PAINTING, SACKS AND BOOT-WEARING

Fiona Clucas is up the garden at this moment doing my Christmas present. I am rurally looking forward to this - see not about wood and photo below.

Let me start with a load of old plastic sacks - these are the tulips evicted from the spring pots and bagged up until they die back. Then the best bulbs can be stored until next year.

One of the emptied pots was the one made from a hot water cylinder we bought at Canon Frome last year. This has been bedded with annuals.

So from sacks to boot wearing - this is the parsley, unfortunately beginning to grow successfully. I say unfortunately because of the old saying that where the parsley grows well the lady of the house wears the boots.
I do not really mind as she has always worn the boots and I like parsley. (Had to put that in.)

Today I have been fighting the weeds which I had left far too long. Bindweed and the odd grassy weed I am used to, creeping buttercup is a real PAIN!!! and now we have been invaded by common vetch, latin name vicia - so you can see where the word vicious came from. It has entwined itself through the saxifrages and amongst the white campanula.
I filled two wheelbarrows with the stuff.

The aquilegia are again fantastic and the deep purple ones put into a vase with the overwintered campanulas - the big orange ones - are a great together.
I love purple and orange together but they are not complementary colours - like red and green. Orange goes with blue and yellow the one for purple (or magenta.)
Anyway I like the two together.
Be bold, I say, be bold.

This morning I got out of bed and took a leisurely look up the garden and there, down by the asparagus was a RABBIT!
Here we go again.

Up in the wood the wild flowers are just magical, especially in the early morning light, wrapped in bird song and before the breeze gets up.
Early or late can be the best time to walk the garden.

Coming back from the wood towards the house our chappie is still reading his book by the ash tree. At least the weather is warmer now.

And then around the front of the house the clipped shrubs are getting too big - lovely shapes but a hack back will be called for later in the year. The greys are Brachyglottis and the yellow one a something else - It will come to me one day.

The lower photo shows how it was six years ago in the early days.
What a change time a (and a load of well rotted horse manure) can do.

It is a pittosporum.

I have just read Gardeners World Mag. and sent off four images to their readers' photos page - well you never know. (Perhaps I do.)

So Chelsea Flower Show is over. I did not watch it all on the TV - talk about overkill - and anyway I am not interested in hyper-manicured plots, things that cost tens of thousands of pounds, gadgets that every gardener should have but will never use. (I call this Lakeland Plastics Syndrome - the things one has to have but will never use more than once.)(Our ice cream maker sits in the Utility conceding defeat to a plastic tub from the supermarket.)

Totally disconnected thought - somebody needs to make an efficient, quiet and light to handle strimmer.

Thought over.

We had asparagus for lunch - but only two spears were our own - the rest were from the supermarket - and tasted poor compared to our own. I have decided to try and restore the asparagus by moving it, and getting some new stock, to another bed. This one will have better drainage and a lot of grit and sand in the soil to make it lighter. I remember as a young man the plant growing wild back of the dunes near Southport.

Perhaps I will divide and move the rhubarb to the existing bed to revitalise that. It has become overcrowded.

Perhaps I will not?
Perhaps I will have a cup of - no - a glass of beer!
Yes, that is it, beer.
Two barrows of weeds - I have earned it.