End of month view

I am away down to Oxford for a couple of days tomorrow to help older daughter get ready for a trip to Japan with her six month old baby and to see younger daughter's progress with unpacking after her big move out of London into the country.  So here is a slightly early end of month view.

Here is the side garden, now awash with geraniums, aquilegia, verbascum and peonies.  I am going to show you some close ups too, just because I love them so much.

These paeonies will be over so soon but there foliage is a meaty contribution even when the flowers are gone and the flowers themselves are so luscious I would have them if they flowered only for a day.

The aquilegia by contrast have been going for a while and will keep flowering for a few more weeks yet.  I love the way they self seed and the different colours and shapes they throw up.  This pinkish one is a gentler softer colour than I would usually like but it is just perfect.

This is looking down through the new little orchard.  The apple blossom has faded and the daffodils are gone but  this is the area where I am planting wild flowers.  For weeks I have had trays full of oxeye daisies, honesty, teasels and field scabious in the greenhouse and coldframes.  I know that visitors have raised the occasional eyebrow at my pots full of weeds.  This weekend has seen the end of the huge task of planting them out.  They don't look much yet.

This I promise you will be a patch of oxeye daisies next summer.  It has been hard work planting out in the lush grass but here and there the visiting badgers have been of help.

Here is where they have been digging, looking for chafer grubs I think.

Producing a perfect little hole into which to slip a teasel.

But already there are patches of beauty: buttercups under the apple trees.

Sweet rocket around the silver birch.

And grasses which are themselves beautiful.

Here is the cutting garden, the sweetpeas beginning to twine up the mesh, the lavender stripes filling out, the irises and the echinacea looking healthy and solid.  Not many flowers yet.  I have been planting out cosmos and zinnia grown from seed and it will be the annuals which fill this with colour, scent too from the sweetpeas, and scent from the lavender.  Globe artichokes are here too.  We will eat them until we get bored with the whole palaver, but some will go to flower and the flowers are as beautiful as any.

And here is the kitchen garden.  It would look better if the raised beds didn't need to be netted against the chickens but I couldn't bear not to let them roam so protecting the crops is a necessity.

The chickens are even in the side garden, the closest this place gets to formality (still pretty much a sprawl, but a thoughtful sprawl I hope).

Oh I love May.  I wish I could hold it in my hand and keep it for a little longer.

Today

The electricians came.  More of our house fell gently into the kitchen.

I planted out annuals into the cutting garden and ox eye daisies into the orchard.

The chicks got lost in  the long grass.

The state of our house sent us off to our pub for burgers and very good chips.

Ian wanted to watch "Dave".  I was snotty.  QI was on and I was wrong.

It got, happily and hardworkingly and the days are too short, to bed time.

Chick update

Go away, can't you see I have chicks to look after?

Oh my God, I have lost one.  Nobody ever tells you how hard this mothering business is.  I need eyes in the back of my head.

No, it's OK.  All present and correct again.  Why don't you just go away and leave me alone?  I have work to do and you are really not helping.

New arrivals

Our Welsummer hen has been broody for a while and sitting tight on six eggs for the last three weeks.  A hen sits for twenty one days so I had been expecting the eggs to begin to hatch tomorrow.  This afternoon I was out in the kitchen garden inspecting the growth of the gooseberries as an alternative to doing anything more strenuous in the blue, still heat, when I heard a cheeping.  At first I thought it was a bird in the hedge but when I stood very still it seemed to be coming from the henhouse.

We went over for a look.  When we lifted the lid the hen was still sitting with the familiar spread wings.  The cheeping fell silent.  Ian gently lifted her to have a look.  The first thing we saw was a couple of empty eggshells and then a tiny yellow chick, already beginning to fluff out.

Moving her again there was another chick, this one still wet and flat and two more empty eggshells along with the two eggs yet to hatch.  The nesting box she was in sits a little higher than the main body of the henhouse and two tiny chicks had fallen out an inch or two down into the main house.  We gathered them up and put them back with the mother.  Then Ian blocked the entry and put her back on the eggs and chicks.  Tomorrow we shall move them all into the main house.

 Chicks are just impossibly perfect.  Another one has hatched tonight.  Tomorrow I shall get some better pictures!

Inside and out

On Saturday two men arrived and knocked all the plaster off our kitchen walls.  I was going to say knocked hell out of my house actually and that is certainly how it felt.  In a four hundred year old  house you never know what you will find when you start to do any work at all.  We have decided to move our kitchen from the 1980s extension where it languishes now, all stained walls and peeling melamine cupboards, to the larger, older room at the front which used to be the dairy.  The room has been plastered with a mixture of lime plaster and new gypsum based plaster.  The new plaster has been gently falling off ever since we arrived and we have bitten the bullet and decided to have the whole room replastered.

So here we are, bags and bags of rubbish later, with the plaster off and the old stone walls revealed.

The floor is made of huge slabs of slate.

The walls are hugely thick too but here and there taking off the plaster has brought pieces of stone gently crumbling out of the wall.

 In what was the back wall of the house there is a another little blocked up window just the size and shape of the little window in the side wall.

So there we are, first step on the way.  Take it gently.  The house has stood a long time and needs to stand a long time still.

So outside is a good place to be just now.

Everything is fizzing and fountaining green.

The apple blossom is out.

And so are the crab apples.

And further away from home, the woods are full of bluebells.   Everything is coming up green and roses.

The day we went to Malvern

I took my camera to Malvern but somehow the fact that it was cold and I was enjoying the company of Zoe means I didn't get it out so this blog will have to be a picture free zone.  Hopeless.

Setting off on Thursday felt a bit like playing hookey, all by myself in the car, leaving all my usual responsibilities behind.  I was reminded again of how much I like driving when it is just the car and me and the open road, or the M6 which is not quite so Mr Toad-like.

I was staying at Bredon House (recommended, good position, great breakfasts) with Zoe and Karen from An Artist's Garden and Karen's sister in law Jane.  This was quite a cunning way of managing the meeting up with bloggers as I had already met both Zoe and Karen and thought that this would feel more like a reunion with friends and less like plunging in to a roomful of strangers and it did. Meeting blogging friends is an odd sensation,  never actually quite like meeting a stranger, more as I imagine it might be to meet up with a penfriend.  I wouldn't know.  I was a very poor correspondent and never managed to create one of those long distance relationships with a penfriend which I rather envied in my more dedicated letter writing friends.  But bloggers, now I have met quite a few bloggers and it is always a delight.

Thursday night was a meal in a pub.  We walked in and within seconds Helen was there showing us to the table.  We must just look like gardeners I suppose!  Perhaps she was looking at our hands.  You just have a few moments on first meeting a virtual friend when the reality of what they look like can cause you a mild surprise before the real person overlays the image in your head.  Within half an hour you can't imagine that they could ever be anything other than what they are.  So there was patientgardener (taller and slimmer than I thought she would be), VP (taller, thoughtful), Anne (exactly as I had imagined), Yolandaelizabet (I thought she was blond).  Then there were the people further up the table, some of whom I managed to speak to and some of whom were just too far away.  It was great to talk to Gayle (what on earth do I mean if I say someone doesn't look American? Not sure, but she doesn't, she looks English) and to feel that wonderful sense of connection to someone from far away.  I knew I hadn't had the chance to talk to Frances and Ewa so hoped to catch up with them the next day.

The day of the show kicked off with a massive breakfast: blueberries and raspberries and yoghurt followed by bacon and scrambled egg and toast.  I could eat like that every day if someone else made and served it and I had such good company.  Karen and Zoe had both warned that they were not morning people but it didn't show! Perhaps the excitement woke them up early.

The day was cold but soon warmed up by meeting other bloggers.  Zoe and I met up with Milla and that was just as good as I had thought it would be.  We drifted around show gardens.  I hardly dare to say this but show gardens are not really my sort of thing.  I like places that have evolved perhaps rather than been designed and I found much of the planting rather contrived and spotty.  Then I came across the Garden of recovery and wellbeing which I absolutely loved.  Perhaps it was the nettles and the jack in the green behind the chicken shed or the chickens themselves, both of which reminded me of home, or the beautiful tiled path.  It was a little oasis of calm in the midst of the bustle.  I also liked Trackbed, based on a railway line on the Welsh borders, and Deb Bird's The Nature of Nurture with its fabulous ivy covered fence and covetable greenhouse.

The highlight of the show for me was the floral marquee.  I could feel my stomach fluttering with excitement.  All those stalls, all those plants and amazingly helpful and knowledgeable people like Avon bulbs, patiently  explaining to me that the camassia I had fallen in love with probably would not like my stony fastdraining soil but pointing me in the direction of a fritillary I had never even heard of.  I was determined to be careful in my plantbuying.  There is nothing more demoralising that having everything die on you.  So I bought some beautiful epimedium, some delightful bunny grass and couldn't quite resist some scented leaved geraniums, complete with some advice as to how to keep them over winter.  It was heaven.

Evening was a visit to Helen's house.  Her garden is even better in the flesh than in photographs and I fleetingly longed for a damp enough spot so that I could grow her ligularia.  Dream on.   Here I did catch up with Ewa and Frances, met Victoria and Lia and generally felt that I had not enough time to talk to everyone again!  So if I haven't included your name here I apologise wholeheartedly, it is my terrible memory (oh also met Anna and Claire and Sally, oh I should never have started this naming people thing).  Everyone without exception was interesting and good company.

And the next morning I whizzed off.  I should have had another day.  I should have had time to go back round the floral marquee a couple of times and to look at all the outside stalls.  There were some fabulous craft pieces as well when I could tear my eyes from plants.  There were people I felt I had met only fleetingly - VP, Happy Mouffetard, Wild Somerset Child - who I would have loved the chance to talk to  for longer.  Even those I did meet for longer left me with a sense it was all too short.  Thanks so much for all the organising to VP and patientgardener.  It was just great.

Seven things that make me grumpy

I have just read about seven things that make me grumpy on rosie scribble's blog  It spoke to me.  Perhaps I am having one of my grumpy old woman days.  So, just so you can see that all is not sweetness and light up here all the time, here are my seven:

1. Politicians posturing and turning any question into a way of blaming the other political party instead of entering into a real, unscripted, interesting dicussion .
2. Political interviewers doing their own version of posturing, being aggressive and rude and not apparently appreciating that they are at risk of becoming the story not the question.  I am fascinated by politics and follow it avidly and would no more not vote than run naked down the street, but you can tell that I have spent a lot of time shouting at the radio over the last few weeks.  Will be quite a relief, and not just for me, when the election is over.
3. Sexualised clothing for little girls.  No, no, no.  Just wrong.  Leave them alone to be children.
4. People who don't answer emails for a week or two.  I suppose I should just accept that not everyone checks their emails and tries to respond every day  but a lifetime of working where the expected response time was about half an hour has left me with no patience for being given an email address by someone who apparently doesn't really use email.  Give my your phone number instead. Grump.
5. Being the only woman in a roomful of men who all bond cheerily over football.  Doesn't happen as often as it used to now, thankfully!
6. Not getting enough sleep.  I am hopeless without sleep.  I have sometimes wondered if the main reason I found having small babies a bit of a struggle was that I don't manage very well on little sleep, but then, who does?  It makes me foggy and forgetful and irritable and just plain cross.
7. Big shopping centres, all that excess, all that consumerism, all those people shopping as if it were a religion.  I hate everything about it: the cynical manipulativeness of the retailers, the gullibility of the punters, the idea that buying things will  make you happy, the sheer wastefulness of a society which is constantly buying new things and throwing things away without regard for the effect of this on mother earth.

Only 7 did you say? OK, I'll shut up then!

The Malvern Spring Show

Well on Thursday I am off to Malvern to spend Friday at the show and to meet up with at least 50 garden bloggers.  I have had my usual attack of wondering whether I should just stay home.  I'm always like this.  If ever I am invited to a party I always have a period of feeling that I can't quite be bothered to go and casting about for excuses to stay home.  Then I get over it, begin to quite look forward to it, go and invariably have a good time.  I do actually love meeting people, like talking to people, am quite extrovert and chatty.  I just sort of forget that when I am up here, hanging around in my jeans and t- shirt, dirt under my fingernails, head full of plants and dreams.

So now I am well and truly over party cold feet.  I am hugely looking forward to seeing Zoe and Karen and to meeting so many people whose blogs and tweets I read.  I am longing to get round the plant stands.  I am quite excited by the whole idea of a couple of days somewhere else, and somewhere else devoted to gardening.  How good is that?  I have a list a mile long of people I hope to talk to and of plants I might buy (and a list even longer of things not to be seduced by that would not like it up here.  My big resolution, I will not buy things that won't survive just because they murmur and flutter their lashes at me.).

Thanks to VP (Michelle) and patientgarden (Helen) for all the organising.  You are stars.

Roll on Malvern.