Six on Saturday 11th May 2019

I know it's been a quiet week on the blog this week - will have a few more posts for you next week but to round out the week here's a peek into the garden.

Linking up with The Propagator again this month for my Six on Saturday entry. Find out how to join in on his blog here . You'll also be able to see links to all the other participants' posts too. I'm just taking part once a month but many folk take part every week - enjoy!

1. Rosebuds promising joy - The Dark Lady, Gentle Hermione and Alan Titchmarsh all budding up nicely in the front garden

2. The aquilegia that fling themselves all over the garden with joyful abandon really come into their own now - dainty ballerina flowers from an incredibly hardy plant

3. Voluptuous velvets and dainty pastels from the grown from seed pansies.

 

4. Golden oregano joining the re-emergence of the over-wintered herbs

5. The promise of strawberries despite a small cat-astrophe

6. Daisies dallying at the edge of the grass area - soon the mower will be out but we'll enjoy these for a little while longer.

Planting out and picking at the plot

Met J at the allotment this afternoon in time to admire all his hard work and deliver the spare battery for the mower and some plants for adding to the bean and root beds. He'd already spent a couple of hours mowing the paths, putting up the bean wigwams and sowing the second batch of our Garden Organic Members' experiment lentils. These join the lentils we'd sown last month and our chickpeas in our legume beds and form part of our new-to-us crops for this year. We now need to get our Climbing beans sown at home ready to plant out once all risk of frost has passed. 

After several weeks hardening off at home we've now planted out the first of our beetroot seedlings and some extra broad beans to fill out the gaps in the rows of earlier plantings. There's a second batch of beetroot seedlings on the window-sills here that will go outside this week to harden off and we'll also direct sow a few later in the month to give us a staggered harvest. I managed a little bit of hoeing, picked a few cornflowers from our small cutting patch and cut a carrier bag full of spinach beet leaves - tidying up the over-wintered and transplanted plants as I went in the hope that we get at least one more picking before they bolt. We're hoping that the new sowings will be ready to plant out before these ones give up on us. The cornflowers were also self-sown from last year's plantings and J transplanted them earlier this year - I'm so glad he did as they are far ahead of anything we've sown this year and there's nothing like picking bunches of homegrown flowers for the house knowing they are completely pesticide free so haven't harmed the wildlife and also haven't been flown half way round the world just to make me smile. Final job of the day was to pick some rhubarb - a batch for us and a batch for some friends. And speaking of friends - it was nice to catch up with a few friendly faces whilst I was up there too.
Here's hoping we get a chance to do some more tomorrow...

Garden Organic Lentils under cover

Filling in gaps with Broad Beans grown in loo roll inners

HSL Beetroot - grown in pots and planted out in clusters

First mini-bunch of cornflowers from the cutting patch

Spinach beet harvested and plants tidied - lovely mown paths too

End of April garden watch.

Apparently it's National Gardening Week this week and this year is a celebration of growing your own produce so if you do and have photos the RHS want you to post pictures on social media using the #NationalGardeningWeek hashtag. We didn't know there was such a thing but let's face it, every week is gardening week in this house so I couldn't miss the opportunity to do a bit of an End-of-April round up of what's going on in our little patch.

J had a few extra days off this week so in addition to finally dropping a load of stuff off at our local charity shop (and acquiring a little table for the garden in the process), we've spent the last few days dead-heading and weeding, pricking out seedlings, potting on plantlets, shuffling spent bulb pots and watching to see if the dahlias would respond to being in the light. The achilleas, sweet peas, lettuce, rudbeckias and a few of the strawberries are all in new homes and the front grass paths have been mown. As the cowslips have taken over the back lawn that getting a couple of weeks reprieve and will be mown when they go over. The pots of scabious, strawberries, pansies, herbs and bulbs out the back have been weeded and the dead things have been emptied out ready for their pots to be re-used. The Babbington's Leeks that decided they'd rather be in the patio than in the pot have been cut ready for cooking with in the next couple of days. A couple of loads of washing have been dried on the line outside and J has spent some time in his shed working on a new bird table. And, in anticipation of a couple of wet days ahead a few of the prolific bluebells have been cut to fill a small jug in the living room. So how's your gardening week going?

After the weekend!

The achilleas germinated well

Now they have room to spread

First batch of sweet peas 

Dahlias emerging

Lettuces potted on

Peonies budding

Just the right height for a cuppa!

New Scavenger Hunt

Today I discovered that a fellow blogger over at Patio Postcards has launched a Summer Photo Scavenger Hunt. The Winter one was great fun and got me back into using my camera so I'm looking forward to trying to find the items on this new list and getting a chance to see how everyone else interprets the list.
Please check out the (easy) instructions on Patio Postcard's post for today  but in the meantime I'm off to wrack my brain for photos that will fit the headings in the list, just as well we have about 6 weeks until the first check-in!

2019 Summer Photo Scavenger Hunt - May 1st-September 30th
 
1. An Outdoor Clock
2. Single & Pretty
3. Repetition
4. Blurred Vision
5. The Word Summer
6. An Umbrella, open or closed
7. A Curving Path
8. Shells
9. A Bridge
10. Something Made of Stone
11. Fish
12. Something Crooked
13. Two Colours of The Rainbow in Any Combination
 (colours of the rainbow are: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)
14. A Handwritten Sign
15. A Broken Chair/Bench/Stool
16. An Out of Season Treat Being Enjoyed
17. A Sail
18. Something That Should Be Found In Pairs 
19. A Funny or Meaningful Bumper Sticker
20. A Favourite Seasonal Scent

Alternates: 
A:  Bird or Bee House
B:  Fresh Local Produce

Slow TV

Spent the last few days popping in and out of a wildlife camera screening live footage from a Kestrel nest box on the Loughborough University campus.

It's one of many such cameras up and down the country, and indeed around the world that give you a chance to watch nature in action. The Loughborough Kestrels even have their own twitter account @Lborokestrels and at the moment you can watch as they begin to incubate 3 beautiful eggs. If you get hooked you can also check out the antics of the Leamington Spa Peregrines and the Dyfi Ospreys via the Wildlife Trusts in their area or on Youtube.

Even farther afield there's a camera watching the Brown Bears in Alaska!

Great for raising awareness and lowering blood pressure. Enjoy

It's hot out there....

The long weekend flew by -  after a Friday spent shuffling bulb pots and basking in the sunshine we spent the rest of the weekend sowing courgettes and sweetcorn seeds, making a couple of trips to the allotment, catching up with friends and sheltering from the heat of the August Easter Bank Holiday. Yes, it was a lovely weekend after the long grey of winter and sitting out in the warmth felt wonderful and life-affirming and thoroughly joyful. But, stop for a minute, it was 25℃ in the Midlands in the middle of April and this came on the back of last year's long hot dry summer and news of Spring wildfires in Scotland, the Peak District and Staffordshire and is something that we really should be concerned about, in fact it should terrify us, it should mean we're rushing to insulate our homes, reduce our use of petrol, gas and other polluting fuels, plant trees and protect habitats, refuse single-use plastics and all other non-essential packaging and dispose of all of our rubbish responsibly, buy only organically-grown pesticide-free foods and sustainably produced clothing, to only consume what we really need not what advertisers make us think we want. It means that when we watched David Attenborough's BBC documentary on Thursday night or heard Greta Thunberg speak  that we finally let the penny drop, finally decided to take action, to listen to what scientists have been telling us for years, to believe our own eyes, to finally acknowledge that the climate has already been affected by our actions and our in-actions, to take our blinkers off and own up to the fact that it is up to US to change how WE live now or risk huge damaging changes that will detrimentally affect the lives of millions of people all around the world - not THEM, not just the politicians, the multi-nationals, the conglomerates, the governments, the others but US.
The question is are WE going to change or WE going to keep looking around for Someone Else to do something?

Ideas on where to start:
 https://www.asustainablelife.co.uk/
https://transitionloughborough.wordpress.com/
https://www.thegreenlivingforum.net/forum/
https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/
https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/
https://www.fullychargedshow.co.uk/

A Good Friday...

It's been a bit of a tired week this week, I think going on five weeks on antibiotics is taking it's toll. Still things are improving and the glorious sunshine of the last couple of days is helping. Yesterday was a shuffle plants and seedlings about and then sit in the garden day.

We took the early bulb pots out of the decorative planters at the front and planted up new pots with the pansies and violas we've been growing from seed. Not only is this a cheaper way of having lots of bedding plants, it also means we know that they are grown in peat-free compost and with no pesticides or herbicides added, so we've got guilt-free colour all year round. Dropping them into the decorative planters like this means refreshing the display is much easier and less wasteful. The bigger pots are still going strong so no need to worry about them for a few weeks yet. Mind you, we did have to rescue a couple of gaillardia that happily shared a pot with a delphinium last year but now it's established it wants the whole pot to itself.

Door pots - the scent is lovely

Fresh growth creates a lush corner - must remember to water

Lovely contrasts of red tulips against the green foliage

From tiny cutting to beautiful abundant flowers in just a few years

This is actually our neighbour's but we love that it's happy on our porch railings too.

Once done we decided to just sit in the back garden and enjoy. All around us the birds sang, bees buzzed and butterflies flitted, a lovely start to the weekend

Cowslip heaven