Category: Gardening
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A tiny forest for a tiny garden
Although a large garden is full of delights, it’s also a lot of work. You notice that kind of thing when you get older. And you wonder, can we ever keep this up? Eventually, perhaps, the answer is no, we can’t. So downsizing from our smallholding in Sparty Lea seems like a compelling option as…
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After the move . . .
I can’t say ‘job done’ yet because it’s not; there’s the small matter of the biosecurity netting, which has the additional advantage of protecting the chicken feed from the jackdaws and pheasants. But that’s a task for this morning, with any luck. Meanwhile, with the chickens ensconced (apparently happily, but really, who knows for chickens?)…
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Chicken moving joys
So yesterday I finally cleared all of February’s hawthorn hedge trimmings from the potato patch, and pulled out this spring’s encroaching nettles. I thought I’d leave the newly sprouting potatoes, emerging from the wanton tubers I’d missed during the past year’s harvest, for the chickens to scratch around. But then I wondered, hmmm, potatoes are…
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Return of the European goldfinch
We’ve missed them, these brightly coloured little birds, though chaffinches, sparrows, dunnocks and the blackbirds have been here throughout the winter. I kept them nourished from the feeders that are designed to keep jackdaws and rats out, though the unwanted creatures are getting better at filleting out morsels even so. But late yesterday morning two…
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Clearing a path through the docks and nettles
Sometimes the easiest way forward is on your hands and knees. So it was with our two paths on either side of one of the potato patches/chicken runs. On the right side, looking out over the valley, soft fruit bushes (logan berry; blueberry; black and red currant) were once sequestered from the birds by black…
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A tidy conservatory . . .
Most of the time it’s a utilitarian usefulness that the space affords us. We never seem to have the time to sit and enjoy, but rather we’re busy in other rooms doing other crucial things. Yesterday I started clearing the staging (it had held the chitting potatoes, for example, and then seed trays) and then…
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A slight act of selflessness . . .
I wondered why the marjoram label was regularly covered with compost. We noticed it buried again as we went out for a short walking interval between rainy spells. I moved to clear it off, but my hand froze mid-air. The cat droppings were a good clue. We made our progression around a new-to-us circuit, on…
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Random blossoms of loveliness
Sometimes the smallest things evoke the greatest joy. I decided to take a quick snapshot this morning of the flowers that bedeck the short board fence around the front garden here in New Galloway. We’ve been admiring the multiplying bloom for days now; the plant seems to be exalted in its presentation of itself. More…
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Emergence . . .
You can’t under-estimate the joys of emergence, in my book. We began chitting our potatoes shortly after they arrived from the seed company, early March. Today, in early May, the first signs of real growth could be seen coming out through the holes in the black weed cover. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean the weeds…
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Social joy of a community garden . . .
We decided to take a little drive over to the community garden, being developed from an ageing walled garden on the Garroch Hall Estate, to see how the extensive volunteer effort, coordinated and funded by Local Initiatives in New Galloway (LING) was doing. It took a bit of finding but we got there in the…
Roads to Joy 