The Garden

As you may have guessed from the shed post, my garden's been on my mind a lot. Actually my mind (and the rest of me) have been in the garden a lot so there's been no escaping thoughts of it.

There are two reasons for this - 1) the weather has been great and 2) we've been working hard to make the garden more attractive to our cats in the hope that they'll spend more time in our garden and less time messing up our neighbours' garden.

Also it's spring and I've been planting loads and loads and loads of seeds.


Our garden is small - there's a bit of patio, a bit of grass, borders along two sides and a raised bed. Taking up more space are, in order of decreasing size, the kids' trampoline, the playhouse, the mini-greenhouse, the compost bin and the washing-line. This means that attempting to tart the garden up takes a bit of planning - we can't just shove a new plant or feature into a spare space because there just aren't any.

Our efforts to make the garden cat-friendly do seem to be working though. In fact the other morning there were five cats (including our own two) in the garden, studiously ignoring each other and apparently playing what Terry Pratchett calls cat-chess*.


The two nepeta plants we put in last year, nepeta nervosa 'Blue Moon' and nepeta 'Six Hills Giant', have proved more appealing to neighbouring cats than our own (they're just beside the white and ginger cat in that picture), but I'm growing nepeta cataria from seed this year in the hope that it'll appeal more.

Anyway, getting to the point at last, as our little tortoiseshell-and-white cat is particularly attracted to our neighbours' pond we've built a pond of our own. This was quite an epic project for us, despite being such a small pond. It's really just a plastic tub sunk in the ground, but neither of us was really sure what we were doing so our first attempt produced a very small swamp. My Beloved is of the 'ah, sod it, it'll be okay' school of gardening whereas I'm more cautious and, being more of a Hermione by nature, inclined to read up on a subject endlessly before tackling it. Together we usually balance each other out. Our first tub sprang a leak - possibly not surprising as it had previously been used for mixing cement and we'd discovered as we dug the hole for the pond that our garden is full of rubbish. I mean actual rubbish. Like many an archaeologist we discovered pottery when we started digging - only ours was 1980s kitchen tiles. The spot we'd chosen, bearing in mind the limitations of a small garden, is where the one annoyingly mismatched wrong-sized slab was in the patio. So we gain a pond and lose a minor niggle!

We went and bought a new tub, lifted the aquatic plants and so forth out of the old one and put the old tub inside the new tub - in retrospect the other way round would have been more sensible. This time we added gravel after the aquatic compost (as suggested on the compost bag that obviously we didn't read until too late last time) and avoided the 'instant peat-bog' look. Plants and pondweed were replaced and it started looking actually pondlike. A few days on and it's settled and you can actually see into the water. The cats are fascinated by it especially now that insects are being attracted by the marginal plants.


We left the handles on the tub just in case we have to lift it again but if everything looks okay we'll cut them off soon and start planting things in among the pebbles so it looks less temporary. Looking at it as others might see it now I'm feeling faintly embarrassed by how amateur it is, but hey, we can't all be Titchmarshes and from what the books say, ponds always look a bit rubbish until the plants are established!

Inspired by Simone of Linden Grove's 'sowing and growing' list and Mother of Purl's inspiring allotment posts, I think I'll list what I'm growing - it's as well to keep track of these things..

From seed - nepeta cataria, nasturtiums, sweet peas (lots and lots - our neighbour gave us a load of seeds she didn't need), sunflowers (ditto), marigolds both tagetes and calendula for dyeing purposes, anthemis tinctoria for dyeing, night-scented stock. Also strawberry plants from some seeds I found in the garage - I don't know if anything will come up but we already have strawberries in the garden, so these will just be an added bonus if they do.

Plug plants - more marigolds (tagetes I think) , pinks.

Yet to plant - carrots, potatoes, salad things. Buddleia 'Buzz' (dwarf buddleia) ordered. I've ordered some more marigold seeds (calendula 'Lemon Zest') too, because they look pretty and I think this gorgeous flower I photographed at Kittochside a couple of years ago might be Lemon Zest:


And I'm about to cut out of a section of the lawn for a new flower bed so I've got a whole lot of flower seeds to sew for that - poppies, nigella, cornflowers and whatever else I have to hand. I've got my fingers crossed that we'll have a very colourful summer this year!

---------------------------------

* See The Unadulterated Cat. Somebody lent me this book last year, I can't remember who (I thought it was my brother but he denies it), and nobody admits to it. It's all very strange, and having read the book I suspect it was a Schrodinger's cat nipping round the corner from next Tuesday to ensure that I have all the important cat behaviour books. One of this morning's cats appears twice in my photos, at both ends of the garden without apparently having moved. Just goes to show, Pratchett knows his cats.

My first mosaic

It's blossom euphoria time and I've been taking loads of photos of it! So what better subject for my first mosaic? I've admired other people's mosaics but hadn't the foggiest how to do them until somebody (Silverpebble possibly, I know she did lots of gorgeous mosaics of the Splash of Colour pictures) included links and instructions on a blogpost.

Another time I'd upload the pictures in a more sensible order and get the colours more balanced but I'm quite pleased with it nevertheless. Blossom and blue sky - what could be nicer?

dandelions

It's dyeing time again! As the weather has been so good the dandelions have been blooming in every sense - blooming nuisance in my garden, but I'll admit they brighten it up no end! I didn't dye with dandelions last year or not properly anyway, so this year I planned to take advantage of the proliferation of dandelions in our neck of the woods. I suspected I'd need a fair few for a decent colour and there just weren't enough in the garden so Miss Mouse and I set off on an expedition..

She looks very purposeful there, doesn't she? She was delighted at being allowed to pick flowers for once and we got loads, half a carrier-bag full. When we got home she happily helped me take the stalks off and put them into a measuring jug. When I weighed them I found that we had more than twice the weight of the yarn in dandelion heads so working on the assumption that more is more we boiled the lot up. It was a bit smelly to be honest - nothing like the boiled cabbage of last year, but a bit swampy-smelling. Thank goodness for good weather and having the kitchen door open!

So here's the ta-da!

As is often the case with natural dyeing the ta-da is a muted one - a ta-da if you like. It's a nice pale yellow, maybe slightly stronger than it shows in the photo.

You want a brighter ta-da?

I finished the Boy's socks at last! Yay!

shed

There's something about sheds that really appeals to me. I think it's the huge variety you get of buildings that are essentially 'just' garden sheds, combined with the myriad of uses people find for them. Some people using them for storing gardening stuff, some as an escape from everything, some as a place to work. I gather that authors tend to be particularly fond of sheds and other outbuildings as workspaces and I can see why. My dad uses his shed for just about everything. It's a shrine to ingenuity with stuff stored in every possible space. I love it.


And it's so covered with clematis that in the summer from some angles you can barely see it. It's a Stealth Shed.



Dad is the master of ingenuity and constructs garden buildings and storage whenever they're needed, such as the lean-to to the side of the main shed, and of course the sitooterie:

..which naturally is a place where you 'sit oot' (click here for a different take on the concept!). That's not a great picture as it was taken in the spring before growth really get going - in summer it's a beautiful green place to sit in the shade or indeed if it's raining and you still want to sit oot. Mum and Dad like to have their coffee 'outside' a lot so they're often in there or in the greenhouse. They have a washing-line in the sitooterie too for airing stuff on wet days. I should do something like that. We used to have neighbours who had what was essentially a car-port minus the car with washing-lines strung up. Here in the wet west of Scotland it meant they had their washing out much more than the rest of us. I don't suppose it dried completely but even if it had to have a few minutes in the tumble drier to finish it off it'd still have that fresh smell. Mmmmmm.

My garden is too small for a shed unfortunately. We already have the kids' trampoline taking up space, along with the PVC mini-greenhouse, and the gradually rotting and disintegrating playhouse. I have a wishlist as long as my arm, both for plants and bigger stuff like shed and greenhouse, but I'd really need a Tardis garden for all the stuff I'd like to cram in. And to go off at another tangent, now I'm imagining a courtyard garden in the middle of the Tardis - how cool would that be? I'm hoping that when my Beloved's sold a motorbike there'll be more room in the garage for my gardening equipment (where do my trowels go? Do they migrate?) and dyeing stuff. Our neighbours recently got a shed and I have Shed Envy.

One of my favourite garden buildings - it's really too much of a stretch to describe it as a mere 'shed' - is Puck's Hut in the Formal Garden at Benmore Botanic Garden near Dunoon. I suppose it's more of a summer house really but it's just such a nice design and looks so right in its setting, which is interesting because that's not its original setting. It used to be in Puck's Glen but was moved down to Benmore at some point.

It's got just a hint of moominhouse about it! I like it so much I bought the postcard:

I have the postcard up on my pinboard now, along with other things that make me smile.

Woohoo!

We got the warm weather, we got the sunshine!

I'm a bit weather-obsessed at the moment aren't I? How blissfully relaxing to sit in the sunshine in the garden though. Yesterday and today were beautiful - in fact I had to stop myself from doing all sorts of gardening things more suited to the end of May, because we're still likely to get a few frosts, but honestly it felt like summer. My brother came over and sat in the garden chatting for most of the afternoon; the cats stalked tiny insects; the kids bounced on the trampoline; Miss Mouse decided she wanted to eat her dinner in the garden - how could I refuse?

On that note I'll just refer you to my second post from my picture-a-day blog which includes my favourite and very appropriate poem.

On an Adventure - part three

Heron! I love herons! And oyster-catchers, but I couldn't get close enough to get pics of those.

Fortunately seaweedy rocks don't move so I could get a misty loch shot. We went to Dunoon that day and it poured the whole time so no photos of that. But I went to the wool-shop I went to last time and got some more King Cole Riot for the blanket I'm knitting, so not a wash-out. And I got the kids some books in a charity-shop :-). We've done very well for kids books in charity shops recently.

And finally we headed home the following day in even more torrential rain. This was at the Rest and Be Thankful again - where the warning signs were flashing as there was a higher risk of landslides and falling rocks. Unnerving!

So.. between rain and falling into burns and splashing along the shore and what have you, our soggiest adventure yet. Come to the West of Scotland in the Spring!

On an Adventure - part two

Rain rain rain rain rain rain. Rain.

We went to Inveraray Castle (which looked a bit green, most odd) in the rain. Photography isn't allowed inside so I only have a few pictures of outside, but they're good fun - love the windows!


The unfortunate thing about visiting such a place with my kids however is that I can't tell you a thing about the history of the place. No idea how old it is or anything. Fortunately it's all there on the website so I can read it leisure without an impatient four-year-old person saying 'Come on.. this way.. hurry up..'

It really did absolutely bucket down the whole time we were there. We'd had to stop in Inveraray to buy new wellies for Miss Mouse as she'd fallen in the burn the previous afternoon and her boots were sodden on the inside. Those new boots ended up being the icon of our little break yet I don't have a picture of them. I should have a close-up of them in their gorgeous pink brightness.

Anyway, just as we got back to where we were staying the sun came out, so the Boy and I went out for a wander to take some pictures and find some treasures on the beach. As I grew up close to the sea (and I'm talking metres) it was lovely to spend some time pottering around the shore with the Boy. Last time we were there we saw some huge starfish from the jetty but this time the sea was too choppy and the seaweed too thick to see as much.




Ah, a bit of gorgeous colour!