Garden epiphanies

Posted by louisa on Monday 18 June 2012 in growing | 3 comments

Since deciding to have a ‘less is more’ approach this year (and being further encouraged on that path by seeds rotting in the soil and later by slugs), I’ve not felt overwhelmed by the garden this year and it’s given me the mental space to make bigger picture/longer term plans too. Both good things.

I keep finding myself having epiphanies about How It Should Be or eureka moments, when a number of different ‘problems’ click together into a pattern to solve them all. Mostly just little things like spotting the perfect place for a much wanted extra fruit tree, figuring out what to do with some of the surplus of lavender plants (two self-watering window boxes on the balcony, under the living room window – will smell fab!) or realising that it makes sense to put my not-totally-hardy herbs in my not-totally-hardy (terracotta) pots, since I’d have to protect them in a harsh winter anyway.

The latter decision led to a bit of a cascade – if the herbs are going in there, what will happen to the lingonberry and cranberry bushes that are already in there? Well, the lingonberry is a nice shape and would look good as a full stop at the end of the ground-level bed – I’d just been wondering what to put there. And I thought the long-fronded cranberry would look good tumbling off a raised stone-walled bed – I’ve got some scrap stone and thought I’d make a new small bed between two existing ones just for it, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon … then I realised if the herbs were going in the pots, there was now a space in the ‘herb’ bed which is conveniently at the top of a tumbledown-able wall… Perfect!

The best thing is that nearly all the stuff I’m doing at the moment is with perennials so I won’t need to do it again next year. Trying to plant a few garden with annual veggies each year has been too much for grasshopper-minded me. The biggest ‘bigger picture’ decision I’ve made is to have all the beds in the garden, bar two raised ones, filled with herbs or fruit bushes so if I don’t do any annuals veggies one year, we’ll still have a productive, and well-stocked, garden. This year, because of the “less is more” and the slugs, we’ve got quite a few empty containers but I’m that not bothered because they can be stacked out of the way and the planning/perennial planting gains have been worth the smaller harvest. And if I can be bothered, there are still some thing I could sow now to fill in the empty spots anyway.

Basically, in short, I’m really glad I decided to have an easy growing year this year because it should make future years easier too.

Have you done anything different with your garden this year?

Adding to our vintage crockery collection with a charity shop bargain

Posted by louisa on Monday 11 June 2012 in charity shopping | 5 comments

We had a good charity shop score on Saturday – 4 little plates and two bowls for £1, all in perfect condition, from one of the charity shops in Shipley (which is the place to charity shop these days – all the cool kids are doing it).

Not only is that a pretty decent bargain by itself, it’s an especially good score as it’s in the classic 1970s Bacchus by Kilncraft design – which is “our” vintage pattern.

It was one of those everywhere patterns in the late 1970s-early 1980s and my mum & dad had a set – I remember it vividly from my early childhood, especially as it regularly turned up as props on TV shows back then (which, as a small child, is enough to make you feel special by association).

Here is a picture of me at about 18 months, Christmas 1980, with one of the Bacchus dishes on the table in front of me (bottom right corner):

We stole acquired what remained of my mum & dad’s set a few years ago (including that dish from the picture) and have slowly been adding to it with charity shop finds over the last few years. A milk jug here, a couple of bowls there. A couple of years ago, we found the remains of another family’s set in a charity shop in Armley – dinner plates, side plates and cups – on a white background instead of the mustard, but that was close enough for us (and they’re the ones I tend to use when taking food pictures). And we get items from other sources too, for example, just a few months ago, John’s mum found a few more not-quite-dinner plates at her mum’s house so we’ve added them to our pile.

I’m not very much into collecting things because special collected items tend to end up as unused Sunday best but they are very much in everyday use here so it’s fun to find these items as we go about our travels – especially when they’re cheap or free. Coffee cups and individual dinner plates often pop up on eBay for £5+p&p or so but that misses the point for me — the hunt or rather the stumbling-upon is half the pleasure. The other half of the pleasure is, of course, still using perfectly good crockery that is as old as me and will probably still be usable in another 30 years time :)

Do you have anything in particular that you collect or look out for in your charity/thrift/op shop adventures?

The end of May already? Gosh!

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 29 May 2012 in chickens, growing, house, meta | 6 comments

I disappeared again, didn’t I? Thanks so much to the people taking the time to check on me in comments/via Twitter/in real life etc – I am fine, just been busy and then being lazy ;) I have been keeping up with other people’s blogs (reading if not always commenting), just not getting around to writing anything myself :)

What have I been up to since I was last writing regularly in February? (Cor, that was ages ago!) Here’s a quick recap for FutureMe and anyone else who might be interested (hi Mum!) ;)

Growing

Due to the aforementioned busy-ness and laziness, I decided to go for a less-is-more approach with my growing this year. Then about half my seeds rotted in the soil (thanks for the sudden winter-temperatures in April, Weather, really thaaaaaaaanks) so it turns out I’m doing a very-much-less-is-more thing this year ;)

I’ve got a handful of courgette plants (three varieties) and a few pattypan squash/pumpkin plants too — not a huge amount but I think I’d struggle to find room for many more in our garden (silver linings and all that!). I thought all my tomato seeds were going to rot in the soil so asked for half a dozen plants from my dad (who always grows too many tomato plants) — but at the last count, about a dozen of my seeds made it too so again, I’ve got enough plants for my small growing area. I’ve also got broad beans & runner beans in decent quantities, and a few other things such as a few cucumbers, some chilli plants, some new-this-year herbs and misc salad. It’s not going to feed us throughout the summer but it’s better than nothing — and I’ve very much enjoyed not being overwhelmed by having to pot on stupid amounts of seedlings etc. Everything seems a lot healthier too since I can lavish attention (and other resources) on the few, rather than spreading it around the many.

The thing that led my initial less-is-more idea was a decision I made a couple of months ago to switch all but two of the garden beds to being perennial fruit or herb beds: I’ll grow veg in the remaining two beds and in all the containers I have around the place (and continue to make), but if I don’t get around to planting a lot of veg one year then we’ll still have a garden that is relatively productive and looks quite nice too (compared to bare soil anyway). With the exception of a couple of strawberry plants that got attacked by chickens (thanks chickens, thaaaaaaaaanks), all the fruit planting I’ve done this year seems to have gone well – I bought more cheapy fruit bushes from Aldi in the winter (2 more blackcurrants, 2 more redcurrants, 3 more raspberries), which have all taken, and various strawberries to fill out the soft fruit harvest throughout the summer. None of those will really produce much this year but last year’s cheapy bushes, not so cheap bushes & trees and strawberries are all producing some fruit, and we’re hoping that John’s apple trees will also start producing in earnest too.

Chickens

The fluffy cluckers are doing fine – producing eggs like billy-o at the moment, nearly a 100% lay rate over the past few weeks which isn’t bad considering they’re all over 2 years old now. No sign of any broodiness yet this year, even in the hot spells, which has so far put any hatching plans I might have on hold. Maybe next year.

They seem to have liked all the dry weather of late – their run was a bit muddy in April but now the dry earth is perfect for scratching and dust-bathing in. They like the rest of the garden for the same reason – hence me losing some strawberry plants.

Goals for 2012

Mischevious chickens

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 10 April 2012 in chickens, growing | 7 comments

After a bit of a blogging holiday, I intended to write a puntastic post about how both this blog and the garden were “springing back to life”. My laziness at the end of last year – leaving lots of salad go to seed then not clearing away the pots – has meant that we’ve got various self-seeded leaves popping up all over the place (including some well established swiss chard plants which didn’t die off during the mild winter) in addition to all the fruit bushes/trees getting their blossom on. But then (overly-dramatic music) … HENS HAPPENED:

Oh hello there garden wrecker.

I thought I’d let the girls out to have a scratch about/weed the garden while I pottered in the greenhouse – sowing lots of seeds (although not as many as previous years) and potting on some other stuff:

Within minutes though, those surviving swiss chard plants were reduced to this:

Some of the other self-seeded edibles in the lower bit of the garden were also munched, and my daffodils were duly stomped on:

She was happy destroying them until she realised there were strawberry plants in the trough underneath that.

You can see her going “ooh! they’ll be fun to stomp!”. I don’t mind about the daffodils – which weren’t up to much anyway – or the general mess they cause flicking top soil everywhere but I shooed her off the strawberries. That hen, Ginger, then went over to investigate what Ms Mauve was up to:

Quietly eating bittercress. I looked away for a second and heard a wing-flapping kerfuffle:

Ginger had tried to jump onto a big soil filled plant tub but it had fallen over. She, of course, took the opportunity to have a scratch through it for anything tasty before going off to cause chaos elsewhere. Elsewhere eventually turned out to be next-door-but-one’s garden with her fellow Black Rock partner in crime, Blacksy — and they’re the two that don’t like being picked up so I had to do comedy cross-garden chicken chasing to get them back home.

Some of them are more darling though. I was sowing the last of my tomatoes (late, I know) in the greenhouse when I heard a quiet little “can I come in?” buck-buck.

Little Blue jumped into the greenhouse and had a good look around – under the staging, on the staging, pecking at old growbags etc – all the while seemingly asking me questions: “is this your coop? where are the roost bars? where are the nest boxes? can I eat those seeds?” Very sweet. (And no, she couldn’t.)

How I lead a green and frugal life by Lily-dog

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 6 March 2012 in Featured, meta | 12 comments

It’s two years to the day since we brought Lily-dog home so I asked her to put some words together about how she leads a simple, green & frugal life with us.

Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Sorry, got a bit overexcited there, I do like meeting new people. Would you like me to bring you a shoe? Because I can go and get one if you like? Here! Here’s a shoe. I hope you like it. It’s my shoe. Don’t try to take my shoe! I like shoes!

Ok, ok, I’ll put the shoe down and start telling you what you want to hear. I’m not quite sure what the female feedy-huggy one has asked of me because I am a dog but I’ll try my best and will try very hard not to randomly woof. Although I am told I enunciate my woof splendidly, with a proper “wuh” at the beginning and everything. Wuh-oof.

So, yes, I have lived here for two years now and I think I lead a pretty green & frugal life. Well, a white-and-brown frugal life.

I grow my own fur so I don’t need clothes – 12 items in ’11? Pff! I had less that 12 items of clothing in 11 years! – and my fur can be composted when I don’t need it any more. I am also more than happy to snuggle underneath a duvet or a blanket too for extra warmth, no need for gas-guzzling central heating.

I do not – NOT!NOT!NOT! – like going in the car because they are expensive and noisy and sometimes involve journeys to the vets which are expensive, noisy and sometimes involve injections. If I had my way the tail-less ones would get rid of the car and we’d just walk everywhere we needed to go. Because the only place we need to go is the woods, right? Definitely NOT the vets, just the woods.

I like the woods. They are at the bottom of my garden. Walking in the woods is my favourite hobby and it makes me happy that we go there every day. If I wasn’t such a scaredy dog, I’d probably run around the woods on my own all day, making sure I’m instantly aware of any changes in smells and to check that those squirrels aren’t up to anything. Those squirrels are always up to something. That’s why they need barking at. “What are you up to, squirrels?” I say with one single well-enunciated woof. They know I’m onto them, that’s why they run.

I like eating things I find in the woods. Once I found a tuna sandwich. That was a good day. I carried it for about a minute to really savour it before I ate it. It was good. Mostly I just eat green things. My favourite green things are those sticky bud things which the curly haired one calls “cleavers” but I also like some bits of grass. The curly-haired one calls this “foraging” and says it’s a green and frugal thing but I just think of it as walking snack time. The curly-haired one is good and puts green things in pots for me to snack on in the garden too. They’re at dog-mouth height so they must be for me.

Inside the house, I am the good one. I’m the one that helps reduce food waste by SELFLESSLY cleaning up any scraps of food that drop on the floor, any food the cats might leave, and any eggs that get dropped or cracked. It has been said by a certain curly-haired person who shall remain nameless (because I don’t understand the concept of names really) that I sometimes cause the eggs to get broken by nudging them off a table or trying to trip up one of the humans when they’re carrying them up from the chickens but THAT IS DOWNRIGHT LIES. I am a good dog, I tell you.

Speaking of the chickens, they’re fascinating, aren’t they? Their home smells of such amazing things, as do their bottoms. I must admit that I did try to eat them at first (the whole chickens, not just their bottoms) but now I am just happy to watch them. Watch them and sniff them. Mmm, sniffing.

I like sniffing the cats too and they generally sniff back although I think their “eeeuggh!” faces are at least sometimes uncalled for. I do have soaks in the stream as often as I’m allowed so in my humble opinion, I’m very very clean and delightfully fragrant. And the curly one makes me have showers inside the bathroom rain box sometimes too. I prefer showers to baths, which I hear is a green thing: I like that they are shorter and don’t use as much water and that sometimes I can lick the water from the water thing. And after I’ve had a shower and am nice and clean, I help the two-legs clean the bathroom floor by wriggling on every single bit of it. No need for chemical cleaning gunk or even a mop. I’m such a helpful doggy.

I am also good at helping sort the rubbish. They sort it into “recycling”, “compost” and “rubbish” but they seem to miss that a lot of the so-called “rubbish” is actually perfectly reusable. No, I don’t mean reusable … what do I mean? Oh yes, chewable. I am very good at taking things out of the office or living room bins and “reusing” them into little tiny pieces. Sometimes it takes ages for the feedy-huggy people to get the picture: they put the perfectly chewable thing in the bin, I take it out again, they put it in again, I take it out again, they put it in again … I mean squirrels learn faster than these people. Wait… squirrels can learn things? Then they might get the better of me with their scheming ways! Oh no! I should go woof at them to make them forget!

To celebrate her two year anniversary with us, I made her a party hat – with brown-paper spaniel ears.

Some bribing with treats may have been necessary to get her to wear it.

Quite a lot of bribery ;)