Oh, My Days!

 The swallows have returned! They left here late last Summer - nine babies and their respective parents - and yesterday they returned. A week later than last year, but back they are. Well, two of them. Yesterday, there was one, scoping out the joint as it were, and then this morning there were two, swooping back and forth, resting on the TV aerial and then the telegraph wires, and then in and out of the laundry.  I watched them for a while, rocking and rolling through the skies, scooping rangy arcs across the fields, no doubt admiring the new roof of their Summer accommodation. Of course, all year round is Summer for swallows. When the warm days and long rays of the sun begin to shorten here in September, they will fly thousands of miles back South to continue living their warm days. Sensible creatures.  These two returnees will need to build a new nest. The old one that had served as a nursery for the previous two years sadly crumbled to dust when the roof was replaced i...

 The problem with working as a gardener with other gardeners is that each gardener has their individual way of gardening born of years of personal gardening experiences in order to achieve, intrinsically, the same results e.g flamboyant cosmos, rampant rhubarb and robust parsnips. This is a fact. And it’s okay if the gardeners all accept these different ways of working and can play nicely together, but not so if heels of wellies are dug in and gardening gloves are slapped at faces, thus leading to trowels being drawn at dawn. Of course, the lovely thing about having one’s own garden, one’s own plot of land entrusted to one to be careful guardian thereof by Mother Nature, is that one can garden it how one bloody well likes, and one can even mutter about the odd gardening habits of other gardeners whilst doing so, because 1) they won’t hear the mutterings and 2) if they do hear, one has the satisfaction of being able to shout, ‘Get orfff my land, you steaming idiot!’ and, if one feel...

Let’s talk spam. Not Spam, the hideous pink tinned processed meat which, bizarrely, is much beloved by my Mum, and people who use it to make fritters, people who clearly have no respect for their arterial health. No, I’m talking email spam. I have two email accounts. One never gets spam email. The other gets spam email  in varying degrees from one or two a day up to fifteen a day depending, I have discovered, on which companies think it is okay to sell on my details.  These spam emails are mostly to do with 1) alerting me to the terrible things that will happen to my Internet security because my Norton/ MacAfee/ other security system is out of date and needs renewing IMMEDIATELY, or 2) offering me something to benefit my health now I am heading towards 60 years old and CLEARLY falling apart at the seams. For example, one this morning was offering me the knees of a 20 year old. (Another was also offering to help me check the health of my prostate gland - if I could locate it, I...

 With the dry, warm and sunny weather conditions continuing, I was out at 8.30 this morning determined to build on yesterday’s progress and crack on with more gardening before Arctic and/or flood conditions return next week. Are Arctic and/or flood conditions due next week? Who knows? Weather does what it wants to do regardless of the often contrary predictions of the Met Office and BBC Weather.  Anyway, what I did today includes:  …weeding beneath the hornbeam hedge There was a lot of rampant grass creeping upwards and it looked messy. I do not like mess, so I set about tidying up. Whilst this was occurring, His Lordship Malarkey mowed the lawn, so by the time we reached break time of tea/coffee/hot cross buns, the state of play was ‘tidier than before.’  I did a bit of pruning of the hawthorn hedge, mostly out of spite because it thwacked me in the face a couple of times whilst weeding the edges of the hornbeam, and hawthorn thorns are absolute bloody bastards....

Perfect gardening weather chez Damson Cottage today - warm, bit of sun, bit of cloud, no wind - so himself Lord Malarkey and I started the Grand Plan to transform the vegetable garden from current embryonic Raised Bed status to future No Dig glory. Here’s the before photos (because I was on the ball enough to think I ought to record our progress for the purpose of future gloating amongst our abundant vegetable production!) : The square raised bed will remain - it contains my new rhubarb which is growing nicely and I do not want it disturbed. It will also provide a resting place for my tush when gardening. We decided to start dismantling the beds to the left of the photos because a) they have already been growing veg and b) they are in the central area of the top garden and the plan is to spread outwards from them depending on sun and shadow patterns from the surrounding trees.  The rest of the parsnips had to be excavated. We’ve been pulling parsnips since the second week in Decemb...

 I’ve made a few purchases this week, of little things that suddenly became needed. For example, a new litter picker. My old litter picker is dying a slow death and will now only close its pincers far enough to clamp around a tin can or bottle. No use for smaller items which means, on my litter ramble, I have to pick up small things and flat things with my hands, which is defeating the point of carrying a litter picker. I mean, I COULD wear gardening gloves but once you’ve experienced picking litter with a litter picker, you can never look back. It’s orange, my new litter picker. I thought it might make me more visible on the roads. I can shake it at drivers who pass too close. It is arriving tomorrow. Also arriving tomorrow is a small rain gauge. It’s basically a pot demarcated in millimetres and with a handy loop attachment so I can fix it to a pole (not supplied). I want to measure rainfall, you see, so I can learn more about the weather at Damson Cottage. For gardening purposes...

 …hole in the ground, sort of big and sort of round it was… Edith, surveying her handy work, probably started by Sidney, the ‘bit of a digger’ according to his breeder.  Sheesh, what a to do, eh? Becoming a bunny mummy has been fraught with hideous cost, worries, complications and we are barely three and a half months into the experience. Still, they are doing only what bunnies do which is eat, dig, sleep, eat, run around like loons, groom, eat, dig, dig a bit more, keep eating, and snoozing in the sun.  They are, of course, highly entertaining, and worth way more than the cost of the BBC licence fee, and given the BBC isn’t being very entertaining at the moment, I may stick with Bunnyvision.  I feel slightly paranoid that Edith and Sidney are plotting an escape with this tunnel digging. The current burrow is heading East and in a straight line. It is not in danger of leading outside their enclosure. If they continue their tunnelling downwards, then come up again, th...

You know how it is when you think you’ve got something sussed out? When there is a Plan in Place, and you know EXACTLY where you are heading in order to implement that plan because the vision is bright in your mind’s eye?  And just as you are bowling along quite happily because all the planets are in alignment and the omens bode well, bloomin’ OBSTACLES inveigle their way into your pathway, leaving little bits of annoying debris in their wake?  I’m talking the Damson Cottage Vegetable Garden Project here. The project that started in earnest a couple of years ago with the purchase of a lovely greenhouse and wood planks enough to create eight substantial raised beds.  Well, the greenhouse was very productive last year, as were two of the raised beds. In fact, I am still harvesting purple sprouting broccoli, parsnips and chard. A goodly start to The Grand Veg Project then. However, this year’s Grand Growing Plans were beginning to be scuppered because of the lack of compost ...

 ‘Shall we try introducing Sidney to Edith?’ said His Lordship Malarkey yesterday, just before lunchtime.  Well, it had to be done at some point, didn’t it? Both bunnies had been neutered and recovered well, the sun was out, I would rather serve one communal breakfast in the morning than faff around dishing up two, so off we went, up the garden to chez Edith’s, trying not to think of all the disastrous things that could happen like, for example, a massive red in tooth and claw bunny kick off.  Andy had already made preparations for the move first thing in the morning by placing some of Sidney’s old bedding material in Edith’s home in a ‘let’s mix scents’ kind of way. Personally, as a female of the species, I’m not sure how enticing having a bloke’s used bedding dumped in my environs would be by way of introduction. It’d be like, ‘Here’s some stinky laundry that needs doing before we meet, thanks very much’ and I’m pretty sure I would not like THAT kind of introduction at ...