welsh hills again

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is from Ravelry, Amirah by Katherine Va

I have been reviewing plants from the online plant nursery Plant me now  right over this year and now is the time for winter bedding .  For me, winter bedding means plants that I use in pots, planted on top of layers of bulbs for spring.  I am very inclined to leave my garden be in the winter and come inside by the fire but I do plant up seven big pots before I give up and turn my back on it.  It is choosing the bulbs for the pots, especially tulips,  that really gets me going so I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed choosing other things for colour and form over the winter.  Last week the order arrived and I had a lot of fun unpacking it all and potting some of it on as I am not yet quite ready to do my tulip pots. As usual, the plants arrived well packaged and well grown, not huge but bigger than many plug plants which come from other nurseries.  I had ordered two different types of Viola Sorbet. This one is Viola Sorbet Lemon Blueberry Swirl.  The name makes it sound

For the last few years I have taken part in the End of Month view series of blogs, hosted by Helen at Patient gardener .  It has been an interesting exercise and, for someone who is trying to make a new garden where there was field before, a really useful way of looking back and seeing that there is progress. Even when I feel that everything is taking so very long and nothing is coming to fruition as I imagine, a look at the end of month photos since 2009 shows me that I am quite wrong.  Things are settling and maturing.  It is very cheering. This year the garden has very much taken second place to the rest of my life.  I had a big crisis of confidence with it last year and, although I recovered myself as spring returned and I fell back in love with my garden, I have had more time away from it than usual.  I have felt this year that I was running to catch up with myself, falling back through the door from a week in Devon with my parents, gathering myself, wandering around the garden