January in the garden

No garden looks its best in January and the garden is squelchy all over from the endless rain.  Nonetheless there are some bright points, some from the unseasonable warmth, such as the daffodils I planted at the bottom of the garden where they would be seen every time I went past the back door.  There is something rather wonderful about planning something unseen, under the ground, thinking ahead to what it will be in months to come.  Arranging bulbs in little holes in the ground, thinking out how they will look, plotting beauty.  Last year, without bulbs, was dismal, I missed the concentrated sunshine glow of daffodils, harbingers of warmth to come.  There is something so cheering in the bulbs and the way they brighten up late winter.



In the bed outside the kitchen window I have begun to put plants that offer some winter colour, cyclamen, dogwood and hellebore, again to have something to look out at in winter.  The dogwood came from Buckingham nurseries, who sell good quality plants at superb prices, and it has settled right in, working away putting out fresh shoots.  I'd like to put some holly nearby, how anyone can have a garden without holly is beyond me, my previous homes have always had holly and ivy and birds find it such good shelter and a source of food.


(not the world's greatest photograph)

My other big garden excitement is a compost bin.  Never did I think I would get so excited by compost!  Shortly after Christmas my dad arrived at the door with a mystery piece of plastic - which turned out to be the hatch cover for the compost bin and an early birthday present.  He completed the present with a bagful of his compost, complete with worms, to get me started.



Hopefully there will be more to show next month and hopefully I can keep up giving updates on the garden.  I think, I hope, I will become a gardener, being outside, absorbed in a task, is so good for my mental well-being, even if I can only do it for five, ten or at most twenty minutes at a time.

A bad year for blogging

It cannot be denied that as far as I am concerned 2015 was a bad year for blogging.  The completeness of the change brought about by moving house has got me out of the habit of blogging.  Let us hope that 2016 is different, now I have had this house a year and had another birthday, both of which feel like little landmarks.  If last year was about moving out and getting the house set up, what is this year for?

My strepocarpus, I am developing a love of houseplants

So far not a lot, as I'm finishing my second virus since Christmas, though I have got a lot of knitting done while glued to the sofa by fatigue.  Last week I finished a baby dress in a yarn that just suited the pattern and hopefully when I have sewn the second button on I will get around to showing it off.  In the past day or so I have started on some socks for a cousin; as my sock drawer is rather full I have been concentrating on knitting socks for other people.  Am I alone in finding it hard to stop knitting socks?  If I do not have any on the needles I can get a deep longing to knit a sock. Still, there are worse addictions, right?

A recent picture of Willow

I think I will start keeping a blogging ideas notebook so that when I have ideas I don't forget them again.  This year I would like to do something each month on the garden, even showing the weeds and failures.  No point pretending to be better than I am.  Gardening has been so good for me mentally and physically and it provides a safe calming thing to think about when I am anxious.  There will hopefully be more on books, faith, knitting and other making.

Here goes, fingers crossed.

The Year in Books - the first two months

Alas moving house has absorbed all the energy (and some) of the first three months of the year, so I am catching up on the first two months' books in one post, then I will do another post for March and April.  First off is January's book, which was The Country Life Cookery Book by Ambrose Heath, originally published in 1937 and republished last year by Persephone Books.  It is arranged seasonally around the months of the year, each month starting with a wonderful illustration by Eric Ravilious and a short guide to what to do that month in the kitchen garden.  Heath's intended audience seems to be the relatively affluent country-dweller, who relies on what is available in local village shops and in the kitchen garden; and it is assumed that both are well stocked.  With an increasing connection now being made between growing and cooking vegetables, for example in some of the books published by Nigel Slater and programmes such as Kew on a Plate, it is interesting to see a writer ahead of his time in his insistence that there should be a greater link between kitchen and garden.  In arguing for this he draws on the work Vegetable Cookery by a Mrs Elizabeth Lucas, who "offers the revolutionary theory that the gardener should be under the direction of the cook".  While most of us today lack both servants, but his remarks on the vegetables to grow (or buy) and eat are still relevant and useful.  Unlike many gardeners of his day he argues against going for size and large quantities of a few crops, in all things he is driven by taste.  This comes across in his recipes, he writes with almost greedy interest and definite conviction: one of my favourite lines comes at the end of a recipe for an apple pudding, "Bake until the top crust is brown and crisp, and eat it with gratitude."

The second book, for February, is a novel, A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Brae.  At risk of straying into cliché, I found this hard to put down and was utterly absorbed in its world.  However, it is one of those books that it is hard to review without giving too much away.  In short it deals with the effects of a tragedy on a Mormon family living in the North West of England and observes the events through the eyes of different members of the family in turn.  Throughout the family's faith both helps and hinders their grief and the novel explores the tensions of being a family living by different rules and beliefs to that of the community around them.  I rarely read modern fiction, generally having too much of the back catalogue to get through, but heard the short story the novel started off life as on the radio and needed to read the rest of the story.  It is beautifully written, cathartic (I did a fair amount of weeping), but not mawkish or depressing, do read it.

As ever you can see the other entries in The Year in Books here

On the difficulties of photographing bees

The ceanothus in our garden is in full bloom and the bees are in paradise, you can hear them buzzing as they nimbly work from flower to flower.  Looking closer you can see that their pollen baskets are bright yellow and full, so full sometimes that I wonder how they can still fly.  But while the bees are great fun to watch, they are most difficult to photograph, being small and fast moving.  My camera is good, but not state of the art, so it struggles to focus fast enough and accurately enough.


Despite being a failure at its main aim, I rather like this photograph as it shows the problem, the bee appears as a sunlit blur in the centre of the picture, while the camera has focussed on the flowers.



These are probably my best pictures of the lot.  I think I shall have to send my sister out there with her big camera while I read up in the manual of my camera to see if there is anything I can change in the settings to make photographing these amazing creatures easier.



Then my next challenge will be learning to identify the different varieties, I find that a real struggle.

Spring

Although today has been distinctly wintry on the whole we are surrounded by signs of spring.  Our pond was a ferment of frogs last week, at one point we counted twelve in there, which was quite something as it is not a large pond, only just over a metre long at most.  They have mostly disappeared now, leaving the pond full of frog-spawn.  I love spring, watching the cycle of life getting started again, plants appearing, first as tiny green spikes, then emerging into their full identity, small crocuses or full sized daffodils towering higher and higher.  Watching the buds on the trees, there all winter as tiny promises of the renewal to come, slowly swelling and breaking and the bees emerge from their winter quarters and begin to visit from flower to flower.



This has been a good weekend for spring things, despite today's weather, yesterday there were times of gorgeous blue skies and bright, warm sunshine cutting through the crisp breeze.  On my way out I noticed among the many crocuses that have naturalised and are spreading across the front garden most efficiently, one which is striped in purple and white, something I never knew crocuses could do.  On my way home, after dawdling to listen to a blackbird and watch some great tits in the trees - one of them flew close enough past my head that I heard its wing flutter in flight, the first time I have heard that this year - I discovered that crocuses seem to close for the night.  All the flowers had shut in the time I had been out.



We have lots of narcissi in the back garden as well as more crocuses, the occasional tulip, a few hyacinths and glorious clumps of primroses.  I adore the "proper" pale yellow primroses, so sunshiny with heart-shaped petals.  Their cousins the cowslips are beginning to flower too.  Continuing the yellow theme we have sighted a yellow butterfly at the bottom of the garden, probably a brimstone I think.



Everywhere is new life and this morning's great excitement was the news that we once again had two robins, our robin has been doing some valiant singing recently hoping to attract a mate.  There were two robins in the garden in January but it was probably a bit too early for them to be together and one left again.  So we have high hopes of baby robins come the summer.  However, there have not been as many goldfinches around lately, I hope the robin's aggression has not scared them off.



My knitting is keeping with the spring theme too as I am now on the top shaping of the Peerie Flooers hat by Kate Davies, the decrease sections do take some concentration and I have been back re-knitting most rows at least once.  But the finished result is looking beautiful and most spring-like, the Rowan Fine Tweed yarn is gorgeous, with a wonderful lustre.  Hopefully it will be finished soon and my head will match the spring around me.

Seasonal bewilderment

This unseasonably warm weather has caused the garden to be a profusion of flowers and unseasonable new growth, so that alongside more usual sights there are also fresh nasturtiums coming up, summer flowers still flowering and even supposedly spring flowers putting out fresh flowers.


Next door's apples ripening in profusions


Holly berries ripening, we shall be unlikely to have any left by Christmas for the Christmas pudding given the birds' appetites.


The roses by the pond, although they have flowered in mid-winter before, they have a natural enthusiasm.


Summer flowers and foliage


A hoverfly on a poppy


More poppies in waiting


And lastly some enthusiastic primroses

August Sunflowers

We finally have a sunflower flowering, planting the seeds directly in the ground was not wildly successful, these are the only two that have come up.  Next year I think I shall plant them in pots and then put them out when they're bigger.

I love sunflowers, they are so cheerful, like concentrated sunshine.  Hopefully the birds will enjoy the seeds too.

Our tomatoes are also ripening thick and fast and I have harvested some every day the past few days.  There's something deeply satisfying about eating something that has grown outside your own back door and that you have watched grow.

Unfurling

A couple of days ago I took this photograph of some of the roses in the garden, attracted by the beauty of the tightly furled buds, their creamy yellow tinged with pink.



Yesterday afternoon I photographed the same roses again, as the roses gradually unfurled and the blush of pink began to fade.



And this morning they have progressed further still to a mass of flowers.  I am not greatly enamoured of the roses one gets in vases, with small flowers on long straight stems, but I adore roses in a garden, growing in a glorious profusion of blooms.



Despite the lack of sunshine the bees are having a good time, carefully climbing in and out of the snapdragons , whose nectar must be good for the amount of effort involved in parting the "mouth" of the flower and climbing in and then out again and rifling through the heavy bloom of a many petalled poppy.  Many of them are bumbling around the hebe hedge at the front in drunken delight.

The garden and its inhabitants are such a source of delight and refreshment, even on a comparatively cold, grey day as today.  Rest assured I am still knitting, gearing up for the current baby boom, I have finished one baby vest and started yesterday on another and have a fresh pair of bootees on the go to fill in odd moments.

Ceanothus

The ceanothus was only planted a few years ago but is already taller than me and is just, finally creeping into flower, slowly flushing with blue.  The air around it is full of the buzzing of bees and hoverflies and its honeyed scent and it has added a wonderful splash of colour to the garden.





I even managed to get a picture of one of the bumble bees feeding on the flowers, it is a little blurred, but my camera does not seem good enough to capture them, as they move so fast.  That or my skills with the camera are not good enough!

Magnolia

We are blessed with a beautiful magnolia tree outside our house in the front garden and in front of that on the kerb some variety of cherry tree and right now both are blossoming magnificently.  It's a wonderful sight and the bees seem very keen on it all although they show a marked preference for the cherry tree, partly I think because of the profusion of flowers very close together.  Anyhow, I managed to get some photographs today and I thought it might be cheering to see them.







Expect the next post to come from deepest Sussex as I am off on my holidays to a farm - with sheep!

A time of firsts

I am sadly aware that I have slipped well behind with my blogging, this is mainly due to life appearing to move at a far faster pace than I can keep up with and to feeling very tired, not that I should be surprised about that, it does go with the territory.  In the meantime I have been watching an astonishing number of spring firsts emerge as the weather has finally warmed up a little.

We have had the first blossom on lots of the trees - wild and flowering cherry, plum and magnolia all out together - cherry and magnolia shown here outside our house.



The first cowslips flowering, they have taken to the garden, from the two plants put in a few years ago we now have nine in the garden, in addition to the couple we have given away.  My dad is a great advocate of the cowslip and I do love their cheery flowers, yellow is so sunshiny, although we also have the genetic rarity of a red cowslip.



The first bees emerging, I adore watching the bumble bees proceed from flower to flower.  They are nigh on impossible to photograph however.  This year there have been many flowers out awaiting them, including the lungwort, not the world's most prepossessing plant perhaps, but a hit with the bees over many weeks.  The other evening the cherry tree pictured above was abuzz with bees, such a joy to see.



The first fritillary of the year, part of the William Morris theme to the garden, fitting in with the period and style of the house.



The first days of sunshine and sitting outside, watching the birds and remaining still so that they will approach and feed while I am there.  As always the robin is first down, often coming very close in the holly bush to see what I am doing and to twitter softly and sing, but blue tits, dunnocks and even the gold finches have been joining him.  I love seeing both robins together at this time of year, one has started feeding the other with choice titbits and various birds have been spotted with nesting material.

All this has brightened a tough few weeks, with spiritual and physical struggle all ongoing.  On the knitting front (this is supposedly a knitting blog after all), I have finally finished a cardigan, but not managed to photograph it, and started a new one, double v, from an Interweave knits magazine a couple of years ago, in Vinni's Colours Nikkim, which being a cotton can be hard on the hands.  The colour is wonderful though, called peacock, it is rich and deeply saturated.  Hopefully it will not take as long to knit as the last cardigan, which I started last May.



Onwards and upwards as they say.

52 weeks of happy - week 5

A steadier week thankfully, once I had recovered from the "alarums and excursions" at the end of last week and was able to sleep again.  There was even a good day, which is a rare thing indeed.  I do keep meaning to blog in between these posts but keep not getting around to it,  hopefully tomorrow I can remedy this as I have a couple of finished objects to post about if nothing else.

1. Blue sky - a rare commodity over this past year and so much appreciated on the occasions that it has appeared.  I spent time sitting simply looking at it, drinking it in.  At times it was accompanied by sunshine which was lovely, even the feeble warmth of winter sunshine was wonderful and a hint of the spring to come.  I truly am praying and hoping that this year will be less overcast than last, after a while it just starts to drag you down, especially during the summer when it is supposed to be better weather - oh how British, going on and on about the weather!



2. Unexpected early buds - my dad had used some prunings from the wild cherry tree to stake some hyacinths we had in a pot in the kitchen and being in the warmth, with the water from the pot, they have started to bud.  Some are almost out, when they are I shall try to get photos and get them up here.  We have collected up some more of the prunings and put them in a vase to see if similar happens to them.  I never like seeing branches indoors like that if they've been cut off the tree just to look at, it seems mean to all the birds and insects who would benefit from them, but since the tree needed pruning anyway it is not so bad.



3. A lovely pub breakfast with knitters last Saturday morning, good food, friendly chatter and laughter and knitting, a good way to spend any morning in my opinion.

4. Having a good day - not a dramatically good day, just a calmly, nothing getting to me, not feeling too awful day, which is better than wild excitement or overwhelmingly happy in my book.  A walk in the sunshine, reading on the sofa in the sunshine, seeing two police horses go past the house (they appear to have been past our house every day this week at exactly the same time, looking very handsome but rather bored), some peace and quiet and noticing that some snow drops had come out.  Unfortunately the photograph I managed to get is not very good because there was an incredibly high wind so all the plants kept moving about wildly.



Here's to more good days in future.

Observations in a garden, between seven and eight on a June evening

I am sitting on the old bench in the middle of the garden in the cool of the evening. Little snatches of sunshine have made their way through the tall trees to the west and are illuminating a piece of the trellis, making the bark of the wild cherry shine in a fluttering leaf-filtered light and turning a few privileged leaves of the apricot tree translucent and more intensely green.

The biggest sensation around me is the wind, first in big whooshing gushes in the taller trees, then echoed down lower in the shrubs, bushes and smaller trees of our garden. The sound is all around me, gentle, rushing and persistent, putting into sound the scritchy-scratchiness of the holly trees as the leaves scrape against one another. Most of the sound is more gentle though, a soft constant, drowning out more modern noise, lifted and enlarged by bigger gusts, varied with sudden stillnesses when only the slightest breeze travels lightly across my hands and around my body.



The tall trees are like illuminated green tents, formed by leaves caught in evening sunlight, full of life. Around them insects dance and birds fly to and fro chirruping to one another. One young bird cries persistently, as though searching for his parents, or wishing to affirm his own identity.

This is the hour when often a blackbird will sit on an ariel above a neighbour's roof, or perhaps on a convenient chimney pot, singing to all the world, but tonight he is elsewhere. Often when I sit here I am aware of the birds around me, even if I cannot see them, hearing the little scufflings and hoppings and twitterings as they go about through the trees and bushes and fences around me, communicating with one another in a constant game of, "Where are you?" "I am here, where are you?". Occasionally a bold fellow, usually the robin, will come closer to see who or what I am and what I am doing in his territory, sometimes lingering to look over my shoulder and hovering near.

If you sit still for long enough you can be rewarded by the birds coming down to the seed feeder as though you are not there, scuttling in for a piece of sunflower seed before carrying their prize into the wild cherry or holly trees to peck it into submission.

My fingers are cold now but I have no wish to go in, the evening is so perfect, the sky so blue after so much grey and rain and I can smell the already dampening grass beneath my feet, speckled with clover flowers. In between the wind bears towards me the scent of the roses and honeysuckle, both blooming profusely and other scents whose origins are foreign to me. The wind ruffles my back and I watch the golden green leaves of the biggest of the trees fluttering too and fro, the branches pitching and tossing like the sea.






The adult robin comes onto the trellis, looks around the garden to check all is well, flutters to the fence and speeds off between the houses. Leaf shadows show like puppets across pots, plants and bows and a bumble bee, out late, investigates a likely looking nasturtium, crawling bodily into the heart of the flower. A snatch of song comes through the wind, comes closer and the conversation continues across the gardens, but I must leave the garden to its true owners, it is only ever on loan to me, and go in and attend to supper.


(As written except for corrections to typing and spelling errors, 30th June 2012.  Photographs from other occasions)

Late again

No surprises there then, I'm late again with the work in progress post for this week.  I've been very tired this week and a touch out of it (though my body is adjusting to another new medication, so I'll let it off).  I have finished the knitting on the baby cardigan, though I think it needs one more row on the ribbing, so I'll have to go back and undo the casting off.  Although it's a nuisance it will look better and I only skimped in the first place because I was worried about running out of yarn.





Other than that I'm plodding on with my lace cardigan, I'm finally half way through the body but I was right to think of this as a long term project.  Mind you, as ever, actually knitting the cardigan, instead of leaving it to its own devices, might help.



I shall illustrate this post with a couple of recent pictures from the garden (since I have no new project photos), which is looking thoroughly overgrown after all that rain.  Some of the nasturtiums have already reached three feet, climbing up through the ceanothus.  The great tits and other birds continue to fill the garden with movement and chirruping, you can see even in just a week how much they've grown up.  I love to watch them "sun bathe" (for want of a better word) stretching out all their feathers to their full extent in the sunshine and pressing their bodies flat against the ground, or the tree, as two blackbirds were doing earlier in the week.  This morning the great tits were sunbathing on the shed roof, an excellent location as they were well camouflaged.


Verdant chaos

WIP Wednesday

Nothing that exciting to show you this week, sometimes that's how life goes, just working away on the same projects.  I've this minute finished the purple lace socks and they are currently in the sink having a soak, I also finished the turquoise Wollmeise lace socks and sent them off to their recipient (in the Ravelry group British Banter's first ever sock swap).  Since I seem to be very much into socks at present I can see a new pair coming into my future very soon, possibly Cookie.a's Thelonious.



Meanwhile I am working away on a cardigan in turquoise Drops Alpaca, in the shade (prosaically named 7240m) I have been dreaming of using for ages, making Pomme De Pin cardigan by Amy Christoffers, a cardigan I knew I had to knit immediately as soon as I saw it.  At times it felt as though the 24 rows of K1P1 ribbing with which the body commences would defeat me, but I am through it and beginning on the lace pattern, although prepared for it to be a long haul project.



The weather has suddenly warmed up, inside two or three days I went from cold to too hot and my body is struggling to keep up with the change in temperature.  But the roses are thriving on it and have finally flowered.  I am out everyday photographing them and watching their progress, while in the pond a group of frogs have emerged from the undergrowth and are sunbathing, part submerged in the water.

WIP Wednesday

Nearly finished socks...

...and peas that are just starting out on life.