CAUGHT RED-HANDED

Forgot to get R a plain chocolate egg for Easter. So, I hard-boiled three eggs, one with pansies, one with onion skins and one with cochineal - and now I am red handed. A little deftness with  a marker pen embellished them (One with a sad face as the shell had cracked.)
Also made Easter biscuits as per the Marry Berry show on tv - they are v nice, a bit like brittle Welsh cakes.

I have been fencing - not with epees, foils and rapiers but planks, hammers and nails. The idea is to hide the veg beds etc from the house.

I have ordered a climbing rose - chose Golden Showers - and have stuck a sheep skull on top of the right hand post. This fence will become adorned as time goes on.
The blue alkathene piping you can just see through the fence is the framework for some improvised protection for the beds. Fleece early on then netting later.
This year I am determined to try and keep pests out.

Then I show you a picture of our rhubarb forcing pot with some stunted stems and leaves in the foreground. The plants inside the pot are not much bigger.

I wish to update you on the efficacy of human hair in getting rid of Moles. Gilly, it works, BUT having left its hairy run it has set up twenty feet away with a new one, more bigger mounds, more soil and so on. So more hair and hope.

Yesterday we went to the outstanding Garden Nursery run by Abi and Tom Attwood at Halecat, Witherslack - http://www.halecatplants.co.uk. We bought some plants for the new cutting bed - prices very reasonable, place spotless, a pleasure to walk around.

Back to the garden - I raked out part of the banking by the wood yesterday to clear dead grass and stuff. This revealed all the primrose plants we had divided and replanted last year.

Soon they will be out and glorious.

The third photo is of tiny taddies in the lower pond. The frogspawn is becoming a seething black mass. On the left you can see a water snail trail shaped like a hook.

Mr Pheas. in all his splendour is rooting about under the shrubs at the top of the garden. They nest there every year so he is casing the joint.

The big mower is still not out - the grass is hardly growing - but it cannot be much longer, can it?
Everything is waiting - seeds, plants, cuttings - the soil is too cold, the gardener is too cold!

April 1st tomorrow, ten weeks to the longest day and we still freeze in a Siberian wind. I wonder of Putin knows something I don't. Is this a ploy to up sales of natural gas?
Well, let me tell you Vlad. it won't work with us.
(We don't have gas.)

EARTH IS HARD AS IRON

And water like a stone.
And air like a vacuum cleaner sucking warmth from me.
Yesterday I potted up 32 Senecio (Brachyglottis greyii) and by the end my hands were like ice. You cannot do this properly in gloves. R like the shrubs and we have a patch of doing nothing so there some will go, others to Christmas Fairs, coffee mornings and so on.

R clips them early every autumn so that they are comfortably round. You can see one in right foreground  in the photograph, the writing shed, for R not me, above it and the stables over the hedge beyond that - source of the wonderful manure.

R like to clip things, not my ear 'ole, well, not often, so more and more plants are becoming shaped. Is this a topiary fetish, I wonder?

I have completed the manuring, mulching, top dressing at last having repaired the barrow wheel.
So now I have to think of new projects - a fence between the garden and the veg and fruit is on the agenda, perhaps.

So to the current topic of SNOW!
Cumbria is inundated, cut off, submerged we hear - well, not all of it. Here around Morecambe Bay it came and went quickly - there is still a bit behind the hedgerows and the occasional flurry in the air but that is all. The rabbits are out in the garden trimming the grass and birdlife everywhere. There has just been an almighty row outside my windows - fighting wood pigeons - MEN! (It could be WOMEN! but I do not think so.)

Plants are emerging despite the prolonged winter - chives by the path in the kitchen garden, day lilies in big clumps, some things? - I am not sure what they are - bulbs of some sort, I think - oriental poppy leaves and so on.

Yesterday I also wandered across the lawns and through the woodland picking up sticks - the ash trees shed all the time - and snapped them into 9" lengths for kindling for the wood burner.

The garden is like unexploded dynamite waiting for the plunger to be rammed home. We will get milder weather one day, warmth and soft rain (like you get in Ireland) - then the ground will erupt with growth.
Trouble is I am getting fed up waiting.

The pots that have had yellow pansies flowering all winter now have tulips pushing through. I think they are red - I think. I know - label things, label things, label things. But there is something special and delightful about wondering what things are and then getting a nice surprise (or not).

It is almost time to divide and plant the snowdrops - a ritual every year - divide and multiply. Half of each small clump gets moved and the snowdrop carpet spreads.

Off to town to peruse the market stalls to look for bargains for the garden. Will I buy seed potatoes - probably not - I like to grow things that are difficult to get - or expensive - if the weather will let me.
Surely it cannot be as wet this summer as last - can it?
Probably can!

sNOw GARDENING TODAY

White flakes are driving across the garden from the east, pausing and scattering in disorganised fashion, then resuming the urge to go west. Tree trunks are white on the eastern side impaled by the soft snow.
Spring is here - well, came yesterday with the equinox.

The heron has been back and now the mallard are mopping up for breakfast. They know, obviously, that I am not a very early riser. The frogs have survived under the mesh protection I put across one corner of the pond and under that are large clumps of spawn.

Now the wind is whipping the flakes up into a maelstrom, swirling, driving, eddying all at once. (Read Robert Frost's poem). The gnome has an extra hat, shawl and is slowly disappearing from the feet up. In the wood the statue of the small boy looks cold and lonely.

I have been bereft this week - how one depends on a wheelbarrow - because of a puncture. So I did the logical thing - bought a new inner tube over the internet and then mended the old one with a bicycle repair kit. Having done that I am back to more barrowing of manure. The cutting bed is now completed and ready. (Cutting for cut flowers not cuttings though you never know, I might use it for both).
I am a very much lesser form of Gorbachev having impaled my forehead on a branch of the pear tree - just a scabby patch, not a birthmark.

Still only the odd daff.

I notice in the Gazette that this weekend Dora's Fields at Rydal (William Wordsworth stuff, daffs in hosts) are open. People will enjoy all the leaves I am sure.

The walkway through the boggy area is repaired but only for this year. I am cogitating, (NO, cogitating), about getting in a lad with a digger and excavating the garden bottom, putting in  a proper liner and having a gurt pond rather than a li''le un. (Pardon lapse into local dialect).
But then I would have to get into waders rather than Wellies (capital letter for the Duke) - concrete? That is not very Eco is it? So not concrete, then bog? And let it go?
You may have noticed that my hold on English grammar has departed (not that it ever arrived). Watching the snow go around and around, (old men of Aran and such? (prize for the source of that bit of lateralness)), has confuddled me.


Pots means plants.
Hence plastic tubs waiting for carrots, upturned bottomless flowerpots with copper tape around the middle protecting the broccoli and my rhubarb forcing pot (£1 at a house sale many years ago) in the rhubarb bed.

So I have lit the wood burner, have a coffee, feet up and a bit of thrillery words - no, Paul Temple, Lee Child, Reg Hill, Ian Rankin . . . I think I will return to the ultimate fireside read with John Macnab by Buchan - and as I am on a diet - again! - a sweetener and a banana.

Bananas are 0 points! Mmm!

WHERE HAVE ALL THE DAFFODILS GONE?

Long time passing -

indeed, Mother's Day is done and only the tete-a-tetes are out. Winter draws on and all that stuff.
One day there is hope and warmth in the sun, then up I get and lazily glance out of the bedroom window and - snow!
Off I go to try and spread a little (no, not goodwill) manure but the heap is frozen solid, a rock cliff.
Phew! One job I can get out of - but not for long.
It was so cold I had a great idea - all that dead grass on the lower banking could be burned off. (For new readers I have a strimmer phobia).
So, out with the matches, I will just light this small tuft - and whoosh!
The old man is running around like a squirrel in a cage (I know what that looks like) with an upturned lawn rake batting away at the grass desperately trying to save shrubs. (Which is more than can be said for the hair on the front of his head.) (Smell of singeing locks - equivalent to a Number 0. For (most) ladies there is a haircutting device which shaves at various lengths according the the attachment on the end - Number 1 is very short, 2 a bit longer etc.)

Mind you, it worked and half the banking had its old grass removed in a few minutes. I think the other half can just stay long for now. Anyway it is finally warmer - and raining.

The last few days the pond has been frozen over so we hope the frogs are ok - they must be, anything that can spend the winter buried in the mud at the bottom must have amazing powers of survival - I know, they are frogs but could we do it?
Having said that, there are times when hibernation under a blanket of duvet is appealing - in the dark dismal days.

The first surprises have started to appear. Cyclamen by the cherry - should they be, were they not, out in the autumn?

Buds are getting impatient, breaking, then stopping for the cold, then opening a little more with some sun and so on.

White butterbur is ignoring the weather and, as usual, getting on with flowering so that its big bristly stems and leaves can do some heavy photosynthesising as soon as possible.

And the garden is so full of birds, everywhere. The policy of habitat maintenance and feeding, come rain come rain, whatever, is working. There are so many birds I wonder how they can all find nesting space.

There is one very good piece of news - the blackbird that drove us mad last year attacking its reflection in our windows has moved. Last night a neighbour informed us that they were being pestered by it!

So, in all, I have a new saying for the English language - replace waiting for the paint to dry by waiting for the hair to grow! (Not a quote from Burns.) (Hair today, gone . . . enough.)

SUPERGLUE THE CURE

One of the side effects of gardening without gloves is kins - splits in the ends of the fingers which is why I am typing, as usual with two fingers, but with the ring finger of the left hand as the thumb and first two fingers are split.
They, of course, will take time to heal but plasters come off, get wet and are pretty useless.
So - use superglue. put a little into the kin and wait for it to dry. A good skin is formed under which the finger can heal. You might need to repeat the application from time to time but it certainly takes the soreness away.
Currently there are other parts of the body aching too as I have been ramming stakes into the ground with my marl - a big metal mallet. When I ordered it I had a choice of weights for the end and picked one that was too heavy - about 14 pounds - 6.35 Kg. (The metric weight is for those of us who have managed to move on to that system.) Hence I ache!
Then our order of 2 cubic metres (!) of logs arrived and needed barrowing to the shed. I was going to do it myself but R came out and moved the lot whilst I stacked them. What a wife! We would have used our willow crop but they need another 10 years and I did not want to chop down one of our own trees.

I have put in a new length of fencing to visually separate the flower beds from the rest of the garden - it does nothing other than act as a demarkation but creates a sense of a room space by the house. There are just uprights and two horizontals.

At this juncture I was going to show you a picture of our surviving frogs - I counted over twenty in the bottom pond this morning from our bedroom window but if I get anywhere near they do a disappearing act. They are so aware - I was walking along the path by the house, 30 yards (about 27.5 metres) above the pond when they must have seen me and submerged.
I contemplated getting out the camera and tripod and remote
control but was distracted by breakfast.

The veg bed picture shows the near half with a heavy mulch of well rotted horse manure. In the far half where the sticks are, a further mulch of extremely well rotted horse manure has been added. This latter application is about 8 years old, beautiful stuff - if muck can be beautiful.
Under the wigwam of sticks a trench was dug and this was also filled with discarded horse stuff. Beans, for instance, are very hungry plants.

I am also in the process of creating a cutting bed for a  mixture of annuals, biennials and perennials - there is something wonderful in a house wrapped in scent, filled with flowers. It only needs a further topdressing of the horsey product and a path made in the middle so the flowers can be harvested without treading on the beds.
We have a vase of flowering currant in the kitchen and vases of snowdrops, primroses and small daffodils - lovely.
The garden continues to be full of surprises - the wonder of spring.

The far dry-stone wall is redolent with moss forming intricate shapes and patterns. This is also an indication of the purity of the air here. After a few days without rain, if I look out over Morecambe Bay towards Lancaster, I can see a blanket of dirty air below me. It seems to reach up about 250 - 300 feet (75-90 metres) from the sands at sea level. We are at 360 feet. (No, work it out yourself.)
Then along comes some rain and washes all this gunge away. This is one reason, I think, I love the northwest coast of Scotland and Ireland - the air is so special.
Yes, use rainwater on the garden - but it might be full of dissolved smog. Also, you might think water filtered through the earth and rock, emerging from springs might be better, perhaps it is, but it has got minerals in it. We have some arsenic in our water supply. (Just a very little.) (Might explain a few things though?)
Soft water, hard water, did not matter last year - just too much water.
It is raining today - soft rain gently soaking the world - none of the downpours we experienced last year.

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit - sometimes I do go on! (And off).

Time for some more superglue. (No, not the lips.)

HERE WE GO AND SO DO THE FROGS

Frog alert at The Nook - the heron is back and having lunch!
I covered one corner of the pond with a piece of metal grid (reinforcing grid used in concrete). I hope that will put it off - but is that truly "eco"? Should I be letting things get on with life and not interfering?
If one thinks not then no environment is not manipulated, especially a garden.
The pic was taken a year or two ago - the daffs are not yet out. (Except the tete-a-tete).

With the lack of rain the manure mulch is very dry and scattered everywhere - blackbirds and thrushes are the worst but dunnocks are at it too. 

The milder weather - well, it is still cold but warms up nicely during the day (hence the frogs) (they are amphibian and need a bit of warmth to get them active) has brought out the bunnies - we feed all here, no one turned away - rabbits, herons, blackbirds, slugs ....

I have had the MOWER out - the little one. The lower garden is still boggy but needed a skim badly. It looks so much better now. One has to make a few concessions to order, even in an eco garden.

I am still digging and manuring veg beds, have set out the bottomless plastic pots for carrots, pruned the oldest wood out of the blackcurrants, R has finished cutting back the buddleias, I have snipped the top off the beech hedge at the maximum height I wish it to achieve, edged the goosegog bed with salvaged stone, checked the grease bands on the fruit trees, cleared around the lower stream and ponds and even had time to stop and smell the flowers on the winter-flowering honeysuckle.

The snowdrops are flourishing even though the snow has gone (and will not come back, I hope).

I have given some thought to how diverse are the habitats we have in the garden. We have the lawns, veg and fruit garden and flower beds, of course, but also the wood with mature trees, bramble patch, shrubbery, stream, bog, pond, field hedge and bank, a big decaying log pile, manure heap, bird boxes, feeders, dry stone walls, rough grassland, wild flower area - and so on.

Maintaining all this takes some time - well, not the wild bits - generally they are left to their own devices yet prevented from taking over the rest of the garden. The sycamore and ash seeds would soon have the whole garden a potential woodland if nothing was done.

Every winter one forgets just how much work is involved in the garden and as I gradually fall to bits (it is called ageing) I wonder each year how long I can go on doing it. I suppose, if I stop, the whole lot will become an "eco" garden.

Yet it is variety and contrast that make the whole thing a joy, the surprises - yes, even coming face to face with the evil eye (I mean the heron).

Just glad I am not a frog.

WHITE SMOKE UP HERE

Now, do not get alarmed, I am not heading off to Rome to elect (or become) a new Pope. I am going to pontificate about bonfires.
Bonfires are strange animals - you carefully judge the direction of the breeze - it is always good to have a bit of a blow to get the bonfire roaring - light the heap (often with difficulty) and then the wind direction veers and suffocates your neighbours, makes their washing smell and covers it in smuts.

Well, I lit our two heaps at the far end of the garden - before the blackbirds built in them (One flew out as I approached) and after disturbing the structure and checking for hedgehogs - and away they crackled. Around came the wind and sent the smoke next door.

The principal picture is of the far top part of the garden in the wooded area and shows one of our streamlets (open drains) running down to the main stream.

I am still barrowing muck - nuff said.

The garden is getting tidier and the stream has almost dried up through LACK OF RAIN!!! The mower is nudging the shed doors and trying to escape - and it is only March.

Went out for lunch to a place down by the estuary and they are eating their rhubarb! Our plants are struggling to get out of the ground, even under the forcing pot. Of course there is still plenty of rhubarb here in the house (on this page) etc.

Ewedini, the farmers great climbing sheep has been in the garden again. It comes over the wall in the far corner (knocking half of it down) and then wanders around with a face which seems to say, 'What are you doing in my garden?' Cheek!
Barbed wire is now coiled across the corner, wall rebuilt - we will see how it goes. It will soon be time for the lamb gang to escape into the track up to the house. I tried to fix the gap under the fence by repositioning a post and marling it in more firmly - nearly drove the thing through out underground electricity cable! The black line was only three inches below the surface! Shocking work.

And of flowers - snowdrops, small daffs, crocus, odd daisies and celandines, promise of much more to come. At this time of year with low sun much is backlit like the Acer sango-kaku and the witch hazel. There are still some teasels left on the lower banking and they catch the light beautifully.

I stepped out this morning - a beautiful, calm, sunny, warm day - and a skein of geese went over heading for the Duddon - magical. The garden is full of birdsong. The pond is full of frogcroak. How an earth do we survive the dark days of winter?

It all makes me feel good to be alive and part of this amazing world.

A LITTLE HEAVEN

It has not rained for a week and looks set fair!
Here I am talking about lack of rain - for once.
Having said that, the lawn in the lower garden is still sodden and a no go area.
R and I out pruning some of the buddleias yesterday - yes, I know it may be a mite early but the sun was out and so were we.

We have our first wild primroses and the stinking hellebore (Helleborus foetidus) has been in flower for a week or more.
The Witch Hazel is in full flower (and scent), roses are beginning growth and the aquilegias are uncurling their leaves from the compost and manure.

The buddleias are all over the garden - outside the kitchen window where they give cover to the birds at the feeders, around the septic tank and as a hedge on the banking. On the banking they are pruned very short at the banking top and then longer as one descends the slope, so that the top is level. For several months the birds do lose their queuing bush by the kitchen and the septic tank becomes rather visible.

There are snowdrops everywhere and the first crocus, planted on the top banking, are appearing. Locally there is an area known as the purple pasture for its carpet of spring crocus. I know I might need thousands of crocus or a hundred years to emulate that - and I am a bit fogeyed - but one has to start somewhere.

Last autumn the grass on some of the banks was too wet to strim and had to be left.
So now I have decided to burn some of it off and this proved successful but a bit scary when a breeze blew up - had to dash around with a shovel bashing out the burn to protect shrubs about which I had forgotten.

I have repaired the steps up into the wood - nothing sophisticated, just some pressure treated planks sawn up and held in place with two or three stakes.

The manure man keeps traipsing, keeps mulching. I have transplanted errant white campanulas that seem to have spread over a large area of one of the flower beds. There was so much that, in the end, I dumped some of it by the far wall - where it will survive (or not).

Ah! Goldfinches outside my window - a little heaven, as is the garden when it is still, breathless and basking in early spring (late winter) sun. I can almost hear the grass growing, the buds unfurling in joy after the long wet, cold, dark months.

The winter is coming to an end, though we did have snow flurries yesterday, and I am waiting for the final sign that winter is over - only about six weeks to go - then the chatter will begin again and the sky will fill with swallows.

As I said, a little heaven.

FROG BLOG, SPRING SPRUNG

Spawn to Pond 2 en passant!

We have our first frogspawn. R was in her shed (The Wendy House) and heard strange noises coming from the pond. It was all of a commotion. She crept nearer and the frogs disappeared into the mud - but - left behind our first spawn. No doubt the mallard and herons will be here soon - for a snack.

And now I realise I have put off the refurbishment of the ponds too long. I will have to isolate the area with the spawn before draining the rest or move the spawn from one pond to the other.

Last night the song thrush was trebling from the big sycamore - it has returned again from its winter holiday abroad.
And this morning, early, a blackbird was fluting from the old ash.
This warm snap has brought everything on.

Before that there was snow and dark evenings.
The snowdrops seem to have loved the weather last year. We did divide and replant in the green and they have thrived.
The pulmonaria is out as is the mahonia. We have a small scraggy plant at the woodland edge but have been given a beautiful specimen by our son-in-law's parents. The spot is picked but I will delay planting it until the ground is softer - hard frost last night.
Panic - birds scattering, one into the study window - sparrowhawk on a hedge-skimming attack but all have escaped.

The mist has risen and gardening deferred - too nice not to walk - perhaps to town and back separated by a coffee.

We have been given some purple tulips by I and A - to pot or not to pot? I will have to think about what to plant with them and what colour.

I have decided to convert one of the veg beds to a cut flower one - this will mean lots of preparation - shifting more manure. Mind you, those who have read my previous blogs will realise I can shift plenty, even if only in writing.

The manure heap from which I barrow is enormous - see image.

Now, I mentioned how some plants have done well from the weird weather last year - well, moles! They are everywhere casting up their mounds of soil. I do not think I have seen such a proliferation.

Perhaps I could borrow my friend's dog to have a go at them, but not yet, it is only a puppy - a cockerpoo!

Ah! Yes - another way of getting rid of moles has come my way - sticking a stem of rhubarb down the holes in the hills. That would be fine but the rhubarb is only three inches tall even in the big forcing pot.

Another friend just said to get some traps.
Perhaps he needs a new waistcoat?

TALES OF LAWNS, PONDS AND A HOT CROSS BUN

So, there we were, staring out of the bathroom window at the banking under the flowering currant (still dormant) and gazing at an earthwork, an adit to somewhere newly dug.

We had wondered where the rabbits had got to - even in winter, if the weather is mild, they come out to feed. Now we know.

So up in the bushes and block up the nascent warren. It was not nearly deep enough for there to be anyone down there. The bunny will try again, and again and get hot and cross hence the title.

The snowdrops are in full flower now and replanting them in the green last year to extend the spread has worked.

R is looking at catalogues, I am looking at the old bank balance - no seriously a packet of seed is so much better value than a few seedlings.

We have been invaded by the twitterers agin - long-tailed tits - clustered on the feeders.

I am still barrowing manure up from the horses - if the amount of this I have put on the garden is anything to go by we should buried in vegetation come July.

At the end of the big shed I have fixed a large square of concrete reinforcing mesh as trellis, dug over the soil - and manured it - and planted a Clematis armandii  with a red honeysuckle on each side.

This we can see from the kitchen.

I wish to mention our forlorn lawns. The appalling weather this year has resulted in the death of grass. There are bare patches, areas of moss and creeping buttercup. Reeds are growing in the lower garden where it is still wet. The extent of the damage is beyond me spiking and topdressing such a large area. In the end there may have to be some scarifying and reseeding - and some praying for dryer weather. Mowing will have to start with the light machine to avoid too much damage.

The photo shows the stream and ponds 7 years ago before we had created the garden, house just built. Now they are overgrown. The ponds need restructuring or even turning into a stream! With so much water coming down the stream from the back field silt has made the water too shallow. The water lily is sitting on a muddy bank.
Now, I could dig them out, reline them and wait for them to fill up with silt again but is that the best solution? It is so much simpler with a pond not on a source of running water.
Mmm! I seem to have water on the brain!

HAIR TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW

And I am going cu-cu?
Can't shift manure at the moment - just tweaked my back pushing human hair down mole holes. (Trying to turn the compost did not help much either.)

Why the title - don't know really - time for a pome reflecting on the glorious summer of 2012 :-

WHAT SUMMER?

Summer is a-going out,

loud sang no cuckoo,

strewn - no seed, no sweet

mead brewed, leaves fall,

water springs anew

through our sodden wood.

It rains, it rains 

again, rindle drips collide,

pipes gather shadows,

throw down torrents,

besprent the yard. 

The garden weeps for the sun.

Three amelanchiers are dead

drenched by the flooding rill,

mildew’s white hyphae 

blight the meadowsweet.

We dream of drought

now summer is a-going out.

This has so much internal rhyme it would make the compost heap turn itself.

Actually line two is a lie - I did hear a cuckoo here once last spring.

The garden does have colour in early February - apart from snowdrops and so on - is white a colour?

Most of it is in leaves but the hamamelis (we have an orange one) is flowering and spreading scent, shoots are appearing everywhere and the grass is greening.

At this rate, ground permitting, I will be mowing by March and the beds will not all be manured (because of my back).

I am now finding out where I planted daffodils in the autumn for, as usual, I have neither kept a record nor labelled them.

There are lots coming up by the far dry-stone wall and along the willow tunnel - shown above.

Unfortunately the sides of the tunnel have also sprouted a plethora of mole mountains - hair to the rescue.

The ranunculus in the old earthenware sink is sprouting and tulips are pushing up through the yellow pansies in the pots.

I do not think I have seen so many tiny figs on the bush as this spring - we need a good summer up here though to stand any change of figs stuffed with cream cheese and cooked - Yum!

Until today I had not seen Mr Phez (cock pheasant) around but he is back - the ladies must be looking attractive again. He is prowling by the rough shrubbery at the top of the garden where they nest every year.

So, I will have to keep a watch on the moles and hope that 'hair today, gone tomorrow' actually happens.

Hot bath or watch the Rugby.

Could I record the Rugby and have an early bath?

Why not!

BIRDS, FLOODS AND SHEEP (ONE)

I was counting the birds for the RSPB this morning. Then they all suddenly disappeared! Last year it was a Kestrel, this year I suspect Megatron the neighbour's black cat. Fortunately they came back and in addition to the usual we had our tree sparrows and a pair of bramblings.
The survey over, I am looking out of my window - there are long-tailed tits on the feeders and a greater-spotted woodpecker in the old ash tree! Such is life.

The snow has done its damage, (we had 15cm (Wow! Metric)), - snapped a branch off the Magnolia grandiflora, flattened a rhododendron (it will sprout again from the stump). It rained all night and it is above freezing and now we have floods again. Water, water everywhere and not an albatross in sight.

To top it all one big sheep has found our grass is greener and climbed over the wall in the far corner where the fence abuts up against it, managed to knock part of the wall down too. So, wellies on and out I go before breakfast with some barbed wire and do a temporary repair. However, sheep are resourceful and agile. I will not be at all surprised to see it back in the garden. At least it was on its own.

Despite the snow there is still some shape and colour in the garden. The miscanthus is blowing in the wind now but yesterday was heavy with the snow, the brown colours contrasting with the white.

I am still staying off the lawns as far as I can and definitely off the upper banking as the snowdrops are just coming out and the whole area is peppered with daffodil shoots.

Now I have just seen three female pheasants ambling up the woodland path!
Maybe they are here because of the peanuts - the damp had got into the feeders so I emptied the contents on the grass and refilled with fresh dry nuts.
Even if the birds do not take them the wood mice will be nipping out and carrying them off.

I searched the garden for tracks but apart from the bird trampled areas under the feeders nothing - except sheep. We have had a fox, rabbits and even bullocks in the past but today nothing. The voles have tunnels under the snow in the longer grass - a network of paths out of sight of predators.

Bullocks in a garden are a disaster - they trample everywhere leaving deep hoof marks for yours truly to fill in and seed.

Now the rooks have arrived.
Where were they an hour or so ago?

Sigh!

Oh! Yes - on my blogsite, darbishire@blogspot.co.uk, I now have a sign in facility in the top lefthand corner. Wonderful thing sons! There are 300 blogs on there!

SLUGGERY, SNAILERY, ROOKERY, MARMALADERY

Let us hope this cold spell has reduced the sluggery that goes on in the garden every year. Plants are not safe out in the summer. There they are enjoying a mild day, thinking about their flowers and fruit, when suddenly this slimy gang creep out and chew hell out of them - I call it sluggery.
This is not the same as snailery. They do not hide underground and ambush vegetation - they are more obvious, not so sneaky. Snailery is not the same as sneaky sluggery.

The paths are gravelled, the fallen wood and twigs collected, more muck barrowed and spread despite the frost and snow. Actually we have not had that much here, maximum 3". I did not even get the toboggan out and there was not enough for an igloo. We have had our tragedies with a couple of small bird deaths - this is a window hit from a blue tit and I found a dunnock frozen in a flower bed.

Our buzzard dropped in but was soon harassed into dropping out again by the rooks. I suppose that is a case of rookery?

Today has been Seville Day - I have been making this year's Marmalade. Old recipe, Sadie's Best. I may have blogged this a year or so ago but for the G&G Garden bloggers, here it is again. (I know this is last years batch so do not look too closely at the labels.)

9 Seville Oranges
8 lbs Sugar,
9 pints water if softening on top of cooker (I do it in the simmering oven of the Aga with the lid on so only 6 pints water).
2 lemons
1 sweet orange,
yield 14 lbs or so.

(You can see I am not Metric Man)

Cut up fruit, squeeze out juice, tie pips in a muslin bag, and any other bits.
Cut up peel and put through mincer (have old Kenwood).
Put juice and peel in big jam pan and add water.
Put pips and bits in muslin bag and hang in pan.
(NOTE: I need to do it in two lots so need to divide bits into two bags.)
Boil up without sugar and simmer for 1-2 hours till peel soft and transparent.
Now I divide it in two and add half sugar (warmed in bowl in oven).
Stir from time over gentle heat till dissolved, then boil hard, lid off, for 10-12 minutes.
Put jars in bottom oven with lids on a baking tray.
Test regularly by taking off heat and putting a teaspoonful on a saucer. I put the saucers in the freezer to make them cold and speed up the testing.
When you push your finger into test sample and it wrinkles it is ready!
Fill hot jars and screw on tops straight away. As the marmalade cools it vacuum seals the lids. No need for waxy discs and rubber bands and such.

A bit of a faff but once a year should be enough except for extremely avid marmalade consumers, those with a marmalade waistline.

CHIPPINGS OFF AN OLD BLOKE

What can you do when the ground is frozen? We are just above the snow line here at 365 ft and all is rock hard. First wear gloves, two or three pairs of socks (except then you cannot get your wellies on), several old jumpers and so on.
Of course what I do is go out in one pair of socks, a good pair of trousers and a good shirt and get really mucky. R has given up.

So, four tons of Burlington blue slate chippings are barrowed onto the garden paths to repair the damage done by last year's weather. We could have had welsh purple chippings or green slate ones but the blue is less intrusive.
The path edges have rotted and new ones are being put in. Steps need to be remade, not, this time, with discarded scaffolding planks but I have found a cheap source of pressure treated fence posts. So, sawn up into lengths of about two feet, they can be used as the risers, pegged well and then infilled behind with soil and the chippings. I have abandoned the wood chip path through the wood as the surface rotted (especially this year) in a few months. Stone, I hope, will last longer.

Another victim of the rain was our electric gate at the bottom of the track. (R insisted she did not want to get out in the rain to open and shut it so it was one luxury we indulged in when we built the house.) The water has affected the motor and penetrated the seals. The paper lady arrived one day, popped the paper through the letterbox and then could not get out! Trapped by a shut gate. As it was very early it was a pyjamas under trousers job.

The track will need repairing, the ponds will need redigging, lining and the boardwalk repairing. Bankings are rough as all was so wet in the late summer and autumn that strimming was not possible. As the daffs are coming up any cutting back will have to wait until July at the earliest so they can build up their bulbs for next year.

It always amazes me how much wood falls off our ash trees. we have been collecting it and storing it under cover.

And the muckwork goes on, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow up from the horse heap off the lane below the house.
Hard work but one of the secrets of a garden which bursts with growth later in the year.
Whilst we were watching the rain the creeping buttercups have been having a field day, well a buttercup field day - tough to extract their clawing roots.

And, much of the lawn areas are still out of bounds,
boggy and soggy, the grass sparse, (I'm a poet and don't know it).

First buds on the snowdrops and the mahonia coming into flower and woodpeckers pecking nuts at least mean we are the right side of the dark days. The world is waking - which is more than can be said for myself.
I have found a cure for insomnia - sleep!
No, the cure is shifting manure, heaps of manure.

And now is the time to try Cousin G's mole disperser again - out with the human hair and down the molehole it goes.

MUCK, MIST AND MAGAZINES

I am a fogey in a fog - a cold chilling fog - it penetrates to the
bone. The trees are long-limbed ghosts, dripping in the mizzle.
Everything is still, so still that the movement of a bird stands out and draws the eye.

The shifting of horse manure goes on, day after day, one barrow pushed up the steep hill from the muck mountain in the corner of the horse field by the gate. Now I am clearing the dead remnants of plants from the flower beds ahead of the spreading and loading up the compost bays. The grasses, miscanthus and stipa, are left and look good - fountains of light brown against the grey of the day.

Yesterday I had an urgent telephone call from my Grandson - he had been out walking and found a fossil in a stone. So, out I go to the garden and root amongst the many pieces of stone gathered from all the places we have visited. I find a good fossil, clean it and put it with the gathering collection of bits and pieces to take down to him and his sister (and his parents) when we go later this winter to grandchild sit, (not on them).

The chipping paths in the garden have suffered with the rain and are muddy. A new layer was needed so two large builders' bags of blue slate chippings were delivered late yesterday - lorry too big for our narrow gate and so on of course despite warnings. The sacks now sit atop a low wall (easier to fill the wheelbarrow from above) waiting for muscle power (he comes on Monday).

The rain eased, the water level in the stream has fallen to reveal mud and silt washed down from the field and filling the two ponds - more digging needed!

Just once since the beginning of the year (perhaps twice) has the sun shone. Then it lights up the pansies in the pots - a success. So is the sarcococcus by the door where its scent wafts over me each time I pass. I put the winter-flowering honeysuckle on the banking - this was a mistake. it needs moving to somewhere I can smell that as well.

So, what can one do when the days are drear and the darkness pervades all?
The woodburner can be lit, a mug filled and magazines - such as the three shown - read, and catalogues perused.
R has said that we do not need more plants, we have more than enough.
I wonder if she knows I have twelve catmints and twenty senecios (whoops brachyglottis now) rooting in the shed?

I did not put in any more wallflowers in the autumn, the slugs ate the lot, but have noticed last year's are coming into bud already. They are now small shrubs with woody stems.

So from the fogey in the fog, here are good wishes to all for the New Year.
(ps. 6 month scan OK, next check in July)

Yesterday I sat out in the chill for an hour waiting for the delivery of the chippings and it just felt wonderful to be alive, a very small part of this fantastic thing called Earth, a part of the magic, listening to birds call and distant voices across the fields, feeling the sharpness of the air on my face, to be happy.

THE NEW YEAR RESOLVED?

Ah! Here I am again, full of resolutions - to lose weight after the feasting and to do something in the garden every day I can no matter how small. Having said that I have been pinned to the computer, if not by the rain, by the fact that, in my wisdom (HA!) I upgraded to the Latest Mountain Lion system for the Mac. It was only £13 - was - but then Photoshop was incompatible, scanner was too, half the things did not work and I have had to sort it out - sigh!

This has nothing to with gardening - only blogging.

The sheep are in the field in front of the house and now we are in the dark mornings after Christmas everything seems rather monochrome.

However there is a big flower bud on the Fatsia, the last roses of summer are still flowering, grasses such as Miscanthus have taken on a warm brown colour and bulbs are beginning to push through the soil - daffodils and snowdrops, the latter especially. The image shows the first snowdrops flowering by the Wendy House path at the end of last January.

Now a new year is coming and surprises - 'I had forgotten I planted that!' - self-sown seedlings - especially aquilegias and opium poppies.
The birds are singing too - twittering long-tailed tits, a robin in the ash nearest the house, great tits and collared doves, the coo-ee of the goldfinches t They know something is afoot.

It is during these dark days between Christmas and my mother's birthday that motivation is hard but the birds must be fed, the blogger must begin to starve and plans developed.
The paths need re chipping, the compost turning, dead growth removing, overgrown plants thinning, cuttings tended, and the garden needs walking - each time new ideas, things to be done come forth, wood fallen of the trees collected and added to the bonfire that never burned - too sodden.
Can I face the disaster of the veg this year with the incessant rain - can I find a way round it - the beds to be raised more, domed to aid water run off, be more selective in choice of veg - and will the asparagus have survived all this water?

It is time to be positive!!

So I shall light the wood burner, get a mug of something hot and contemplate all that I have just said and bury myself for the last few moments of this year.

Then . . . . . 

A STREAM OF THOUGHT

By popular request or something here is a bit about our drain/stream/torrent.

It rises from the back field and runs through the rough area in the top western corner before plunging down a banking into the garden area proper.

This banking is rough but has golden saxifrage, wild bluebells and daffodils in the spring, wild angelica and grasses later in the year.

We cut/strim/clear it once a year.

From there it runs beside the veg beds and the compost heaps (or through them at present with this appalling year) and on into the far lawn.
As time has gone by it has cut itself a deeper and deeper bed but this still cannot cope with the volume of water coming out of the field today.

In the picture you can see the white Birches in front of the far wall. There are clumps of daffodils either side of the stream by its bank and under the trees. Later in the year the underplanting of the trees is mostly Ox-eye Daisies.

I have just been up the garden and the water is flowing freely everywhere, the turf is sodden and still it rains.
You can understand that the soil (Lois backwards)(Happy Christmas) is unworkable - even some of the leeks seem to be floating. (I have a Krik in my neck and a plethora of Grandchildren hunting me.)

To continue - after the lawn the way is through a wild area with teasels, yellow rattle, ragged robin and bedstraw to the top settling pond. This is shown in the picture with the boardwalk wending its way to the Wendy House (R's writing shed). In the water are watercress and reedmace. The shrub to the left is my one surviving amelanchier - the other two have drowned. The hedge to the field below the garden is on the right.

In the far corner the water plunges down a ten foot fall into next door's field. When the stream is in spate you can hear the water roaring as it drops out of the garden.

With all the good food around it seems a pity that fat is not water soluble - I could just stand in the rain for a while rather than diet. Mind you, with this year's weather I would have dissolved and disappeared long ago.
Mmm! I have a feeling there are some people already doing a rain dance.

So this is Christmas,
and what have I done, (in the garden - not a lot),
rain isn't over
and it's not much fun.
Wishing you all - a wonderful Christmas time.