This week has been very cold. There was snow on Sunday night which scattered across the garden, sprinkling it with fairy lights. It hasn’t snowed since but the temperatures have dropped as far as -5 and the snow has not … Continue reading To see a world in a grain of sand…
As we approach the end of 2022 and venture into the wilds of 2023, this post celebrates all that has been joyful, exciting or downright disappointing in my garden and allotment this year. This year my main achievement was my challenge to harvest sixty different vegetables, fruit, herbs, or edible flowers or weeds in the garden and allotment. In fact, my list reached sixty nine. This was an interesting challenge for me and I didn’t do anything very different from usual other than try some new varieties of veg that I’d grown before and make sure I recorded every new … Continue reading Reclaiming Paradise Awards 2022
Who can resist a freebie? I try not to be consumerist but free stuff is always hard to resist. After this year’s bumper apple harvest, several neighbours and people at the allotment having been offering free apples. Although my harvest has been pretty good I can always find uses for more. So I’ve picked a few from the boxes in the street, now waiting to be cooked and eaten for breakfast, baked into cakes or stored in the freezer: These all claim to be cooking apples. I don’t have a cooker in the garden (although the Howgate Wonder is supposed … Continue reading Freebies
Some people have two cars. We don’t have one at all but, for the moment, we have two lawnmowers. If you’ve been with me for a while you may remember my much loved lawnmower – bought 25 years ago at … Continue reading A tale of two lawnmowers
It’s dreich, a word chosen as the most popular Scottish word in a poll a few years ago – link here. Anyway, it’s usually reserved by me for November which is month which is nearly always dreich. Not May. But here we are, experiencing a dreich May and trying to make the most of it. Despite the incessant rain, there have been some moments of sunshine and I did manage to get into the garden to look for ‘wildflowers’ for ‘International Biodiversity Day‘ on Saturday. I found this little collection, all growing in the lawn and tweeted it for #SixonSaturday … Continue reading Dreich
One of the disadvantages of lockdown is that I’ve spent too much time over the winter looking at the garden and getting depressed about the bits that really don’t look good (most of it actually at this time of year). While I blog and tweet about the lovely little spring flowers – here was yesterday’s #SixonSaturday, the lawn is a mud bath, the pond is overgrown, the raised beds are full of either deadish plants or are covered in cardboard or freezer baskets (to keep the cat off) and the hedge at the back of the garden is looking very … Continue reading Holes in the hedge
Last weekend we cleared out the garden shed. It was in dire need. Here are some ‘after’ pics. I couldn’t face a ‘before’ one. You’ll just have to imagine the disordered piles of plant pots, bits of useful stuff, rusty tools and endless reams of plastic sheeting that ‘might be useful one day’. When I say, ‘we cleared out the shed’, I mean that my husband decided it was time to repot some houseplants and needed to reach the pots at the back. In order to do so, he needed to take everything out of the shed, so that I … Continue reading Shed clearing – musing on plastic
You’ll be wondering what this has to do with gardens. It does, be patient. This is the first sewing machine: It’s a hand powered Singer, nearly a hundred years old and belonged to my grandmother. We looked it up online and the model suggests it was made in 1923 and it still works perfectly well. To be honest I can’t imagine my grandmother ever using it. She wasn’t the domesticated type, though she was certainly a gardener and I love that I still have her annotated gardening book – for more on this see here Anyway, the sewing machine passed … Continue reading A tale of two sewing machines
What a glorious day it’s been. A peculiar one undoubtedly, but the sun has shone and a lot of people have got out into their gardens. I spoke to neighbours across the hedges on all three sides of mine, mainly to apologise for my cats but also to share the joy of the sunshine. Fortunately none of them seem to mind the cats. I was going to sow seeds today but decided instead to make a new raised bed. Why? Not sure really, maybe it was a ‘I’ve got to do something’ feeling, or maybe just that the horrible conifers … Continue reading Digging for .. vegetables
We are living in strange times. Plans are being cancelled, people are worried. Yesterday, I tried to keep a focus on the future by sowing seeds. Here are some I sowed earlier, some mixed salad leaves, in a pot in the seed palace, just germinated but ready to grow into something exciting in a few weeks: Yesterday I made a start on the more delicate seeds, sowing tomato seeds in a little propagator indoors. I’ve started with two varieties: Tigerella and San Marzano. I have some others in packets but I’ll sow a few at a time to see what … Continue reading Sowing seeds of hope
Reclaiming Paradise 