Saturday May 30th - Gardening Part 3, and memories of various seasonal excitements

Things ought to come in threes.

While we were at the garden centre we did buy some petunias, lobelia, and something or other else. Three trays for a tenner.

Our previous foray into planters, for either side of the front door, has been remarkably satisfying. This is what we planted, back at the end of April,

And this is how it looks now! 

I wasn't expecting it to turn out quite so well.

On the strength of that, I have spread the plants out a bit more this time, sharing them between four smaller planters. I still had two little lobelia plants left over so stuck them in a tin bucket. My brother and his wife gave me two little miniature roses a couple of weeks ago. They have outgrown their pots, so I've stuffed them into a planter each, and put them out as well. Fingers crossed. Years ago, when we lived in Peterborough, I used to put each miniature rose into a flowerbed at the front of our house when it had finished being an indoor plant. They loved that spot, and over the three years we were there they formed a fairly solid hedge of brilliant colour. Let's hope that these ones cope with outside.

 Meanwhile, the other planters have been placed here and there on the new patio;

The bay, hidden behind it the camelia I was given for my birthday, three agapanthus plants, and some rather  tentative parsley which has survived from last year

A rosemary plant, and a hellebore which was also a birthday present. 

That tap will have to be fixed soon if we are going down the container garden route. There was a spectacular spectacle last winter, when the pipe feeding the tap split.

I had come in from work, filled the kettle and gone into the dining room (thinking "that's not the noise the boiler usually makes when it fires up"). When I returned a few minutes later, the kitchen was AWASH as in wet and watery and flooded. I found the stopcock for the outside tap, and was well underway with mopping up. Luckily, BB turned up as my first piano pupil of the evening was due in a matter of minutes. That's probably the cleanest the kitchen floor has been for a while. Fixing the tap has been a low priority until now.

Just as well, as the stopcock for the house had seized, but that's a whole new story and I can hardly even remember why and how it happened except that we had no running cold water and BB had to wait in for the plumber on Easter Day - oh yes, now it comes back to me; the cold water tap on the kitchen sink stopped letting any water through on Easter Saturday. Had to fill flasks and jugs round at the neighbour's house for drinking water. Sort of the same kind of episode as when the fridge freezer gave up its mortal coil one Christmas Eve, signifying its demise by pouring its life-fluids all over the floor. Or when the cooker went BANG quite literally one Christmas Day (2012, a momentous year) as we got the turkey out. As they say, timing is everything.

On a cheerful note, here is the pot plant that the offspring gave me for Mothering Sunday this year;

It's looking good, isn't it!

  

Saturday 30th May - Gardening part 2

... so on the way home from Lowder Mill we called in at a garden centre close to home to investigate the feasibility of our ideas.

The new patio has left an unsightly triangle-ish patch of bareness where we changed the shape.

 

So the options are

Grass it over

Turn it into a flowerbed 

Make it into a pond

Create some kind of "feature"

Grass - not as straight forward as you might think. Getting it level and sort-of-matching the existing weed-infested "lawn" looks to me to be a tricky business. So I wasn't that keen.

Flowerbed - you mean the sort that fills up with weeds, like the ones we've already got? That patch is already infested with horsetail, which can't be weeded out, so dealing with it in a flowerbed would be a nightmare. Hey, that's nearly a sort of pun!

Horsetail is an invasive, deep-rooted weed with fast-growing rhizomes (underground stems) that quickly send up dense stands of foliage. https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=257

Horsetail wouldn't be such a pest in grass, as it gets discouraged by frequent mowing. Oh, wait, how frequent is frequent? Ah.

We could fill the flowerbed with densely planted low-growing shrubs, which would hide the weeds. I have been eyeing up the roundabouts and verges to see what the council have been choosing.

A pond? No. That means frogs, slime, toads, clearing the pond, blah blah bleah.No. Oh, I said that already.

A "feature". Ah, yes, but what kind of feature? Something smart, attractive, unpretentious, useful, low-maintenance. Does that just about rule out everything? Well, maybe not.

At Lowder Mill today they had a vegetable garden made entirely of raised beds;

http://www.lowdermill.com/gallery.html

   Today it didn't look like this as it is far too early in the season. However what they did have looked most attractive, and easy to manage - alternating rows of red and green lettuces, herbs and marigold flowers. Very pretty.

So I think our plan is going to be to cover the bare patch with a weed-suppressing membrane, topped with a layer of pebbles. We've got our eye on something like these "Premium Scottish Tweed Pebbles" which look like this (that's him standing on them to give a sense of scale).

Then, on top, we could put some of these half barrels to be "instant" raised beds and what ever other containers look suitable (that's him measuring across the top with his arm to give an idea of the size)

I reckon that would work. Then, maybe, as if by magic, they would become something along these lines

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=527

Watch this space...  but be patient. This could take some time. 

Saturday 30th May - All about Gardens part 1 - Lowder Mill

We nearly didn't make it to Lowder Mill today. Deciding to take the back roads might have been a clever plan if we had turned back immediately we realized that we should have taken that sudden left-hand turn signposted "Hazelmere" just after we left Plaistow. But we didn't, and after a while the signposts kept suggesting Cranleigh and Dunsfold as suitable destinations. The roads were appalling, narrow, twisty, pot-holey, and, worst of all, the left hand verges had subsided to the point where we grounded twice.

Eventually we stopped at a junction, consulted Google maps, and discovered that we were in the tiny hamlet of Shillinglee. I fully expected Miss Marple to appear at any moment. Confident at last of our location, we took the left. And arrived at Plaistow. Again.

At this point our options were to go home, or try again. I'm glad we chose the latter course.

Eventually, in spite of having omitted to bring the detailed large scale map of the actual location of the garden, and indeed not even being sure of the name of the garden, we spotted the bright yellow NGS sign and bowled along yet another little lane to our destination just before lunch. Still on speaking terms, I might add.

Here's the link to all about the place. The sun came out, the cold wind dropped, the tea was served in proper china tea cups and saucers (mine was Royal Albert "Country Roses"...) and the cakes on similar plates. Nice.

We walked around the mill-pond; in spite of the visitors rambling about, it was still a beautiful, quiet, peaceful place to be.

but for a better feel of what the place is like, follow the link, as I only took a couple of pictures.

The homeward journey was uneventful, as we sensibly took the main roads. We had the rest of our lunch in Midhurst and continued our on-going discussions about our own garden, based on what we had just seen. The mill-pond idea is going to be too ambitious for our suburban back yard, but there were other possibilities to consider...  

 

Friday 29th May - Ants at work

We've been away for a few days. I'll post about that soon. Probably.

The beautiful new patio was finished a couple of days before we went; they carefully brushed sand into all the little cracks between the bricks and then sprayed it with a sealant.

We've put some of the patio pots back, and the Balinese statues and a few other bits and pieces. There's still a lot of tidying to do, and a great sandy-weedy-scruffy patch which used to be patio and is about to become lawn or flower bed (less likely) or garden feature (very unlikely). 

I'm so looking forward to some warmer weather (which is not happening today, more's the pity) when I can sit out in the sun and chill, no, I think I mean relax, with a cup of tea.

Meanwhile, the ants have been busy excavating the sand, grain by grain, and piling it up above their nests. That was NOT in the plan.

But not entirely unexpected. 

Thursday 6th May 2015 - check and chuck

116 Things to Throw Away

Down to just 44 items to check and chuck. Getting there!           7th May 2015


Just had a look through the "116 things to Throw away" page.  It was a bit of a cheat, marking up another load of items as "gone" as I didn't actually go and find them and get rid of them today.

Some categories, like electronics and cables and software are nothing to do with me anyway (we have strict demarcation areas in parts of our generally cooperative life together).

The "cheat" was slight, because last weekend (or was it the weekend before - the weeks are flying past) we took about ten bags to the charity shop, and there are about another four or five already waiting to go.

Every box or bag that leaves our house cheers me up. Once we have dealt with the house itself, we can maybe summon up the courage to deal with The Attic...

Sunday 3rd May 2015 - Sour Dough Loaf F A I L*

Nothing to report on the sour dough experiment.

Just move along, please.

Well, what happened was this;

The starter did its stuff, and I added the rest of the ingredients (more flour, more yeast, more water, some salt).

 promised to let you know how I got on.

The instructions said to do all this mixing and kneading and rising stuff, so I tipped it all into the bread machine ad set it to "DOUGH"

That worked.

Then the instructions said to do more kneading, and shaping and proving and baking.

So I did the kneading and shaping and put it into the oven on the automatic "BREAD" function.

Less "hand-made", maybe - more like "machine-made with interventions"

HOWEVER; the oven claimed that it was still a bit warm - perhaps hot, even? - from cooking supper, and declined to follow the programme for "BREAD".

So after the hour for "BREAD" was up, BREAD was not what was in the oven. Sort of dough, pretty much as I had left it but quite a bit bigger. I minded a lot less than I might have done, because although it had over-flowed the sides of the baking sheet it hadn't got as far as welding itself to the glass or dripping all over the oven.

It was a fairly straightforward manouevre to fer-flopf it all into the bin without letting it fer-flopf itself all over the floor. So that bit worked fine.

No pictures, after all you should know what a bin looks like by now.

*F A I L stands for First Attempt In Learning.
If you learn by your mistakes, then OBVIOUSLY mistakes are a necessary part of learning, no?