I knew it! There was a reason I'm doing this now...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2232056/Gardeners-florists-named-UKs-happiest-workers-90-horticulturalists-enjoy-going-work.html

OK, it's from the Daily Mail so perhaps one would doubt the voracity of this story, but yep, I have never been happier at work. Every day brings something new and every day I end up having done something I can see the results of my labours - and it's always appreciated too.

Working at Argos on that brick they call a catalogue, I would flick through it thinking, "18,000 products in here, I don't want one of them..." Whereas, I can look back at my days work in any one of my lovely gardens and think, "Ahhhhh, that's nice!"

I think the following pictures from this year are tantamount to that statement:

I do have such fun you know. Take today for example, on my way to Quainton (see below) I got stuck behind a cab that kept speeding up, slowing down; speeding up, slowing down. I assumed he was looking for somewhere, the home of his next fare for instance. But no. Oh no, this cab driver was in front of me for five, going on 25 miles - that's what it felt like.

We got to the new hideous estate just the other side of Aylesbury (see this link: http://simonmurraygardenservices.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/i-promise-not-to-mention-weather-part.html) where there is a single track road with road works and a set of traffic lights. The lights turned red and said cab driver stopped in such a place as to make it near on impossible for the traffic coming from the opposite end of the road to get passed him. Stand off.

After a couple of minutes two rather large blokes got out of their cars and asked him to back up. Nothing. I got out and tapped on his window. He put his hand up and refused to even look at me. He was Indian, so unfortunately the two blokes got a tad racist.

I said,"He's a fuckwit because he's a fuckwit, not because he's Indian." The two blokes looked like they were going to take out their frustration on me, so I went back to my car. Thankfully the cabbie did back up enough for the on-coming deluge of cars to get passed. 

Of course, after this protracted interlude, the lights had not only changed to green from our way, they had changed to red again, so we couldn't move. I say we, but the cabbie decided he would go anyway, meeting yet another line of on-coming traffic halfway. More stand off; more shouting; more I was thinking that I would never get to Quainton, a mere mile or so from the "beauty" of Kingsfield Park. He backed up, very slowly, after one of the workmen from the building site had "had a word".

To cut a very long story short, we eventually got through the road works, on to the estate and he indicated that he was going to turn left into an unfinished road with about ten unfinished houses. He stopped. I hooted. He waved his hand at me again; my blood pressure started to rise - I mean I can take a joke, but fuck a pantomime!

He moved on at about 6mph and then indicated right, stopped, an on coming car full of kids and an irate looking mother nearly hit him. Then he moved on nearly hitting them. I was now beside myself with something akin to tourettes-a-gogo and would have stopped and let the bugger do whatever he was trying to do , but there were about 20 cars behind now. 

Finally the cabbie turned right at the next road and I put my foot down. The last I saw of him was in the rear view mirror with one of the 20 cars chasing after him flashing his lights and hooting like a walrus on heat.

The legend on the back of the cabbie's car? "Serving Aylesbury for 25 years - exemplary!" Whatever that means...

Quainton, Spring this year

...again Spring, just cut the grass. Below, Quainton today
13th November 2012, a pretty good replica of the Somme...

Anyway, I'm happy, are you?

I promise not to mention the weather... Part Deux

Two posts in a day - sounds like a song a la Crowded House's Four Seasons in One Day, love 'em. Now I've mentioned them I am listening to Weather With You, class. Neil Finn has to be one of the nicest blokes - I know it's not possible to know that for sure, but he was one of the blessed Linda McCartney's favourites, so he must be good.


On my way to Quainton every Tuesday morning I pass through a new housing estate and I laugh a lot. And this is why I laugh a lot:

This place is about 30 seconds from the edge of Aylesbury and, all due respect to the people of Aylesbury, but it's not the most scenic of places and has a bit of a reputation for drugs and suchlike. And I do not judge here, not by any stretch of anyone's imagination. These signs are for a pile of crap estate called Kingsfield Park and they say (just in case you can't read them):


1 Kingsfield Park  - Air to Breathe


2 Kingsfield Park  - Space to Think


3 Kingsfield Park  - Space to Think (again)


4 Kingsfield Park  - Room to Grow


It's a shockingly misleading bit of marketing. Most of the houses are back to back and cramped up into little cul-de-sacs that could not give you space to swing the proverbial marketing exec, let alone to think, breathe and grow. I guess I'm just a house snob, I like old houses, at least turn of last century and new estates just seem such anodyne little boxes with gardens the size of a stamp. All too pretty and possibly not that well built. Here's a couple of the house styles from their website:

Gimme Victorian streets any day!


This is the top of the driveway at Rebecca's in Quainton, about five minutes drive from Kingsfield:

And here are some flowers from the top of the drive too:

Nice!


Happy house hunting - if you're doing it!

Happy New Year - if a tad late...

Feeling as though I have been very neglectful - feeling? - as this is the first post of 2012. And such a huge year what with the following events:


March 1 - Greek Drachma bank notes are exchangeable for Euro until this time. 


April 9 - Sophie, my daughter, is 13 - how's that possible!


June 6 - Second and last solar transit of the planet Venus of this century; the next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125


July 19 - Staging the World – British Museum exhibition on London and its theatres in the 1590s and 1600s.


August 11 - The world's biggest celebration of books commences for two weeks of events and performances from literary names established and new at the International Edinburgh Book Festival.


2012 is also Someverdana, claimed to be a year of spiritual transformation (or apocalypse) - something to really look forward to. End of the world? My money's on 12th Deccember.


But far more important is WorldPride, a "...world-wide phenomenon and in 2012 the party is coming to London for a 2 two-week long event, with the final parade set to take place on 7 July. WorldPride is a festival promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues on a global scale and is expected to attract over one million visitors from around the world." I'll be there...


Oh yeah, and it's a leap year too.


If you know of any other stuff happening this year, keep it to yourself 'cos quite frankly, I don't care...


Well, hasn't the weather been kind? Oh yes it has. When you're a gardener it really matters that you can just carry on regardless and I for one have done as much. I have loads of pictures to upload - 30 in all - so I think I'll do it in two hits.


Last Autumn I collected a serious amount of apples from gardens across Herts & Bucks and have so far managed to produce 20 bottles of apple wine.

Chateau de Murray 2011 - cheeky lil'number, quite citrussy, but
I think it hits the spot!

I am working on cider now, hopefully about 15 litres, but not sure as my maths is shit as I may have mentioned before. I have chopped the apples and now need to crush 'em and then press 'em - I think I will fashion a press out of a car jack and some wood, saw that on the tinterweb and it looks good enough to me!


Been working on Pat's paving for weeks now, but should finish the bulk next week. Here are some pictures, I'm quite proud of of the work actually...

It's been hard work, but work that had to be done because of the loose slabs. I have been concerned for a while about Brian falling over.

A couple of weeks back I was burning off some rubbish from the compost heaps at Julie's place in Buckland, Aston Clinton, just five minutes from home. It's my Wednesday garden, the 16th century farmhouse with pond, etc. Anyway, there I was, petrol in one hand and matches in other, could I get the bloody thing to light? No. So I bend over and strike the match next to the pile of bone dry debris - covered in petrol mind, the debris, not me - and this happens:

Doesn't look that bad does it? Burnt nose and foul
smell of burnt nostril hair. But it resulted in the below.

Ouch!

It was like a nuclear holocaust, like that scene in Terminator 2 when Linda Hamilton is screaming from the fence for the kids to leave the playground. I tell you, if I didn't wear glasses my eyelashes would have been burned off. Which would have matched my eyebrows. I have very little eyebrow hair due to the fact that I blew them off with my dad's lighter when I was 12 - I am 55 in two weeks. So that's 43 years and no change then. Ho hum... This is the offending fire...

I have become obsessed with snowdrops. They are fantastically early this year, I have been amazed at the numbers and here are some at Rebecca's in Quainton, Bucks:

I particularly like this picture, probably because I got quite wet laying on me tummy taking it. What one does for art eh?

And finally for today - I will finish part two of this post tomorrow - I will jump a couple of weeks to today. I usually listen to Radio 4, but this morning at the behest of one of, if not, my best friend in the whole wide world, I started to listen to Radio 2, George Harrison's "What Is My Life", followed by Dean Martin's "Amore" and Bruce Springsteen "Brilliant Disguise". If you had been passing you would have seen a 54 year old prat in woolly hat playing his fork atop a compost heap a bit like this...

Happy gardening campers!


Peace...

Well, hello... Lovely to be here!

My word, how busy can one get? It may have been Autumn for a while, but up 'til last week it's been busy, busy, busy... Which is good of course, but I heard someone say that they saw a gardener out with a light on his head the other evening at about five of the clock - that is ridiculously sad. I mean, what the f**k is that all about. One can buy them at SchmArgos, so they we go, bound to be crap...

'nuff said. I have been chopping, trimming, a-lopping, sawing, chainsawing, slicing and hacking for weeks now and it's been quite delightful - gets rid of a lot of pent up angst and tension my dears. Adds to the compost bins, but whatever, it's what they're they for. Also, BONFIRES! Oh yes, burn baby burn. Is there something wrong with a person who loves setting fire to stuff? Is there? Oh, really... Ooops, have to say I haven't burnt that much but it is such a joy. As is, shredding old paperwork. Oh yeah, especially when you are doing it for the chickens bedding, just feels right you know?


The new chicks are here and they are possibly the cutest things since the last ones...

Harriet left, Clarrie right. Florrie was delivered to us very ill, bless her
so we had to have her put down and Happy Chicks - blah! - are sending us
two new chicks to replace her. We only had her 36 hours and it was
rather heart breaking.

Anyhoo, the name of the game is clearance, clearance, clearance and these pictures show something of what I have been up to recently:

Ooo, sharp!

A nice bit of planting done a couple of weeks ago -
lots of herbs and perennial stuff to give colour
all the year round, lovely!

Next year I shall be planting a load of new shrubs in here, a philadelphus, some more hebes and some flowers to bloom all through the year, looking forward to it. Had to dig in a load of
compost this year 'cos it's been looked after that well in recent years...

 The following four pictures are from the "new" house in Quainton, near Aylesbury. Lovely place, huge house, loads of garden and an absolute delight to work on. The owners have had a lot of trees moved from one area where they are building a tennis court, so we have to place those elsewhere over the next few months. It's very exciting to be working on a project like this. I also get to have my pick of a load of raised beds and such like - that's a bit like an alcoholic having his pick of someone's extensive wine cellar (I did say a bit like...)

Front entrance - it's going to be made more obvious
early next year

Nice bit of clipping & trimming here. I like a straight hedge! Below is
from the other end

Not sure about this, but I quite like the shaping I've done

More bloody apples from yet another garden
that had "too much" - more wine methinks!

The Grand Union at Berkhamsted. We're responsible for keeping this
stretch tidy and I think I got on top of it, just

Sophie, Callum and Finlay, bonfire night at nan & grandad's watching the many displays across
Tring - nice evening had by all...

A new invention, a self-pushing wheelbarrow -
doesn't work yet...

I laid me down, and saw this...

I have such a lovely time doing this and it's so nice to share it with a few people, especially the ones I love. It'd be nice if it went on for a very long time.

Anyway, enough of that mushy stuff, I hope to post a bit more regularly now that the season is actually drawing to a close properly.

Happy wintering my brethren...

Simon (C-Moon...)

Allotment life Pt the first...

...this may be a random, every now and then thing, who knows.


Tonight, at dusk, I took my first batch of dwarf french bean plants over to the allotment. There are some quite nice people over there, but as I am basically a sociopath I very rarely talk to them. Especially Tim, who has the plot to the right of ours. I joked (a bit) about being a sociopath myself, but Tim is most definitely one of those people with the social grace of Michael Winner on speed - "calm down darling" indeed!


Last year Tim asked me how I was getting on with my job search, I said I had just started gardening and he said, looking disparagingly at my plot of barely tended ground, "What makes you think you can be a gardener?" Unfortunately at the time my 4 year old son was running towards the main road that we have to cross to get back home, so I couldn't reply as I had wanted - i e, a nice slice to his neck with my trusty hand hoe. I muttered something like, "Sorry, my son is about to be splatted by the 500 bus to Aylesbury, so can't stay..." and ran to catch aforementioned child before that very thing could happen to him.


Suffice to say, I attempt to avoid the loon at all costs. I bumped into his wife the other day and found that she is almost as lacking as Tim in the social skills - she has an Ann Widdicombe type approach, very direct and twice as ugly. She laughed when saying, "Remember how you lost all your potatoes in that late frost last year?" (The hand hoe, where's the fucking hand hoe?) I smiled through gritted teeth and carried on regardless.

...handy hoe killer...

She also said, "Fleece is the answer, fleece and mulch." "Yes," I replied, "and perhaps the BBC weatherman getting his weather report right." "Don't see you over here much these days," she carried on. "Wonder who does all the work then, d'ya think it might be the potato fairies?" I replied, acerbically. (NB: these are the actual words, I kid you not.) She did not even acknowledge the fact that I used the words fairies and potato together in one sentence. I know it's not exactly Grouch Marx, but per-lease, it was mildly amusing. "Yes," she carried on, "fleece and mulch." "Sounds like an old english hey-nonny band, you know, Morris Men and all that?" She blanked me, success! 

Hey-NONNY!

Anyway, tonight Tim was just leaving as I arrived with me dwarf french beans plants. I haven't seen him for months, well not up close as if I see him when I round the corner from our place and he's on the plot I turn round and go home - trust me, it's worth the hassle as I will kill him if I mix too much with him. He ALWAYS has to say something, ALWAYS! and this was the brief conversation:


Tim Bit late to be planting, what you got there then?


(he never says hello, just blunders straight into what ever his strange instinct brings up)


Me Never heard of the old phrase?


Tim What?


Me When 'tis half moon seen, Plant your dwarf french bean. Don't let me hold you up I can see you're off home, BYE!

'tis a true delight by the light of the silvery moon

Happy mulching...