Hello again! Par de uno

Well, the second week of the new gardening season* kicked off with a quick tidy up in Pat's back garden - don't want to take away too much though as there was a heavy frost over night and the old leaves and foliage keep the new shoots nice and warm. Then returned to the front and finished off clearing up the disaster left by some idiot scaffolders who ruined the edging of the grass. Basically drivers tend to turn round on the area of grass in front of Pat's and it churns up the grass, but the scaffolders did a really great (sic) job of making a quagmire out of it, so I have attempted to clean it up, make it look better and with the help of some strategically placed posts (rustic stylee) will make it look good and impossible to do a u-eeee over!

Should have taken a proper "before" but I only thought to do it after about an hour's work 

Then over to the allotment to carry on with the digging. I only have about a third left to do and then I'll be getting the manure/home made compost on it. Very exciting as the potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic turned up on Friday, all nicely chitting and pre-planted in the greenhouse yesterday.


While cleaning out the chickens yesterday there was a very loud bang and crash. Yep! Footballs and greenhouses don't go together... Poor Finlay got shouted at, which is always wrong - note to self, anger management, anger management, anger management...


A few catch-up pictures. The first one is the seed, mixed with sharp sand, for the wild flower meadow at Quainton. A cornucopia of loveliness...

And these are some of the many signs of Spring at Church Farm, Buckland, Julie & Andrew's place...

I do like a daff or two and those hellebores make my heart jump and the narcissi at the bottom even beat the daffs - speaking of daffs, well done the Welsh for winning the Six Nations, marvellous stuff...


Pat left me the keys to let Fergus out today, so he could have a run about and do his "business". The below is as far as he got from the back door! Bless the ol' fella!

And finally, yesterday being Mother's Day, here's a picture of mum and son that I just couldn't resist...

Happy cuddling!


*NB: The new gardening season is a figment of my imagination by the way, I just call it that as I am now back working on all the regular gardens I have and it's a rather lovely sign that Spring is really here and I can stop being a miserable git for the next 8/9 months...

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!

The greenhouse comes to life

This is what it's all about. Hopefully, all this will produce us enough food to not have to go to Tesco from June onwards...

Salad leaves, toms, french beans, salad onions, carrots, potaydas...

...cabbages, salad onions, more cabbages...

...cucumbers, melone, basil, more toms...

...yet more toms, melons, salad onions and that shallot!

Also, over on the allotment we have more cabbages, about 200 onions & shallots, garlic and 4 types of potatoes