Hobbies and Crafts

hat sounds like a big job Vera. We are just back after 15 days away and we have a jungle to contend with. It is all flowering well, only one tomato not thriving but is very 'lush'. OH is busy choppy back as it is garden bin day tomorrow. I am on the second load of washing and there are two more loads in OH's case and the washing bin!!

How’s your lawn now Kandj? We don’t have grass anymore but we do have a big problem with moss in the beds even though the soil here is fairly free draining.

Our garden is looking very lush and somewhat overgrown. I can’t believe that 4 years ago there was nothing there but a tatty area of grass. I have noticed that the blooms on some of the perennial flowering plants are getting smaller so I will be dividing them at the appropriate time and hoping that will give them a boost.

At the end of the month we have a fencing company coming to replace all our fencing. It’s a big job as there is a lot more involved that just slotting in new panels so they are expecting to be here for three days. After a month for it all to settle and dry out they will come back and paint it. We want it the same light greyish green that we have already. I hope they don’t have to trample on too many plants to get to the fence.

No end to these maintenance jobs are there

Kandj it is always a fingers crossed moment when killing moss and weeds in the lawn isn’t it. Sounds as though it is working anyway so good luck.


Tess oh dear you do have a problem looking forward to your good news. Hopefully son will be able to fix up a new cord for you.

Will try to come back with some good news soon (I really HAVE got some!) However at the moment it has been over taken by my bad news! :-0

I have killed my lawn mower> Tried to mow the ratherovergrown "lawn" yeaterday and ran oner the cord. It is now in two pieces. :-(

And my son has run off with my scythe - he says that it is a health and safety issue.

Well done Vera OH...... you are obviously teaching him well. Praise when deserved.

Out early this morning to water in some weed and feed I had spread on the front lawn. It is working and already turned some moss black. Not a pretty sight but needed to be done. Now I am just hoping that the feed nitrogen element will work! Fingers crossed.

Ok well done your OH. But you are right, ration the praise, don’t want him to get carried away. Still glad you are now happy with that bit of garden

Very early in the spring I said to OH that we needed to divide a lot of our plants before the garden got too overgrown. He decided we would be fine for another year or two. Of course now everything is too big and some plants are dying for lack of light and water as others have grown over them.

I had a moan at him about this and a while later was horrified to see him out in the garden with shears and secateurs. My thought was “Be afraid, be very afraid” :-(. You know how expert he is at giving everything a crew cut.

Well I misjudged him. He has cut back a choisya, taken out a couple of grasses and done a good job of removing quite a lot of large leaves from a couple of hostas and leaving them a nice shape. That little bit of the garden looks much better now. :-D

I have thanked him but daren’t praise him too much in case he gets shears happy.

Been working hard on the garden today, planting out OH's petunias in borders and pots and generally tidying up. Pulled the forgetmenots out as they were over which gives space for annuals.

anyway, photos of the garden taken today are on the photo blog. If you haven't got or have lost the address please ask and I will give it to you.

He will catch on soon Vera.
I managed to get a few things done before the sun came through this morning and then a bit more after 4 pm. Couldn’t stand it out there in the middle of the day. Still sounds like it will be back to normal in a couple of days here. :-0

I’ve been busy trying to tidy away the winter debris in the garden and have got quite a lot done but in this heat I can’t stay out there for long. Our garden is in full sun nearly all day and I find working out there for long brings on a bad headache.

OH was in the garden with me a few days ago with secateurs and loppers in hand. I managed to guide him towards the cornus as that needs hard pruning to get the red stems next winter. I thought it would survive one of his famous “ haircuts”. I’m getting quite devious these days

I have had to come in now from the garden I did an hour or so before lunch and another half hour afterwards, it is lovely out there but too hot for gardening and I am tired. We are assured it won't last!! I have made up 12 baskets but they are not outside they are half in the greenhouse and half in the conservatory. And then I did half an hour weeding and clearing out a couple of ferns. Noted OH has been helpful and added a top up of soil to the Hostas which are growing well. However he has not covered them in grit. He says he will do when the rugby he is watching has finished. Knowing his memory I now have to keep an eye on that situation. He also expressed surprise that I had brought a pot with a seemingly dead fern up to recover on the patio. It will regrow. He said he was going to bin it :-( :-(

I think Spring may well be here.

The worst thing about gardening at this time of year is that no matter how much you clear up and weed it always looks untidy because of all the daffodil, crocus and early tulip leaves.

Lol Vera gardening is an adventure with you and your other half isn't it?

We have just got back from Hampshire but would not have been gardening today as it has been drizzling all day fro Lee on Solent to Gloucester. Still we can't complain as Friday was lovely and sunny and yesterday was dry, windy but not too cold.

We actually had a dry day yesterday. Didn’t last as it has been raining again today but we did get a couple of jobs done.

We had a good look at the lavender that OH messed up and some of them have a few new shoots coming from the bottom so we are leaving those in but we had to take out 10 definitely dead plants. OH decided we would buy plants of a good size but I was thinking that’ll be about £100 so I had a look round garden centres and shops. Homebase had packs of 6 cuttings for £7.89. They weren’t huge but a reasonable size and looked very healthy. I bought 3 packs. We planted 10 to replace the dead ones and I am going to put the other 8 in to a couple of troughs in front of the garage and keep them as spares in case we lose more of the originals.

OH then offered to cut back the hydrangeas that we have either side of a bench. They are the paniculata variety and look really good. I think a bit of his barbering would probably kill them right off. I managed to guide him to another job and did it myself
:-D

It has been very wet and quite cold here too Vera. It rained all night and stopped about 10 this morning. OH was out in the greenhouse planting seeds, then he cleaned the lower patio, and then he changed the pipe that burst in the snow to a plastic one (it is to the outside tap). He had to cut off the old copper pipe to do that and he found it had actually burst in a second place as well.
Yesterday he dug up some Phlox that were in the wrong place and I don't like the colour of them (salmon). He planted them in another place. Anyway he now has more space for his dahlias. Which should be coming out of hibernation soon but it is too cold.
I just stayed in doing housework and washing towels and bath mat etc and making cards.

You and your OH are working hard in your garden Ann. We still have a huge amount of tidying up to do but it seems to be constantly raining. It has stopped this afternoon but it is far too wet to work out there and we are promised more for tomorrow.

OH managed to get out and cut back some grasses (with my permission!) and that immediately made it look a bit better but there is still a lot to do. I have a lot of plants in my conservatory and they ought to be going out for a few hours during the day to harden off a bit but, at the moment, I think they will just get waterlogged. Having nursed all the cuttings and the mother plants through the winter I don't want them to get drowned now.

Oh well, it can only get better.

Well so far we seem to have lost three smallish lavenders in pots this winter. Annoying as they were young ones and doing well. I suppose the temperature went just too low for them.
OH has been working hard in the garden today, dug over one bed and moved some plants we didn't want, then cut the lawn. the lawn is not doing very well at all, a bit muddy so we need to get some lawn seed I think.
I potted on the 16 basket tots that I bought during the week, should have enough now to fill the baskets.

Oh dear Vera, is he suitable contrite? I think we have maybe lost two of our lavenders in pots. Not surprising really as the temperatures went down so low. They are both looking very sorry for themselves. I have pottered for about half an hour this afternoon but I was already tired from spending 2 hours at a craft fair. It is such a lovely spring day that I just had to spend a little time out there in the sun. so, sat and had a cup of tea then planted a couple of violas that were left over from some OH planted in two troughs yesterday, thenpulled up two very dead heathers from the winter trough and tub, don't know why they died but they were so dead they crumbled when I pulled them up, and pulled up some Nemesias in tubs that didn't make it through winter as they usually do. Insprected the small acer we bought last year and that is budding, so ok so far an the Wegelia looks almost alive, not sure about that one, Buddleias OH and I pruned all three about 2/3 weeks ago and they are fine. and I just saw a tortoishell butterfly :-) :-) All our miniature daffs look lovely as do the Helebores which have come into their own this week so hoping we don't get the promised more snow.

Now we are more or less over the flu we’ve been trying to tidy the garden a bit, though we still tire quickly.

I’ve got 3 mini buddleias in half barrels and I managed to get them cut right down, with a topping of new compost and planted out a couple of things that have been sitting around in pots for too long. Then I had a look round at the rest of the garden .......

.......grrr :-|. His Lordship seems to have killed most of the lavender. You might remember that last autumn he “trimmed” the lavender edging a semi circular gravel path round the bird bath i.e. he gave it all a crew cut. There are something like 24 or more plants round this path and I reckon there are about 6 that might survive. Needless to say, the 9 lavenders around the base of a tree that I trimmed are fine.

What would you do with him?

I'm glad that you had a safe journey Ann and hope you soon have a thaw and can unpack the car without mishap.

My daughter and I travelled via motorways to north Hampshire and back on Saturday and found roads to be as you noted. There was most snow in the area of M26, but that was in fields and edges, not carriageways.

Locally we have had very little settling snow, but we are not far from the sea, so that often makes a difference. Gardens nearby are full of trees in blossom, primroses,daffodils and japonica, with dark purple violets making lovely splashes of colour on grass verges.

My own garden needs a good tidy, but will have to wait until the weather improves........

We were in two minds as to whether to travel ot not, there was so much gloom and doom around about the roads. However we set off in snowless Dalton at 0955 and, despite there being snow on the fields and hills all the way down there was not a scrap on the roads, only a tiny bit of slush on hard shoulders and traffic was moving normally (except in roadworks of which there are a few. We stopped and had lunch in Keele services at Harry Ramsdens and ir was surprisingly good, so no cooking tonight. The first slush on the roads was on the mall side road from which our cul de sac leads. However our drive is another story and it is a sheet of ice where the snow has thawed and refrozen. So the car is in the garage unpacked. Seems really strange not to be unpacking the case! there is about 6 inches of snow fallen in our back garden.