Category: Gardening
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Smallholding love . . .
I have the distinct sense that our picnic table is becoming an iconic image in this blog. But this smallholding is still home, whether or not we retreat with increasing regularity or frequency to our tiny bungalow up in Scotland. And yesterday I was able, thanks to the relative dryness of the growing lawn, to…
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A walk in the sunshine
We finally made a circuit of the dyke walk that extends through marshland in the Upper Ken, on the border of the Galloway Forest. There we watched a crow/jackdaw/raven dive-bombing a red kite, over and over again. Eventually, it seemed that the red kite agreed to divert its soaring flight away from the black bird’s…
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Sometimes, the joy is better the longer the wait . . .
When my mower, aka Plough-poo-mulcher, bit the dust a month ago, I despaired. I could see that nobody here in the UK stocks a replacement part for the mowing deck any longer; it’s long been retired. But the John Deere brand is hugely popular stateside (apparently we can thank the invention of the mass-produced steel…
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Unexpected joy on a frosty morning . . .
The world is a small place. I thought I’d take a quick snap of the lovely sparkling frost covering the garden this morning, and when I returned to the kitchen table to upload the image, my brother’s snap of his own frosty morning (yesterday’s) pinged into the laptop. Our mother related with great glee how…
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A never-ending story of fertiliser
The potato patch is moving towards readiness to receive this year’s offerings. The clement, dry weather was such a delight this weekend; it was looking possible, at last, that the horse poos out in the field might be dry enough to be blown into the big collection bags. And indeed, the first swathe of mower-harvested,…
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Fixing things gives a special pleasure . . .
What if your wheelbarrow develops a flat tyre, possibly as a result of trundling through endless thorny branches from a long hedge trimming odyssey? That’s going to play havoc with the big gardening effort, but it’ll take a couple days before the tyre can be fixed at Paul Gowland ATV in Allendale. It doesn’t take…
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The joy of clearing the decks
As gardeners go, we’re not very good. We do try, earnestly and with great good will, from early spring and into and through the growing season, to coax healthy food from our beds. But by about mid-autumn, when the green tomatoes linger and the French beans wither, when the asparagus has set a few orange…
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Gotta love that hard frost
There’s a special joy to be had, sitting in the warm kitchen, looking out at the hard frost over the East Allen valley, as the sun threatens to encroach over the horizon. I know this, because I’m experiencing it right now for myself. And if I am cheerful and ready for the day, it’s no…
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The hedges are trimmed!
Possibly because I’ve been doing a little bit more each clement day, but I was able to make a big push late yesterday morning and into the late afternoon, finally to finish off the last sections of our 50m of hedgerows. These hedgerows form small rooms around the garden, and when their ungainly tall shoots…
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Trees in the ‘forest’
I’m indebted to DEARA (that’s the Department of Agriculture, Environment And Rural Affairs) for the ‘reveal’ image of a mature hedgerow with specimen trees standing proudly out from the otherwise annually pruned hedgerow. I knew that our package of hedging included specimen trees, when we acquired the bare root saplings from TreesPlease and planted them…
Roads to Joy 