Shhhhhh!

A brief site meeting this morning to discuss the positioning of a small shed beneath the large conifer to hide the oil tank had to be postponed.

The neighbours were complaining about the noise!

Antici....

...pation.
To be said in one's best Tim Curry voice!

The hungry gap is always a frustrating time. The only edible things available to eat from the garden are a few herbs, a mass of rhubarb and some tatty spinach left over from last year. Sure there are plenty of greens available in the wild - sorrel, jack-by-the-hedge, wild garlic and nettles - but is not quite the same as that first harvest of the year.

Everything is so tantalisingly close to being ready.
It is time to cover the strawberries. As soon as the first hint of pinkness appears, the blackbirds start paying them rather too much interest for my liking. This year I WILL eat them myself, rather than donating them to the wildlife.

The first sowing of peas was eaten by something (probably mice or voles) before they had a chance to get going. The plants look delicate, but are as hard as nails if I can get them through the first couple of weeks with their heads out of the soil, so the second sowing was made in a length of guttering in the greenhouse and then planted out. And there are third and fourth sowings almost ready to follow in their footsteps.
I don't think it is possible to have too many fresh peas.
Broad beans of course. Dwarf varieties only this year as the yield is pretty good and the plants don't need staking, which is always a bonus up on this hill.

I have really been enjoying my garden this year. With two of us tackling it, the place is starting to get straight again. Robert likes the bits that involve petrol-driven machinery, so the hedges look tidy, the woodpile is full and the lawn gets mown more than once in a blue moon. Which leaves me with time to plant and weed and pot on - and to take pleasure in them, rather than simply rushing to get everything in.
Not having chickens scratching everything up helps too. I miss the chooks - and the eggs and manure - but not the frustration of finding a couple of hens dust-bathing in my newly-planted seedlings. I'm sure there will be chickens in my life again, but they probably won't have quite such free rein as was the case in the past.

The lettuces are almost ready too. It's a shame that the sun has disappeared temporarily, but I'm sure it will come back eventually.

The Spring planting frenzy happens every year. I always worry about being too late, so I put in the poor tender seedlings too early, then a late-May cold snap turns up with the result that they sit in the ground and sulk until mid-June.

I know this will happen because it is always the same. My old-boy neighbours tut despairingly over my hastiness, and offer me their leftover plants just in case mine turn up their toes with the cold. And the late-planted seedlings always catch up with the early ones, and often do even better. But I just can't stop myself doing it - the first sunny day in May, I am out there putting in those little plantlets and hoping that I will have got it right for once.

But it never happens, and the first couple of weeks of June are always spent pacing up and down, waiting to harvest something.

Anything!

A rare success

I love my garden.
Vegetables, flowers, trees, grass (well maybe I grumble about the grass sometimes). There is very little that gives me more pleasure than pottering about outside, pruning, dead-heading, digging and planning. It is all good.

Houseplants are an entirely different matter.
My intentions towards them are always honourable, but I cringe inwardly when someone gives me a potplant as the odds are that it will be a brown and crispy husk within six months. Having most of my windowsills point due South doesn't help either as the poor plants have the choice between thermal shock cycles there, or sitting further into the room in semi-darkness.
I could give the roll call of houseplants that have gone before, but it would be too depressing for words. Suffice to say, it is long.

So last year, when a visiting friend gave me a beautiful Phalaenopsis, I admired its beauty and simply expected it to go and join its predecessors on the compost heap eventually. But the blooms continued to flower month after month, and the plant appeared to enjoy my benign neglect. When the flowering stem finally died back, I felt that something so pretty and so tenacious deserved a chance.

After taking advice, I moved the pot to overwinter in the spare bedroom where it more or less dried out, but was given a watering whenever I noticed it - which admittedly was not very often. Amazingly it started to put up another flowering stalk a couple of months ago, so I moved it to where I would see it more often, gave it a bit of a feed and waited.

Last week it rewarded me with this. So lovely, and quite undeserved.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

This is something I seem to find myself saying quite a lot.

When we decided to hold our wedding reception in the garden at home, I inevitably found myself looking around the place with a critical eye. There are so many things that I have left undone over the past four years, due to lack of either time or oomph.

Take the pond, for example.
It was quite a nice pond when R and I first moved here. Goldfish, waterlilies, flag irises and marsh marigolds, boggy area, home to dragonflies, pond skaters and water boatmen, frogs and newts. Unfortunately it was in entirely the wrong place - in full sunlight and under a couple of deciduous trees that shed their leaves directly into the pond every Autumn.

Well, the goldfish survived on neglect for quite a few years.
And then I got ducks...
Ducks are lovely. Brilliant entertainment. Lots of eggs and the surplus drakes are rather tasty. They loved the pond and promptly stripped it of all greenery, ate the goldfish and as many tadpoles as they could get their greedy little beaks around. And they pooed. Into the pond that was already silted up with the sad remains of all the green stuff they had eaten. Without any oxygenating plants, the water promptly turned green and changed to the consistency of pea and ham soup.

In one of my Bridezilla moments, when I realised that the guests would have to walk past the pond and survey its awful green sludginess, I decreed that it would have to be drained, dredged and refilled. Husband-to-be quite sensibly didn't argue with this, but took the submersible pump from its shelf in the barn, removed a large tubful of frogspawn and pumped out all the water.

Then he handed me a bucket...

It took me two days to remove the 6-inch layer of noxious primaeval gloop and barrow it to the compost heap (mustn't waste all that organic matter!). I also removed many of the large edging stones that had fallen in, half a dozen planting baskets which, pre-ducks, had held waterlily roots and a mysterious collection of green-painted funnels (no idea what those were all about).

We then refilled the pond, returned the frogspawn and waited for the stirred-up stuff in the water to settle and change from dark brown to the clear, limpid pool that I fondly held in my imagination.

Only it didn't.

A week later the water had changed colour.

Back to bright green. Roughly the colour of pea and ham soup.

I wasn't happy. Not happy at all.

There was only one thing for it.

We would have to get some more ducks!