by and see how it looks when he's over in Cardiff.
Because we have both been working full time there has been little time to get the greenhouse erected. We have this week off work so are hunkering down to get the job done. Luke has dug over the ground we are putting it on and is now laying a base whilst I am cleaning the glass and metal of the greenhouse. Boring but worthwhile. Let's hope a few of the angry wasps don't make a (sorry about the pun) bee line for us!

June 18th.
We had a break yesterday and drove down to Cornwall to visit Luke's Dad. A trip to Fowey, reached by the car ferry was very pleasant. We had a pub lunch with Trevor (Luke's Dad) and his girlfriend Julie, who drives the local bus. A group of unsuspected pensioners were dive bombed by a huge and hungry seagull who disappeared with one of their sandwiches, grabbed straight out of a hand of one of the group. The pub had a sign stating that if anyone had their food stolen or spoiled ("natural causes") by the seagulls then they wouldn't get a replacement or reimbursement. I guess it happens a lot. Anyway, after wandering along the little main street, punctuated by stops to nose in shop windows, we caught the ferry back and drove to Hannafore where we sat on the grass and looked over at Looe Island whilst eating clotted cream topped icecreams. As Trev said, "This is the life" and it was. Not a bad way to spend a Thursday, hey?
Now we are back and hopefully ready to tackle the huge job that is the greenhouse. How I long for it to be up and ready to use. Today Luke is going to carry on with the other two sides of foundations whilst I am meant to be laying the blocks it will stand on. Sure to be some grumbling going on before the day is out!
Tonight Luke's Mum\and stepdad are coming to stay so we have to be done and dusted in order to welcome them. Best crack on.....

Half past eight and our work is done for the day. These long evenings will allow us to garden longer for normal for a little while longer. Who can believe we are almost at the longest day of the year? I've been reading about biodynamics, the waxing and waning of the moon and such like. It sounds pretty interesting but for now I am just getting out there and planting away.