Man of the Match; wild flower meadow; Karcher again, etc

Well hello! It's been a long time - ish...


Busy, busy, busy, but no excuse for not doing this since February. Biggest, most important thing that's happened since? Finlay, age 6, Man of the Match against Bovingdon on Sunday and he didn't even want to play in defence! He was class, even going on a couple of David Luiz style raids forward. Proud parents is all I can say.


As to gardening, well where to start. Karchered my way round Rebecca's in Quainton:

I know I have an obsession with this contraption, but it does do a superb job, but please wear waterproof trousers if you ever attempt to do a job on this scale...

Also, made a really good start on the meadow area. Cleared away lots of weeds and rubbish from under the trees and will hopefully get the OK on hiring a turf stripper/cutter which will mean I can clear the area out in the open in just one day. This is the area shown from both ends:

The area I've cleared is the far end. This is fairly late in the day so does not show the full effect of the sun on the open area. It's a long term project, which I love, because it means I am going to be here for some time to come. Love it!

And, finally at Quainton, here's the hellibores I moved from the proposed tennis court area, plus a few ferns and such like. They have settled in beautifully, but then again they're not my favourite flowers for nothing, they're just so easy...

Over at Buckland and the pond had some visitors the week before last, couldn't believe it!

Yes a duck couple, unfortunately you can only see the male as this was taken on my mobile and the camera isn't that good.

A view of the pond from the top, delightful!

And finally a quick look at the allotment:

The digging is coming on a treat, I will be putting on some compost this week. Sowed the cabbages at the weekend, awaiting the potatoes, sowed five different varieties of tomatoes, put in some salad leaves in the greenhouse, as well as salad onions and some onions too - eat your heart out Tesco!

And absolutely finally for this blog, the new chicks arrived three weeks ago and they are very cute, as you can see:

Tallulah - who has a "gammy" toe on her left foot, she hobbles a bit but seems in no real discomfort - she chirrups all the time bless her...

Tilly, very robust!

Clarrie, Harriet, Bridie (hidden somewhat) & Betsy - all laying! We had 12 eggs last week, so basically now they are in full flow, so to speak, we should start getting well over 20 eggs a week from them. Half dozen Murray Eggs anyone? £1.73 to you!

Happy laying!

Allotment quickie!

Today I went to the allotment to have a tidy up and, more importantly, to dig. The following pictures show Finlay doing just that.

Good hot bath at the end of the day, of course!

The aim is to finally get rid of the horrid path of couch grass behind Finlay and that area will be covered in potatoes, five varieties this year - two reds, two whites & a salad variety. Where the black plastic is will be cabbages and beans and such like. And the area where Fin is "digging" is the fruit area - bramley & braeburn apples; rhubarb; blackcurrant; and black, goose and rasp berries! 

The words great and genius are so over used. Always have been, but they seem to be wheeled out far too frequently in these over hyped, "celebrity" obsessed days. Gareth Bale for instance, he of Tottenham and Wales. Basically he is a good footballer, like so many, he IS a good player of the game. BUT he is NOT Lionel Messi, nor is he Cristiano Ronaldo; he has a long way to go before he can be mentioned in the same breath as Ryan Giggs. Mr Bale is not even in the top 20 footballers in Europe, but he is continually mentioned as the best. When he consistently performs to the standard that we all can see he has occasionally achieved, and not just every now and then, that is when we can think of him as great or a genius.


And taking those two words, great and genius, we can move on to to Spike Milligan. He is without any shadow of doubt the greatest genius comedian this country (Empire? don't forget he was born in India) has ever produced. Without him, Not Only But Also & Beyond the Fringe would not have existed. Neither would Monty Python, Alexei Sayle, Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, The Mighty Boosh, Reeves & Mortimer, Harry Hill et al and even that exceptional kid's show, Horrible Histories, would not be. He invented a genre and countless others have since followed it. 


Anyway comrades, once a leftie always a leftie, except if your name is Paul Johnson of course (turncoat - wasn't he horrible on Desert Island Discs the other week?), so here is a picture of my very favourite, and new, t-shirt. I got it for my birthday last week. I also got a Spike Milligan Sweat shirt, basically in honour of the 10 year anniversary of the great man's death.

So there we are, a bit more politics amongst the compost and why not? Politics is life; life is politics. Unfortunately we can not escape it, they effect (infect) so much of our lives do politicians. The person who says, "I don't care about politics, it doesn't effect me," needs serious help...


Happy allotmenteering!

Coming soon...

...reality. Yes the real world has interrupted as usual and I really have to get cracking and get some new clients and fill the coming weeks up with lots of lovely work.


It's all very well sitting in doors looking at the snow, wind, rain and other stuff mother nature chooses to throw in our faces

- lovely girl that she is - not overly fond of green myself, but there you go - but there's a time to get back to where you once belonged; out there with your thermals, woolly hat, hoodie and steel toe caps, wielding clippers, trimmers, loppers, secateurs and every other sharp tool one has at one's disposal. Actually Friday was spent doing exactly that and I got rather hot wearing the aforementioned clobber.


I have the last dregs of photos from the cold snap - I truly hope I'm not tempting fate here - the first picture is from Monday last week:

Chicken prints on the roof of our rabbit run - I do believe that chicken shit on the right hand side, but I think we'll ignore that, eh?


Next is from Monday, when I peered into Pat's huge living room in her house at Berkhamsted, thought it was funny to see me staring back. Well mildly funny. Don't ask me what I was doing peering in there, I forget.

On Wednesday I completed the sorting of the compost at Julie and Andrew's place in Buckland, near Tring. I have managed to compost about a third of the flower beds with it. It's taken me about 8 weeks to finish it. This included the now famed "fire in the face" episode, you may remember (http://simonmurraygardenservices.blogspot.com/2012/02/happy-new-year-if-tad-late.html). Death defying, that's me. This is the final cleared bin. I had to grub out an old tree stump too, which was difficult because I don't have any tools anything like robust enough to do that, but there it is, gone!

And finally on Thursday, a visit to Quainton and the picture I took of the pond in the Autumn, all nice reflections and stuff, was like this:

Slightly distorted with ice. Just as beautiful though.


This is my design idea for my new one page website:

Alison's new website launched this week. I'm going to get her web designer to have a look and hopefully within the month mine should launch too. Here's a link to Alison's Crimsoncandy Cakes website:


http://www.crimsoncandy.co.uk/




There you have it! Onwards and upwards, probably over on the allotment for a while tomorrow, continue the tidy up for the oncoming beauties of Spring and the longer and longer daylight hours, so I can become something akin to human again...


Happy browing!