Being Mrs C

Garden help

Look at who came to help me plant the rest of the spring bulbs in the garden this morning.

 

This particular robin always seems to appear when either Mr C or I are out doing anything in the garden. Today, he sat on the fence for a while watching me dig holes for the bulbs. When I'd finished he even decided to inspect things more closely!

At times he was only a foot away from me and he didn't seem at all bothered that I was there. Luckily I had the camera to hand, but taking good bird photos with a small point and shoot camera isn't exactly easy.

Surprise crocuses

Do you remember my initial work on my veg plot when we moved in? Well, I'm afraid that on a first glance it doesn't look much different now.

The dark pile on top is "compost" that Mr C extracted from the compost bin that was at the house when we moved in. I use the term "compost" loosely though as having looked at it there seems to be quite a bit of non-compostable stuff in there including some plastic. I need to get my gloves on and have a good sort before digging it in to the bed.

In the foreground though something is actually growing in there.

By the time I'd spotted these the evening was pressing on, hence the need for flash to illuminate them. When I looked back a couple of days later the September sun has transformed them further.

These crocuses looked beautiful open like this. Strangely we have just found these four on the edge of the veg plot and a single one right at the other end of the garden. I have no idea who planted them, but I'm guessing not the previous owner as she didn't seem to do "gardening" in the sense that most people mean. They certainly made a lovely surprise though. Any views as to exactly what they are gratefully received!

Bulbs for spring

Friday night's Gardeners' World reminded us that this is the time of year to plant bulbs for next Spring. Mr C and I made the most of a recent special offer at B&Q to buy some bulbs, but we hadn't yet got round to actually putting them in the ground yet.

We only had a short time available on Saturday morning in the garden, but we made the most of it to make a start planting the bulbs we had brought. We made a start with some snowdrops that we planted in the grass around the base of a couple of what we believe to be damson trees in the garden. There are still more to plant, but fingers crossed that we'll see some small white flowers in the spring-time.

Herbs and heather

Bearing in mind we only went for some grass seed it was quite a haul that we came home with.

Our planting in the garden is a tad haphazard at the moment in that we just happen to see things that we like, buy them and then try and work out where is best to plant them. One area where I am applying a bit of a theme is around the decking. At one end is the large rosemary that was here when we moved in and around the rest of the deck I'm following it with other herb type plants.

A couple of types of lavender have already been planted, but over the weekend I also added another shade of purple courtesy of a heather (calluna is as much as the label says on this one). 

Towards the rosemary I have included thyme and oregano (Country Cream). I have no idea if these will grow anywhere near the size of the rosemary, but they certainly extend my collection of home grown herbs. I certainly can't provide a whole meal's worth from the garden, but I can at least start by garnishing a meal!

Chilli medusa

A "quick" trip to the garden centre for some grass seed resulted in a few other purchases. I'm sure I'll follow up with another post about the things we bought to actually go in the garden, but this is one of the things that has ended up inside the house - chilli medusa.

From what I've learnt from the internet and the label it apparently is both ornamental and for cooking (surely if it can be used for cooking then it's no longer ornamental by definition is it?) I'm pretty sure Mr C and I will try cooking with it at some point soon - we both like chillies and it would be wrong not to try. Although it does mean that it may take me a bit longer to actually get round to trying to grow chillies from the seeds I bought a couple of weeks ago...

Regardless of how it tastes though, it certainly adds a bit of interest to the windowsill where all my herbs are growing.

Garden fruits

As I wrote a while back I've been making very small steps towards being self sufficient for a while. Now that I've got a garden it should be somewhat easier. 

One thing that I was keen to do was try my hand at growing some sort of fruit, but having taken a look at the contents of our new garden it seems I may already be a step ahead of where I thought I was.

The apple tree outside the log cabin was obvious (even to us!) but the others gave us a bit more to research. (Cooking apples we think based on the look on Mr C's face when he took an exploratory bite!)

Overhanging us from one neighbour is also what we think is some sort of cherry tree. Initially (based on something we saw at the garden centre) we thought it might be a morello cherry tree, but looking at some pictures on the internet the leaf colour seems wrong. Of course we can always just ask the neighbours, but I've not had chance yet!

The final one is a bit more interesting. There are two trees up near the house (one smaller than the other) and from the shape of the leaf it looked like they were some kind of fruit, but we weren't sure what. This week though some fruit has actually appeared on them. Not much (and very hard to see in the photo above) but we think it might be damsons. Grateful for any positive identification and if we are correct then fingers crossed that next year we might get a bumper harvest of them.

Plant or weed?

Apologies for the blogging break. Returning to work has sucked me into the corporate world (not a nice place) for this last week or so and finding time to do anything else has been a tad difficult.

Following the comments back on my question about identifying things in the garden I've decided to follow Mrs Nesbitt's suggestion and see if anyone reading this can help.

So, question number one. All around the edge of the decking and the steps up to the decking is this.

A few people seem to think that it may be related to a strawberry plant, but no one is totally sure. I realise that there is some grass and bind weed growing amongst it as well, but when we first moved here we found some small, very bright yellow flowers on it too. All the flowers seem to have now disappeared and annoyingly the photos of them seem to have vanished from the camera memory card as well.

Up close the leaf looks like this.

Any ideas gratefully received!

Identifying green things

I promise that I'll blog about something different very soon, but this has to be another gardening post I'm afraid.

We're progressing quite well, but one thing is constantly foxing us. How are we supposed to identify those things that were already in the garden when we got here? I can recognise some of the more basic thing - grass, dandelions, bind weed etc, but we're now at the stage where I'll come to something when clearing a bed where I stop and try to work out of it's a weed or something that I should be leaving in.

Based on the simple information of it has leaves shaped like this and has small yellow flowers is there something simple that Mr C and I are missing that could help us identify things? Google obviously helps a bit, but I'm surprised that there's simpler way with the various garden books that we've managed to pick up. I'm not sure where to start though as I'm often not even sure which chapter I should be looking at.

Failing that I'm guessing inviting some people round, offering them a glass of wine and a walk round the garden while I follow them closely with a notebook might be in order! Any offers?

Gardening first steps

Now that I've got the garden I've been planning for for ages it's almost hard to know where to start!

The garden is very much a blank canvas so although there are plenty of weeds to sort out the general lack of flower beds meant that there was very little that had to be done straight away. One exception to that was the area that I quickly identified as a possibility for my first veg plot.

I didn't need the gardening books to tell me that the first thing I needed to do here was clear the site of all the weeds and rubble. The previous owner had kindly left behind some bags of compost (plus a half full compost bin - quality of contents as yet unknown) so I'm assuming that at some point before planting anything I'll be digging it in to the site.

 

The summer weather (i.e. rain!) curtailed my first attempts, but luckily the sun was shining the next day to allow me to complete the work.

The soil actually looks quite good quality and there were certainly plenty of worms that I unearthed during my digging. 

Mr C and I are very much novices when it comes to gardening so, in the absence of the internet these last two weeks, we've been making the most of the various books that we've either been kindly given, or picked up from charity shops.

I have two particular favourites at the moment. The first was a very kind gift from Mrs Nesbitt who I have come to know through the New House Farm forums: Gardeners' World Book of Gardening for Beginners. This lovely little book really does start with the basics, and unlike most other gardening books is a convenient size to be able to read it in bed without doing myself (or Mr C) any injury! My second gardening favourite read is Carol Klein's Grow Your Own Veg. I'm determined to make a go at being as self-sufficient as time allows and being a great fan of Carol on TV I love the way that this book is written in a similar chatty style.

One thing that all the books agree on is understanding what your soil is like. Although it all looks pretty good to me, I'm no expert and hence off I went to buy a small soil testing kit so that I could understand what the pH level is to allow me to plan what to grow.

The kit wasn't too expensive (about £4.99 for multiple uses) and it was incredibly easy to use. 

Quite simply soil is mixed with the powder contents of a capsule in the kit, water added, contents shaken up, and once everything has settled simply read off the scale on the container.

Now, if my eye sight is telling the truth, and the water isn't confusing the result, it looks to me like we've got neutral soil here. My initial response was to think that that was a good thing, but a bit more reading suggests that it may not be so good as it seems that some veg prefers slightly acidic soil. Hmmm - off to read some more me thinks...

Before I turn into a complete gardening bore - honestly I will still post about other things - I've started a list of gardening books that I'm using over in the right hand side bar. I'm sure that over time I'll be writing about quite a few of them.

Our new home

Finally we have a broadband connection in our new home so at last I can start telling you all about it. 

Since we moved in it felt like I was taking quite a few photos, yet now I look at what's on the camera I notice that they're all actually of the garden! Ones of inside the house will follow just as soon as I tidy up a bit more.

Above is the view from the back of the house down my new garden. Well, I say my garden, yet it technically belongs to Mr C and me, and the Building Society. But, the latter haven't shown much interest in it as yet, and Mr C's not here right now, so I guess it goes back to being my garden!

As you can probably see, the previous owner wasn't much of a gardener, and, as my Mum declared after she'd had a good look around, anything of interest that we appear to have is actually from one of the next door neighbours who both appear to have beautiful gardens.

Down the bottom of the garden, the blue/green building that you can see is a log cabin the previous owner put in to teach children music in. At the moment we're just using it as storage as it needs a really good clean and a lick of paint. I have plans though. My hope that that we can turn it into a craft cabin so that I can have somewhere where I can leave my sewing machine out and all my fabric, yarn and other sewing bits and bobs can all be easily accessible so that I can spend my time being creative, rather than wasting time rummaging in cupboards for things that I'm sure I have but can't find. It may be a while until we get it into a good enough state to be able to do this properly, but fingers crossed my plan will come to fruition!

Not many plants had been left behind for us, but this sweet pea (lathyrus odoratus - as my new gardening book tells me!) has some lovely flowers on it whilst needing a bit of untangling from the variety of other stuff either growing in the same tub, or coming over from next door.

It also looks like we're unlikely to run out of rosemary any time soon!

The garden is almost split in half by this old tree stump that is half way down. When we first visited the house a fallen branch from it was laying across the grass and they also had a dovecote in it. Both have been cleared away by the previous owners and our first thought was it get rid of it entirely. After just a couple of days we were both having second thoughts though. As well as providing an ideal position for attaching one end or my new washing line (I am so much enjoying the idea of drying my clothes for free with wind power rather than having them sat inside a tiny flat for days trying to dry them!) it also seemed a useful place to attach a bird feeder. We've noticed a couple of birds like to perch on it, and various other insects (especially what we think are wood-boring wasps) also seem to make it home. I guess it's therefore going to stay put for a bit longer.

Talking about wildlife in the garden, one of the first things I did when we moved in was get a bird feeder up in the hope if attracting some birds into the garden. We've now actually got a couple up, but the only interest that we've seen so far is one visit from a tit, possibly a blue tit. There is a robin that is very territorial about the garden and wanders around the lawn as if he owns the place. In the last couple of days a male blackbird also seems to have decided that our lawn provides a good place for collecting food. He seems to wander around the lawn collecting a huge amount of stuff in his beak before flying off. He doesn't seem to be at all concerned as to whether or not Mr C and I are in the garden and often comes very close to us whilst picking up stuff. I've not yet been able to determine exactly what it is he's collecting, but I've now got the binoculars positioned by the kitchen window in the hope that I'll soon get to inspect what he's doing a bit closer.

A large number of long tailed tits seem to be attracted to one of our neighbour's bushes that's overhanging our fence. I'm sure my mum did tell me what it is, but possibly I need to find out again so that I can work out why they are so attracted. As well as our hedgehog sighting the other evening a frog (or possibly a toad - I'm still learning to tell the difference) hopped across the decking as my brother in law was visiting us last weekend. It was possibly visiting from next door's pond, but it bodes well for us being able to attract wildlife when we get round to digging our own pond.

I know we're not exactly having much of a summer weather-wise here in the UK, but the difference being able to spend time outside is making is unbelievable. I feel so much more chilled out now that I can go and sit outside with a cup of tea than I have done in ages. The decking on the back of the house provides a great sheltered place to sit, and picking up this table and chair set for less than £80 in a sale the say after we moved in also helps greatly.

This has turned into such a long post and yet there's so much more to write about. A further post will follow with details of our plans for the garden, especially to attract more wildlife, and I've also made a start on where I hope to have my first veg plot. No wonder I'm not having time to get everything done in the house as well!