A garden room .... the garden in every room .... boiling piri-piri in socks ....

Wednesday night and Fereday is packed off to Morris Dancing practice, leaving the rabbits and I to watch Sir Alan rip some git a new one together before I go up for a bath... so there's a short spot for blogging. Seeing as I don't have a particular Fereday foible to relate and thereby have nothing to add to the cannon of Fereday lore which is slowly building to biblical proportions on LJN, I thought I'd just give a short round up of what's going on in the garden and round the house....The Mini-ment... (Small raised bed in a neighbour's garden)An experiment with hanging little tidy bags of mothballs all around the edge of the bed has proved fruitless as the neighbourhood moggies continued to use the carrot mound as a litter tray... I gave in and bought a roll of meshing today to lay over the top, only to trot round and find that my neighbour has already taken action and put mesh over the bed.... the mesh is working, by the way. On one hand this is good, on the other, it means I can't try another crazy idea which was suggested to me by the very nice security chap in the office who had kindly helped me through the door to the office with my roll of mesh from Wilko's... he highly recommended rubber snakes... apparently cats are afraid of snakes (and, if it actually works as a deterrent, cats are clearly quite stupid). If someone does try this, I'm really keen to know if it works... I might still buy some snakes anyway... just for fun....The back garden (and holding pen)The back garden is really coming along.... the geraniums have been flowering away, including the slightly bonkers one which we bought from Dove Cottage a couple of years ago and has a wild self-seeding habit... it looks really lovely having laced itself through the wild fern which comes up around a flagstone that sits in the middle of the bed.There's a fair crop of 'Waiting room' plants, i.e., those which have been grown on from seed or which have been divided from 'residents', which are slowly being distributed to client gardens, friends and relatives.Roses have small buds on them.Salad crops are going a bomb, and we've already had a couple of small bowls. Fereday and I are now completely converted to Franchi seeds - I planted six courgette seeds and up came six courgette plants.... that's a 100% germination rate.... fantastic.... true, I decapitated one, but three of them are going strong (despite the cat poo) in the mini-ment. Two were presented to a friend.There's a slight smell of piri-piri and chilli by the back gate - Fereday boiled up a sock of the stuff to create some fire water to spread around to scare off the Beast of Bodmin... the ginger tom cat who had the temerity to sit by our back gate on Monday night howling for a date at 4am.... B*st*rd!!!! Still, it meant that Fereday became a fully paid-up member of the "Make gloves, not kittens" brigade.... so, overall, it brought us closer together! (And no, I didn't ask if the sock was clean, so I don't know if it's the piri-piri or vintage Fereday post-Morris practice foot odour that is doing the trick... but something is.... for the cats, at least, there's no let up from the neighbourhood kids.....)The greenhouse and nursery yard (or dining room)Lucky to have a large window in the dining room, you might think? Not when access to it is blocked by four mini propagators, a few 'makeshift' propagators (seed tray or pot with a clear salad carton as a lid), a large house rabbit pen converted into a HUGE propagator, and a dining table pulled up as close to the window as feasible to allow the several seed trays on it to get the full benefit of the sun.... For my part, I haven't taken the Christmas decorations off the mantle yet.... it contributes to atmosphere of garden-centre bargain bin....Fereday is also in the process of sanding down four dining chairs in there - bought to replace the ones I sold on eBay earlier this year .... on a Wednesday.... while he was at Morris dancing practice.... Hey, I know.... anyone want to buy a black Volvo estate???? It has leather seats which heat up in the winter... and a radio... and a boot full of tools... and it's already dusty... and I think there's a small tree growing in the footwell....

After 26 years at Radley College, Adam King has seen grounds management evolve dramatically. Weather patterns have become less predictable, playing surfaces are under greater pressure than ever, and flexibility has become one of the most valuable…

GroundsFest has welcomed Christina Walker to its sales team as preparations continue for the 2027 exhibition.Christina joins the award-winning team with an extensive background in publishing and exhibitions spanning more than two decades. She began…

When freezing temperatures threaten the pitches at Forest Green Rovers FC, speed is everything. Protecting the stadium and training ground with frost covers can be a race against the weather, but thanks to Kress battery-powered blowers, the club's…

Comments

Andrew Fereday May 13, 2009 at 10:33pm

Can I just make it clear that it was a clean sock, and I'm not cultivating biological weapons in my footwear.... Not any more, anyway. I've not been a student for many years now....