welsh hills again

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...

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...

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...

I have always wanted a cutting garden.  I love flowers in the house but when I had small gardens I could never bring myself to cut the things which were making an impact in the garden in order to bring them inside.  Here, with lots of room and a blank canvas, I decided to make a garden specifically for cutting.  It would be full of sweetpeas, cosmos, foliage plants and dahlias with daffodils and tulips in the spring. There were successes.  The dahlias were fabulous but only if I lifted them in the autumn and started them again in the greenhouse the following spring.  For the last two years I have tried to leave them in the ground but I am reluctantly concluding that on a high site in North Wales we do not have a long enough growing season for dahlias to get going without the boost they receive from being started off under glass.  Left in the ground they are only just beginning to flower strongly when they are cut down by the first frosts. Sweetpea...