welsh hills again

Well while we wait for things to happen on the house front I have decided to turn my mind to learning and doing.  I love that sense of stretching myself and gaining competence and I feel as if I have been floating along in my comfort zone for a while.  There have been so many things going on: lots of new babies (ten grandchildren now!  can you believe it?) and the buying of the plot and putting the house on the market.  Now the last of the new grandchildren is here safely, just ten days ago, and there is nothing to do with the house other than play the waiting game.  The garden is pretty cared for at the moment thanks to the 100 day project and we have an August full of visitors coming up.  So here is a week or so of lull when I think I am going to shake myself up a bit. I used to be a great list maker when I was working and have dropped the habit for most of the time.  Life is full of cooking and eating and going to yoga and choir and spending time ...

Not long until the end of the project now and suddenly it is time to pick things as well as to continue with the weeding and sorting.  It makes me realise just how long I have been doing this.  I started on 1st April 2018 at a time when things were only just beginning to grow after a long cold spring.  Now we are certainly in high summer and for May and June we have had a lot of hot dry weather.  When I look across to the hills on the other side of the valley the fields are brown and gold.  This is Wales.  The normal colour of my view is green, many shades of deep verdant green. But this evening through my window shows a bleached dry world.  It is still beautiful but it doesn't quite look like home.  It has been wonderful though to eat outside every day, to sit in the shade because the sun is too hot and to come into the old house where the slate floors and the thick walls produce a cool retreat.  The garden really does need some rain....

I am keeping the project up but with a lot of time spent with older daughter and family and younger daughter and hers  I need to catch up with documenting it! It is an amazing day here in North Wales.  This was the view when I opened the kitchen door this morning and it has stayed pretty much like this all day.  The forecast for the rest of this week is similar so this is a time to appreciate how beautiful it is and to sit on the sense that everywhere needs watering!  Of course it does, we can't have everything! Today's task was just a little one: to cut down the sweet cicely before it seeds all over the place.  Sweet cicely is a  very beautiful thing and while it is flower I love it for the foam of white and the scent.  The plant has a sweet, faintly aniseedy flavour to my palate, and can be used in cooking instead of sugar for things like pies and tarts.  But when it finishes flowering and goes to seed it will seed itself abso...

I have not been recording what I have been doing so here is my attempt at a catch up: Monday: pulled bindweed from the front bed, time taken about twenty minutes Tuesday: did some Spanish in the morning, had a meeting in the afternoon, deadheaded some roses before tea!  time taken about ten minutes Wednesday: today I went a bit bananas about exercise, doing my dance class in the morning, deciding to join in with the walking group in the afternoon and going to yoga in the evening.  I did no gardening whatsoever but I felt great! Thursday was another committed elsewhere day as was Friday.  On Thursday I did pilates in the morning, took the campervan for its service in the afternoon and spent about half an hour in between weeding one of the herb beds which always gets invaded by creeping bindweedn On Friday I went to Welsh in the morning and we went over to see daughter and her family in the afternoon before heading over to some friends for a barbecue.  In ...

I have been better at doing the gardening part of the project than I have at recording it on the blog!  This weekend has been full of family as younger son and his family came up from Devon and two of the others came across to say hello.The sun shone and the children got on amazingly well especially when you consider that they don't see each other that often!  And the value of the garden as a place to be was clear: to sit and chat and play and kick a football or throw a rugby ball or be endlessly pushed on a swing, to feed hens and make dens, to be taken for a walk by granddaughter number one, aged four and a half.  "I'm going to show you that there is even more garden down here, Grandma.  Follow me.  It goes on for ever."  (It really doesn't unless you are four.) So I am feeling more in love with the garden than I have for a long time.  Here is the side garden bubbling over with blue geranium. And the kitchen garden beautifully disguising it...

Can you believe it?  Day 65 and still going!  The last three days have meant quite a bit of garden time, much of it with Ian working as well.  It has been practical, functional gardening: clearing a raised bed, planting out beans and courgettes as well as planting out the cosmos seedlings and doing yet more of the endless weeding. I am not a vegetable gardener.  I like eating it but I don't like growing it.  It is labour intensive and doesn't have any of the imagination and satisfaction I get from mixing plants together and trying to create something which moves me, and ideally other people too.  I can sort of see that there can be a romance in vegetable gardening.  I love a good allotment and I do very much like the sense of eating something where I know exactly where and how it was grown.  But a few years ago we agreed that Ian would do veg and I would do flowers and that has suited me fine.  But Ian has been very busy over the last few w...

This is nearly two thirds of the way through!  That is amazing! Today younger daughter and her two children were here for the morning and for lunch.  As usual in the summer we spent a lot of time outside, feeding chickens, collecting eggs, swinging, throwing balls for the dog, hiding balls for the dog, going up to the farm to see the calves and then pretending I was the dog as Grace made me sit and wait and hid the ball for me to find.  All, as you can see, good fun but not what you might call relaxing.  It is lovely to be able to do it, for myself to build the relationship with the children and for our daughter to ease, just a tiny little bit, the relentless pressure of mothering two small children.  She handles this pressure with enormous patience, good humour and grace but it is still a hard job.  In fact both our daughters and both our daughters in law seem to mother small children far more easily and cheerily than I ever did.  I wonder if I woul...

Yesterday was a day full of movement: dance class in the morning (and yay!  I have finally cracked hulahooping), a walk and some gardening in the afternoon and yoga class in the evening.  I don't want you to think this is my normal programme.  Usually if I aim to do even one of those things I feel I am doing ok and don't attempt to fit in anything else.  But yesterday for some reason I just like felt like moving and I am glad I did. Today is a more sedentary day, even though I keep reminding myself that sitting is the new sugar.  I started the day with a visit to the dentist and the hygeinist.  I might as well be honest about this.  I don't mind the dentist because he generally doesn't find anything to do but I really don't like going to the hygeinist.  This is not the fault of the hygeinists themselves who are all lovely.  I am a wimp.  I don't like the scraping and the pushing my mouth about and the sense that there are more things i...

Every day I have done a small thing in the garden, unless I have been away in which case I have tried to give it some thought.  The greatest difference it is making at the moment is to the way I notice it.  A peony opening, a bit of bindweed twining through the salvias, a tiny bluetit chirping in the hedge: there is something about the daily engagement which makes me see it all. Today I have put geraniums in the pots by the holiday cottage door and begun to seriously harden off the cosmos seedlings which I bought from Sarah Raven. I whisked through the side garden removing tiny heads of nettles which were poking up between the hardy geraniums.  Then I sat for a few minutes, listening to the garden, birds and pollinators and the distant hum of my neighbour's tractor. From my seat the alliums and the orange geum clash gloriously. Looking back towards the house, more alliums are clashing with the smyrnium and the side garden is only days away from erupting int...

Still here, still doing the project!  Life has got a bit busy so that it has been a bit of a stretch both doing the project and recording it have  so here is a bit of a catch up. On Wednesday I went to Chelsea Flower Show which I decided to regard as part of the project, since thinking about the garden is a necessary part of gardening it.  Chelsea is an interesting conundrum.  The beauty and perfection of the show gardens is another world and the transient nature of what they produce is very different from what we try to do as gardeners with a garden which we live in and with the whole year round.  And yet it produces moments of delight and beauty as you clamber through the crowds. This is from one of artisan gardens which I like a lot for their small scale and accessibility.  I was struck this year by how often I was attracted by the hard landscaping as much as the planting.  Perhaps I am turning into Ian. I love this slate sphere and woul...

Yes! Past the half way mark!  There have been tiny bits in the garden since I last posted, mostly watering and the kind of weeding where you wander past and pull one thing up.  And no working in the garden today because today I am off to some meetings this morning and then down to London in late afternoon to go to the Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow, thanks to an invitation from a friend. I am leaving the garden alive with all sorts of bees and blossom.  When you walk around there are places where the noise of insects beats joyously around your head. I am really looking forward to Chelsea.  I went two or three years ago with the same friend and we had a great day.  The trick for me to Chelsea is not trying to relate what you see to your own space all the time, instinctive although that is.  That is much easier to do when you live somewhere like I do where the garden is high and wildish and grows what it wants to grow rather than some vision of an Englis...

Just a short time in the garden this morning before heading off for the weekend. This is a part of the garden I haven't shown you much although in many ways it is my favourite part (when other parts aren't).  We planted a bed of native trees parallel to the hedge at the bottom of the field.  Besides bird cherry, rowan, birch and whitebeam there are dogwoods, a daphne and a magnolia which doesn't really belong there but had to go somewhere.  It seems to blend in ok, just drawing attention to itself for the short glorious burst of flowering before fading back into the background. The trees are underplanted with hellebores, hardy geraniums and pulmonaria.  In spring there are lots of snowdrops and primroses.  Theoretically this bed looks after itself but actually grass invades occasionally and of course the ubiquitous creeping buttercup.  But it is probably the best place in the garden for looking after itself.  I spent a bit of time this morning t...

The project is going well.  Even on the days when I don't get time to document what I am doing I am managing to do something, somehow, somewhere in the garden. Today I have been admiring the way the sweet cicely has chosen to sow itself in amongst the peony.  They are such a happy partnership.  I have also been potting on my seedlings from Sarah Raven. I decided that the answer to my cutting garden conumdrum this year would be to buy in some annual seedlings for the squares which I haven't yet filled.  I have twenty seedlings of four different varieties of cosmos: Dazzler and Double Click Cranberry, both carmine pink, one single flowered, one double, and Purity and Psyche White, both white, again one single and one semi double.  As usual I have bought far too many so these will do my cutting garden, the gaps in the side garden and should still leave a few left over for my daughter in law who is starting a brand new garden in their new house. I also boug...

There was very little time for the garden today as I had a whole load of Spanish to do for my OU course and granddaughter visiting booked for this afternoon.  So I contented myself with a great deal of watering.  Watering isn't generally a problem here in North Wales but we have had a dry few days and there are lots of new things which have been planted and various things in pots waiting to go to my daughter in law's new garden.  The soil is so stony that it drains at great speed when the rain stops and until plants get their roots down they need a little help. So first of all I watered all the new perennials which went in last week and over the weekend: the foxgloves, hollyhocks, violas, and catmint.  Then I watered pots of hardy geranium and clematis for Lindsay.  Finally I moved to the little wooden lean to greenhouse: I can't take any credit at all for what is in here.  Ian has taken over responsibility for the growing of food.  He has sown ...

Today was an astonishingly beautiful day.  I wandered about looking at everything which I had planted and making sure it was still alive! Other than that it was a day for yoga, Spanish lessons and trying not to eat much!

The thirteenth of May.  Had he lived, my father would have been eighty four today.  His illness and decline were so important to my experience of the garden that I shall talk a bit about that today. We gave him a splendid eightieth birthday.  My mother had died quite without warning from a heart attack six months earlier and the village hall had been full of people for her funeral wanting to share their memories of her.  It might sound odd that we had his birthday party in the same place but it felt very right.  Lots of the same people were there and, although my mother's funeral had had its odd surprising moments of joy, the shock of her death was overwhelming and full of pain and it felt good to have some more simple moments of pleasure in that friendly community place. My sister had pulled all the stops out to get everyone there who my dad wanted to see: all the children, with their husbands and wives, most of the grandchildren, now adult so some with...

Does this count as nearly half way?  A couple of days so busy that there was not a space to get out into the garden.  I countered that by thinking about which plants I would have if I had a much smaller space.  I didn't get very far with that but in a couple of weeks I have been invited to go with a friend to Chelsea.  I am so looking forward to it. Today I more than made up for a couple of days off.  I planted all the plants I had bought earlier in the week.  The white foxgloves went into the side garden, currently being lit by the flame of this smyrnium perfoliatum.  I bought it years ago from Great Dixter.  It took a while to settle in but now it self seeds just enough to make it interesting. It is a triennial, the only one I have ever knowingly possessed.  This makes it even more important not to weed out the plants which have no flower spikes as they will sit quietly in year two before exploding into lime green gorgeousness in year ...

Another day of just a little time for connecting with the garden.  I decided to use it for a bit of plant buying and fifteen minutes weeding in the cutting garden. These are mainly plants for the side garden which is a traditional English (or in this case Welsh) cottage garden, appropriate as it sits alongside a seventeenth century Welsh farmhouse.  I bought three more foxgloves.  Out in the field I let the native foxgloves self seed and there are lots of them up by the shepherd's hut.  In the side garden I prefer the white or pale ones.  I also bought some violas and three more hollyhocks.  Violas really like a bit more moisture than our soil offers but I do have some viola labradorica which has settled in very happily.  These have larger flowers so are likely to be a little fussier but the soil here has been mulched this year so you never know. And three more hollyhocks, one black and two pink.  Hollyhocks ought to be happy up here b...

A change of pace for day 38.  We achieved so much and worked so hard this weekend and today was full of reports to write, Spanish to do, shopping to get and admin things piling up.  So today I did one solitary thing and planted a lavender to fill a spot in the kitchen garden where one died a couple of years ago. Not the most interesting thing to do, not the most interesting blog, but it shows I am hanging on to the project!

A different sort of day today, quite far removed from the little by little approach I have taken so far with the 100 day project.  It has been a beautiful day of warm sun up here and although I did an hour of my Spanish I could not bear to be inside for the two hours I had planned.  It will cool down soon enough, tomorrow by the look of the weather forecast, so today was for being outside. Ian has been repairing the raised beds in the kitchen garden.  This is a job which takes time and there was such a lot of weeding and garden work to do down there I abandoned the cutting garden for now and spent my time today weeding the beds he had finished so that we could work together. One of these beds, the third one along that you can see here, is full of peony, sweet cicely and hellebores.  It has also been invaded by the ever present creeping buttercup.  I removed loads of it into the pink wheelbarrow.  Then I inspected the mint bed, the second one along....