Herbs for free!

OK, roll up, roll up.  Here is a change and a chance to win something!

You know me.  I am a bit selfish with this blog.  I blog about what I like and what interests me.  I get a lot of emails asking me to review this and that and most of them come from people who don't seem to have read my blog or to have any  idea of what I write about so generally they cheerily get dumped!  But I had a really nice email the other day from someone who works for Wish UK.  She had clearly read my blog and thought about it and how it connected to her company and she wanted to know if I would like to run a competition.  It's not often I have the chance to give away anything nice to you lovely people so I thought I would give it a go.

  Wish UK is a gift providing company.

You know the sort of thing: driving a Ferrari, having a spa break, hot air ballooning, learning to fly a bird of prey.  Oddly they didnt't want to offer any of these things as a prize but you can have a go at winning a free kit to grow your own herbs  

The gift box contains: 1 packet of basil seeds. 1 packet of parsley seeds. 1 packet of thyme seeds. 1 packet of chive seeds. 1 packet of rosemary seeds. 5 starter growing pots made from coconut husk. 5 natural coconut husk compost discs which expand when watered. 5 wooden plant markers. Herb garden growing tips. So everything you need to get started with herbs and all for free so the ideal way  of experimenting!

All you have to do is to go over to Wish UK and have a look around.  There is a great variety of presents on offer and the prices look pretty good to me.  Then if you would like a chance to win the herb kit just leave a comment indicating that you want to be included in the draw.  If you can make sure that you have an email contact on your blogger profile I can let you know if you win and, with your permission,  I will pass that contact on to Wish UK so that they can send out the prize.  I will put the names of everyone who has commented into a hat on Wednesday 3rd August and get a passing small child to draw the winner.

I am a big fan of herbs and my own garden is full of mints, sages, rosemary, thyme, chives, basil and oregano.  The wonderful thing about growing herbs is that you can eat them as well as grow them and, just as good, bees and butterflies love them so you are doing your bit to help pollinating insects too.

Summer

Working in the garden and the air full of swooping swallows. 
Not our pair and their brood but over twenty carving perfect arcs out of a blue sky, passing near enough for me to hear their wings.
Swooping over the house, down to the pond, mysterious, intense, focussed.
Is this what they must do to know how to return?
They gather on the telephone wires.
Don't go.  Don't go.
I am not ready.

Fluid and elastic time

Time is playing tricks with me.  Sometimes, most times if I am honest, my life is the classic plate spinning exercise, running from house and family to holiday cottage to job to garden to friends and wider family, tweaking a plate here, leaping up as one threatens to crash to the ground.  Sometimes I like it like that, sometimes it starts to overwhelm me but always it feels normal.  So why do I suddenly feel to have all the time in the world?

I think it began when I got back from Devon.  Somehow I had slowed down for the sake of a few days away looking at gardens.  You couldn’t say it was an obvious chill out.  I had driven over seven hundred miles for one thing.  But I arrived home feeling like someone with a bit of time on their hands and here at the end of the first week back I am still wafting about serenely.

This is totally irrational.  This week has been full of the chaos which results from the kitchen ceiling being on the kitchen floor and the contents of the kitchen being on the kitchen table.  See previous blogs for photographic evidence.  I have knocked tiles off walls and picked dust out of my hair.  I have worked on two days and spent most of today cleaning the cottage ready for this afternoon’s visitors.  There is just as much weeding as ever.  I went to yoga and to singing practice for the Eisteddfod and I had my hair cut.  Objectively it has been a busy week.  I have not been swinging gently in a hammock, a good book in my hand and a glass of Pimms on the grass.  I have not been idling along a shell strewn beach with flowers in my hair.  And yet I feel calm and relaxed and seem to have found time to cut sweetpeas for the house and make scones and water and feed my dahlias.  I have sown some seeds and potted on my penstemon cuttings and eaten ripe strawberries standing in the strawberry bed in the sun.

And now I think I will wander upstairs and paint my toenails.  Winter and cold will come soon enough and surely at some point the tide of stuff will overwhelm me again but for now let us make hay while the sun shines.  Let’s not ask why I am feeling the sun on my face.  Let’s just turn in the warmth, cat like, and purr.

A blog of two halves

You might think the kitchen would get worse before it got better.  You would be right.

Even more things move into the front kitchen

so that in the back kitchen the ceiling can be taken down.

And this is where it is taken down to: the floor.  The electrician is coming on Monday and then we shall have to bite the bullet and take the sink out.   There is plastering to be done and a new slate floor to be laid and then we shall perhaps begin to think about new units.  Repeat after me: It will be fine.  Let's just slip outside and pick some sweetpeas.


When not picking pieces of my house out of my hair I have been musing on the visit to Rosemoor.   Rosemoor is one of the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens, this one sited in Devon in the bottom of a sheltered valley.

The warm and gently clouded morning in which we had wandered around Carol Klein's garden had given way to a bright, hot and sunny afternoon.

Oh I don't believe this.  Blogger has lost my entire blog about Rosemoor.

Might just have to go to bed in disgust.

Tales from my kitchen - 1 of a series

I only usually blog once a week or so but I thought you might like to see a bit of house renovation - some of the dust and slog behind living the dream!

Last year we moved the main cooking kitchen back into the old part of the house where it belongs.  We were left with an early 80s horror in the back kitchen, the peeling melamine and stained worktop setting off the mouldy patches on the wall a real treat.

So this year's job was to redo the back kitchen as a scullery/utility and work started yesterday with the emptying of cupboards.

So the new kitchen fills up with boxes from the old one, which go under the table and on the table and on the freezer and the diswasher and out into the laundry and just about everywhere.

The cupboards come out and it is going to get worse before it gets better.

Here it is getting worse as the tiles come off.

We are trying to leave the sink connected for another day or so and here is Ian actually making it a bit better by cleaning up.

And you ain't seen nothing yet.  The ceiling has to come down this week so that the electrics can be redone.  I am thinking a small but dense Welsh version of last year's Icelandic ash cloud.  Flights over North Wales (such as they are) may be suspended.

This is on the front kitchen table to cheer me up.  I had to stand quite close.  From this close up it all looks quite pretty, proving conclusively that the idea that the camera never lies is total rubbish.  But they are lovely and all from the garden.

When this is done I may never move again.

Devon gardens

I have just had a week out of time, a week to wander gardens in great company, a week of sunshine and flowers by the ton.  My head is still spinning with colour and light and fizzing ideas.

Way back in February when I planned a visit to some gardens in Devon the idea seemed like a lifeline.  Life was hard, my brother was in hospital, we were all adjusting to having my father in law to live with us and I was buffetted by how much I wanted to be able to put things right and how little I could do.  As I sat at Karen's table on a wet and blustery winter day I felt stretched out thin like an old handkerchief, pale and see through and just as likely to tear.  On a July morning as I left home in the sunshine life had moved on.  We adjust, we human beings, we get used to things, even difficult things.  Now it felt not like a necessity but like an indulgence to drive away and leave Ian looking after domestic life and his father.

I was travelling with Karen and staying with one of her oldest and best friends who lives in Devon and has a fabulous garden of her own.  It was a long and tedious journey down the border with England, via Chepstow briefly to see my brother, and on through Somerset and into Devon.  One of the great things though about newer friends is that there are all sorts of things you don't know about each other so the journey passed away in filling some of those spaces in the jigsaw of an unshared history.

I had wondered whether I would feel rather in the way when two such good friends got together after a long time but L and her husband were so welcoming and somehow it all felt very easy and natural.  L has made a stunning garden in not much more time than we have been here.  Mine feels very much a work in progress in comparison.  I loved her planting, particularly a very beautiful spiral garden, and consoled myself by observing that her soil and mine could have come from different planets.

A day out to spend with my parents and catch up with my sister and then a day for garden visiting, starting with Glebe Cottage, Carol Klein's garden and small nursery in North Devon.  It's always a surprise somehow to visit somewhere you have read about and seen on television.  Television in particular plays tricks with space.  Just as the newsreader you see unexpectedly on the street in London is often surprisingly short, the garden was surprisingly small.  First impressions: packed (maybe overpacked? and that is an odd observation coming from me) with paths so narrow and planting so full that you squeeze through and bend under branches and would be soaked to the skin by plants after rain.

There is a generous amount of the garden open: a wooded area which must be fabulous in spring where the clumps of epimedium are like huge piled pillows of plants.  I tried hard not weep when thinking of mine, sitting daintily about six inches square in their bed of bare soil.

To the other side of a central path, terraces take you up towards the house, through Alice's garden and Annie's garden towards the big beds where I think the hot plants will go out in another few weeks.  On the top terrace, beyond the private sign, were pots full of cannas and dahlias wating to go out.


There were some inspired bits of planting

and an inspired use of zinc buckets!

And there were some very beautiful individual plants which got under my skin to the extent of coming home with them:

It was a pale soft morning, gently overcast but warm with the promise of sun to come.  I was very glad to be there, looking and thinking, in sparky and knowledgeable company.  It felt like a very personal garden and although we didn't see Carol Klein, the woman weeding in the borders and the other taking plant sales in the nursery clearly loved the garden and knew and loved its plants.

I liked the fact that, although there would have been vast scope for making a money making enterprise out of the garden and the nursery with tea rooms and bookshops and a greatly extended plant sales area,  there was a strong sense that this was not what they wanted to do with it.  Signage was minimal, although there was a helpful sign pinned to a telegraph post at the point when satnav insists you have reached your destination and you clearly haven't.  There were no loos.  The plant sales area was tiny.  There was no tea room.  There was nowhere selling copies of Carol's books.  It was just a garden, her garden.  I liked that.

On not going to bed

Morning: Ian gets up with his father at 7.  I often don't wake when he gets up but generally stir at about a quarter to eight and get up soon after eight.  For those of you who are hating me now, I would just like to say that I have served my time with children whose day started cheerily at 5 and with work demanding I leave the house at 6.15.  One of the great things about working for myself and no longer dancing to the salary man's tune is that I can go with my own body clock, and my clock says nothing should happen before 7 and that somewhere around 8 to 8.30 is when I should be starting the day.

And then morning between 10 and 12 is firing on all cylinders time, doing the tricky things, setting up the challenging spreadsheet, putting in the tax return, nailing the impossible.

Lunchtime for me should be about 1 but is generally earlier because FIL is definitely ready for a sandwich around 12 and by 1 is up for slitting his wrists or making his own.  We compromise, generally, a bit, closer to the early end.

Afternoons are for the long haul stuff: the weeding, the report writing, the making of bread, the odd brief interlude hiding in the wooden greenhouse crushing the leaf of a scented geranium and watching the hens scratch.

Evening meals happen a bit early, again the inevitable result of compromise.  FIL would have eaten at 5.  I would settle for 7ish. Mostly that means a 6 to 6.30 meal where the downside is not being quite hungry enough and the upside is a gloriously long evening.  Especially in summer this is wonderful.

Bedtime: FIL: 10.10.  Ian: varying, can be early, can be startlingly late.  Me: ideally about 11.30 but sometimes that means, as now, that I am the only one up. 

Such a strange thing.  Surely what really matters is temperament, intelligence, empathy, kindness, wit and edge?  And yet how much of life is governed by basic things.  When you do you want to sleep?  When you do want to eat?

Is this just me?

Hello again

Blogging is a funny thing.  Do it and it is compulsive: the writing, the comments, the reading of other blogs.  Stop, even if only for a few days, and it is oddly hard to start again.  What on earth have I got to say?

Not much really. 

We had a visit from some lovely friends who live in Canada.  They insisted that the thing they wanted to do most in the world was to help us weed and manure our rhubarb bed.  I know, I told you they were lovely.

The children began to gather for Ian's birthday and the house was suddenly full of them and a puppy and a toddler.  The sun shone.  The cakes were iced.  Food was planned and prepared.  My sister and her family arrived and tents went up in the field and still the sun shone.  Family and old friends poured in from near and far and the sun poured in too.   Dogs poddled about happily, the oldest stuck to my father's side, the next  one playing football with older children, the puppy happily eating raspberries and windfall apples.  There was much food eaten, games played, the toddler swung backwards and forwards for as long as anyone would push him.   A great tide of warmth and friendship washed through the house and garden.

None of my carefully planned cutting garden, all orange and gold, was in flower and I can't say I cared a bit.

And now everyone has gone and the cat is sleeping quietly and the rain is trickling down the window and the whole weekend has a golden light around it.

Lucky or what?