Garden a Day

You can guess that I didn’t do any gardening on Friday!  I didn’t on saturday either as I went out to a craft demo day at Craftsulove.  But I made up for it on Sunday and yesterday.

We went to the dump on Sunday with 2 big builders sacks full of garden rubbish!  We have a brand spanking new dump in Worthing and it is fun!  All new and shiny!!

On Sunday I cleared a bit of the back corner.  This vinca is a bit of a thug round there, so I try to cut it back each year and dig up stray bits.  It does have a pretty little flower though.

Yesterday I swept the front drive and weeded around the step and the house.  We have a paved drive, but weeds do tend to grow in between the bricks.  I’ll sprinkle some Pathclear down next week perhaps.  (I don’t really like using weedkiller, can’t be bothered to mix it all up etc and then clean out the watering can afterwards)

 

Then I went down the south facing border digging up any bits of the horrid bindweed!  It really is a nasty weed!  Any tiny little bit of the ugly white root grows again, and it is impossible to dig it all out.  Every year I vow to keep it at bay and every year it beats me!

Finally, I weeded and raked the gravel path on the same side:

Still got this at the back though:

Birthday Girl!

(GRRR! I did a long post yesterday but windows live writer did not like it!  So I’ve split the post and am trying again)

It was my birthday on Friday!  Here I am in all my glorious 52 years!!  Lucy bought me the scarf, isn’t it gorgeous?

Maurice has promised to take a day off so I can go to a quilting class in May without worrying about Merlin.  Plus he bought me swimming goggles and ear plugs for swimming!  Did I tell you I go swimming every Tuesday and do 30m lengths.  I love it!

 

I spent the day drinking coffee and eating!  Coffee with Sue at sea lane cafe first thing, then lunch with Sarah and Angela in town, then afternoon tea with Mum up at Highdown cafe!  Rounded off by takeaway Indian and wine with Maurice and Lucy!  On Saturday we went for a lovely meal with friends, fabulous!

More gardening

I did more of my north facing border on Monday and Tuesday.  I know you have to be careful pruning a hydrangea so I looked it up on the internet.  It flowers on last year’s growth, so it won’t flower if you cut it all down.  This bush is quite big, so I pruned out a few of the outside stems.  It’s a lace cap hydrangea.

 

And here’s some of my old terracotta pots on those old steps!

Mum came over to help yesterday (Wednesday)

I didn’t have much time today, so I swept the patio again, and watered some of my pots on the patio.  Here’s my little ‘nursery’ where I’ve potted up some little seedlings I’ve found in the garden.

And look!  My fuschias are beginning to grow!

Sunday

Maurice wanted to go to the classic bike show at Ardingly, so I decided to go with him.  I don’t usually go on the bike this early in the year, and luckily it was a nice day – not too cold!

 

There were some rather gorgeous classic bikes, all beautifully restored and shiny!

 

It was very busy with lots of middle aged and elderly bikers!  it helped if you had long hair that looked lie it hadn’t been washed in ages and had black bike gear on, oh and a rather large stomach!

Loads of stall were selling what looked like total rubbish out of cardboard boxes.   Maurice assured me that it was all worthwhile stuff…..to someone!

Love this guy’s leather jacket!

I think this was the best bike we saw, a 1930 Matchless Silver Hawk.

And here’s my favourite middle aged biker setting the sat nav for the journey home

We didn’t stay too long, thank goodness!  Time for some more gardening when we got home.  maurice cut the lawn at last!!

I carried on doing a bit more down the side path:

Here’s my little beauty for today, it is a Prunus Incisa ‘Kojou-No-Mai’ Sense.

And finally… here’s a ‘before’ picture for the next bit of border I must tackle!

Day-cation

I love a day-cation!  It needs to be a fair drive away, 2 hours to Oxford is just right.  You feel like you’ve travelled somewhere!   It’s best if we don’t take a packed lunch , but we often do!  We love to wander around with our cameras, and don’t usually go into museums and art galleries.  But sometimes it’s nice to take in some culture.

We went to Oxford for the day yesterday to spend the day with Nicholas.  We just love the walk into the city centre along the river!  All the Oxford colleges have their rowing clubs here

These pictures are taken minutes from the city centre!

We went to the Pitt Rivers museum, full of old bones!  Here’s an iguanadon:

And a mother and baby elephant:

The architecture was lovely too.  Then we went to the Ashmolean museum, where we had lunch and wandered round a bit.  Some fabulous paintings!

 

Maurice fettled Nicholas’s bike (which is my old bike after his was stolen)

We took Nicholas out for dinner and didn’t leave Oxford until 8pm, arriving home about 10pm, a lovely day-cation!

Rain rain go away

Today it rained nearly all day!  So no gardening today, just lots of admin type jobs, my own finances and membership stuff for the Anglo Italian Family History Society.

No gardening yesterday as I was just too tired!  And no gardening tomorrow as we are off to Oxford for the day to see Nicholas.

Tuesday 15th march, Wednesday 16th march

This bowl of hellebore flowers contains 1 each of the plants I have.  Aren’t they beautiful?  I have them on my kitchen windowsill right now and I love examining the patterns on their petals and those stamens!

Yesterday I cleared a small border by the garage and one behind the garage.  That one is full of an American beauty rose, and winter flowering jasmine gone wild!  Unfortunately, lots of weeds too!  From the back of the garage a gravel path runs down the south side of the garden.  This corner used to be full of this cornus, much of it old and very overgrown.  But it did have the most gorgeous variegated leaves in summer.  Sadly it has nearly all died – from old age I suspect, and I just have this little bit left.  I do hanker after the fiery orange cornus that my Mum has in her garden.  It looks bright and flourescent even on the dullest winter’s day.  Mine is just a fairly dull red.

 

All down the edge of this path are ferns.  I like clearing away all the dead stuff to discover the new hairy buds forming.  I can’t wait for them to unfurl!  Undoubtedly the best of these ferns.

And here are the hellebores growing in the garden.  I cut them down last summer and was frightened that I had killed them!  But no, they were fine and have been luscious again this winter.

 

Finally a couple of photos for my latest online class over at Big Picture classes.  Our assignment this week is to photograph the rhythm of a repeating motif.  Here are the bricks in my path:

Back to gardening, Sunday and Monday

I like to plant a few potatoes in my greenhouse border.  This year I am planting Casablanca First Earlies.  I usuallyonly get enough potatoes for 1 maybe 2 meals!  Here they are chitting in a n egg box in my conservatory:

 

And being planted in the greenhouse.  It is difficult to water them and to earth them up, which maybe why my yield is lo low!

This morning was another lovely sunny day and quite warm in the sunshine.  So I decided to tackle this horrible back corner!  That rotten tree stump you can see was one of the ash trees, and appeared in last week’s photographs covered in ivy.  As I ripped off the ivy chunks of bark came away and it is really quite rotten now.   This back corner is full of Snowberry (Symphoricarpos), which grew abundantly under the ash trees, that’s how tough it is!  It’s hard to keep under control, so I’ve chopped it all down this morning.

As I have mentioned before our lawn is sunken, with the borders sloping down from a path round the edge.  There are 2 sets of these ugly concrete steps at the front and back.  You can see the retaining wall here which has been broken in the past, probably by the trees.  I don’t think there’s much we can do about it without spending an awful lot of money!

Finally, here are some little beauties found this morning:  Harbingers of spring indeed!