Listen

View from my favourite step

 

This is written in response to the latest prompt from the Grow Write Guild - the theme is what your garden sounds like. If you click on the link on the bird names you will hear what I hear.

For me the optimum gardening time is early evening when everyone else is busy with dinner, going out whatever.  At this time it seems I have the neighbourhood to myself – no lawnmowers, no strimmers, no children playing.

I sit quietly on the bottom step, my favourite place and listen.

The air is dominated by the strident high-pitched whistling song of the blackbird.  He warbles in a variety of notes and if you listen very carefully you can hear another blackbird answering him.  Such a hard sound to describe but its one I love and could listen to all evening.

Behind it is the softer trill of robins, we are visited by at least two on a daily basis and they have such sweet voices.  Gentle and reassuring not as demanding and strident as the blackbird.  Between them the air is full of sound.  If you close your eyes and relax it is almost deafening.

But now there is another sound, this time a man-made one, the soft but persistent drone of a car travelling along the nearby road on its way up the hills.  It is muffled and pushed to the background by the birds – nature winning out over man.

The blackbird and robin are occasionally joined by other birds I can’t recognise possibly thrush, starling, blue and great tit – all visit the garden regularly.  The one I do recognise is the dull coo of the wood pigeon accompanied by its clumsy flapping around the large prunus tree I sit under.  For me this is a sound I associated with an evening in the garden – soft, repetitive and familiar, almost hypnotic.

Other sounds sometimes pierce the bird song – the slam of a car door, the bark of a dog, the squawk of my near neighbours chicken and sometimes the call of a cuckoo but the birds always win.

This is my favourite soundtrack to the garden, its personal, private and very special.

 

Creative Thursday: Felted Bag

Just to prove that my first Creative Thursday post wasn’t a one hit wonder here is another project finished.  This is the first thing I have crocheted that isn’t a granny square or a scarf.  Admittedly it is made up of rectangles so there is no shaping required – something I am yet to try.  The strap was entertaining as you crochet a tube going round and round and round, it grew rapidly like a mad snake and entertained the cat immensely.  I am also rather proud of the little flower on the front which I thought was going to be very hard but turned out to be simple.

The biggest dilemma I had was whether the felt the bag.  I had originally been enticed by the pattern in the Art of Crochet because of the prospect of having a go at felting but the wool, Twilleys Freedom, was so pretty and created a wonderful texture that to felt it seemed a pity.  Having recently discovered Ravelry I put my toe in the water and asked for advice.  I was promptly advised that felting would make it stronger and less like to tear so in for a penny in for a pound.  The felting was simple you just pop it on a hot wash with detergent, no conditioner, and include some old rough towels (or someone advised trainers).  I washed the tension square first to see what the effect would be.  It turned out OK so I threw caution to the wind and went for it.

I have to say that I think the result is great.  The fabric is definitely more solid and you feel it is unlikely to tear.  Sewing it up was simple although it took a few practices before I remembered how to do blanket stitch and I have to say I don’t think my finishing off inside the bag is as good as I would have liked but we live and learn.

Next up is a knitted short-sleeved summer cardigan.  I have my doubts since I haven’t knitted for a year and the last thing I knitted went horribly wrong a lot so I gave up.  Having a pile of wool sitting left over from this project and after yet more advice on Ravelry I found a pattern which looks straightforward and should work for the yarn I have.  My only slight anxiety is that I am used to knitting patterns designed for the wool I am using.  I am assured that I just need to do  tension square and adjust needle sizes and all will be well.  We shall see.  I also suspect that I will decide that I prefer crocheting to knitting.  It is so much easier especially when it goes wrong, no dropped stitches.

I will let you know how the cardigan goes – oh and that yarn is red too.  There seems to be a bit of a theme developing.

Note: Creative Thursday isn’t a meme, it’s just the heading I am using for various non-gardening projects I am doing and posting about – on a Thursday!

Monthly Photo – May 2013

January 2013

February 2013

March 2013

April 2013

What a difference a month makes. I can now tell its a Horse Chestnut tree

For more monthly photos check out Katarina’s blog Roses and Stuff

Guest post for Notcutts

I have written a short post on the Floral Marquee at the Malvern Spring Show for Notcutts – you can read it here

Product Review: PureRain Watering System

I was asked a while ago to review a new innovation for plant watering, needless to say since I received the purerain handheld gun it has rained.  However the other week the temperatures briefly warmed up and I gave it a whirl.

The concept behind the innovation is to aerate tap water.  Why? I hear you ask do I want to do this.  Rain water contains oxygen, apparently gathered as th raindrops fall through the air and this helps the plants to extract nutrients more effectively.  Plants are dependant on air and water in their cells to help them work.  In fact only this week I was reading a magazine article where the author, Bob Flowerdew, commented that watering pots with tap water wasn’t as good as rain water as it contained less air.  However, whilst many of us have water butts during a dry spell these often don’t have sufficient capacity to fulfil all our needs and if you are like me you tend to connect the hose to the outside tap through habit.

The way that the purerain system aerates the water is by colliding the fast moving water against a curved surface. This works in the same way as a weir or waterfall aerates a river. After the water has been aerated it then moves forward and out of the holes at the front of the Gun. Due to all the mains pressure being lost on impact the water doesn’t leave the gun with as much power as it would with a normal gun so you need to be close to the plants you are watering. There is an option with a long handle which I would recommend if you, like me, tend to use the hose to water plants that are difficult to reach such as hanging baskets and the back of the border. I have to admit to being somewhat sceptical about how much air you can generate in this way.  However, when we tried it out the other weekend it was quite amazing how frothy the water was and clear that it was very oxygenated.

I haven’t done any trials to see if the oxygenated water promotes better growth or not but the manufacturers claim that leafy plants will grow up to 30% larger plus because they are taking up nutrients better there is less need for fertilisers and pesticides.

I think that if you are someone who likes a gizmo and do a lot of watering using tap water then this would be worth looking at.  The prices are reasonable and you can locate a stockist through the purerain website www.PureRain.co.uk

My Garden This Weekend – 12th May 2013

I think this weekend’s gardening can be described as wet, windy, muddy with brief intervals in the greenhouse.

The big project has powered forward with the last of the turf being lifted.  This last bit was used to square off the front garden lawn and also to replace a large bare path on the grass path.  Whilst my son was turf lifting I had the job of rescuing and replanting the plants I wanted to keep from the left hand side of the slope.   This was quite tricky as the plants on the slope are all late summer perennials and so identifying which was which aster or helianthus was a challenge.  I did know that I wanted to get rid of the Helianthus Lemon Queen which dominated the slope last year, as well as a day lily which only looked good when the foliage appeared in spring, some Luzula nivea which only the cat likes and a large Achillea grandiflora which was threatening to take over.  Once these were removed it was a case of working across the slope that is going and transplanting the plants I wanted into the gaps the other plants had made.  The bulb leafs were just as challenging to identify with no flowers – at one point I thought I was digging up some blind daffodils only to discover that it was in fact an eremurus.  I tried them on the slope two years ago and they never flowered so they are getting a second chance in the new border.

The blossom on the step-over apples is about to open

My son’s next step was to remove the dry stone wall my Dad had built some years ago to hold up the slope.  We were impressed at what a good job he had done and how big the Malvern stone was once we had dragged it out from under the earth.  There is now a large pile of stone which we will use to landscape around the workshop and to do a better job of edging the new steps.  A substantial amount of top soil was removed and put onto the new border which after some racking and leveling will be ready for planting up next weekend.  There is still lots of soil and even more clay to be removed but that is now a job for bank holiday weekend.

Molopospermum peloponnesiacum

Our  efforts were frequently interrupted by the rain so I used this time as an opportunity to dive into the greenhouse and catch up with pricking out seedlings and sowing yet more seeds.  Several packets of various primulas have been sown, probably a little late, but they are in the cool greenhouse so hopefully they will get a chance to germinate before the temperatures  go up.  I pricked out violas, nicotiana, geraniums and Centaurea ‘Aloha Blanca’.  The Dahlia tubers are sprouting well with one batch far ahead of the others.  I think this is because they benefitted from some direct sunshine in the top of the coldframe whilst the others were under the greenhouse benches.

With another quick visit to the Malvern Spring show to collect plants I am feeling a little gardened out.

Malvern Show Gardens

I’m no longer much of a fan of showgardens and tend to gravitate to the nurseries and floral marquee more.  However, I thought I would have a quick look to see what was on offer this year.  Malvern has always been one of the shows where new designers can stretch their wings and have a go at doing a show garden.

In my humble and inexpert view the gardens have a tendency to be fairly safe and what you would expect but then Malvern, in my opinion, is a show for plant buyers and has an excellent reputation for the number and variety of nurseries at the show and therefore it doesn’t really need to try to attract crowds with the promise of weird and wacky designs – that is the remit of Hampton Court Flower Show.

I only had time for a quick run round, plus the press and television crews were in the way, and so this post is very  much based on a fleeting glimpse

The two photographs above are of the garden that really quite my eye and made me stop in my tracks and I believe it received a Gold award.  It is designed by Villaggio Verde a fairly local company that specialises in olive trees and other mediterranean plants.  The garden is part of a set of gardens all celebrating the Tour de France and represents a cafe in the South of France where professional cyclists have stopped for 100 years.  I liked the non-fussy planting especially around the beehives and it felt to me a fair and realistic representation where the designer hadn’t got too carried out.

Another planting that appealed to me was in the garden called, A Return to the Med designed by The Garden Design House.  I liked the textures of the planting and also the detail in the pebble pathing.  I would like to replicate this pebble pathing on my patio although I suspect it would take me ages to do and may just send me mad so this will be an idea I file away again for yet another year.

The two photographs above show the planting in a garden entitled, Single Track Mind, designed by Teresa Rham of Groundesigns;  another garden in the Tour de France group.  The intention of the garden is to represent the mental challenges faced by the road racing cyclist.  I have to confess that I never really get the deeper meanings of these show gardens but again I was attracted to the planting.  The mixtures of textures and shades of green in the photograph above and the darker shades, again in flowers and foliage, in the top photograph.  Of course we have to remember that the plants are planted far closer together than any of us would in our gardens and this is typical for showgardens where there is a pathological fear of earth showing; honestly, they can get marked down on it!

Finally, this garden appealed to me – A Room for a View designed by Alchemy Gardens.  I suspect that I am attracted to both this garden and the very top one as they are completely different to mine.  Something that I could never have in my own garden and so far more interesting to me than the cottage/woodland style gardens.  I also suspect that there is an element of escapism in them, taking us to somewhere warm, and in the case of the Alchemy Garden, tropical which couldn’t be much further removed from the cold, damp and windy show ground yesterday.

Whilst these gardens are not as unattainable for the average gardener as the showgardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show they are still something that few of us would replicate in our gardens.  However, the pundits always like to say that the average gardener can get inspiration from showgardens so what  inspiration did I get from these?  As I have said I like the pebble pathing in the Return to the Med garden and the understated green textures of the Single Track Mind garden is food for thought when planting a border where you want interest besides relying on flowers.  The Cafe garden demonstrates the impact planting en masse can have and as for the last garden again the good foliage combinations are shown but really for me I just want to paddle my feet in the pool, who needs inspiration!!