Little house on the patio

This is my new shed. The sun is shining on it, because it is a good trusty shed. And I have now painted it a very dark brown (English Oak, it says on the tin), so it looks like a tea house from Japan. The roof is black onduline - I thought it looked nicer than the felt ones and it should last longer.

One day I will re-do the patio and then I will make a little path leading up to my shed door. Inside, it is very tidy, with all the garden stuff hanging from nails knocked into the walls. I chose the most beautiful shed I could find because it is right outside my kitchen door and I can see it when I'm sitting at the kitchen table eating my breakfast.

You can forgive me, I hope, for my infrequent blogging, when my time has been spent so wisely and productively, hmmmm?

Asters and dahlias

Well aren't these nice. All from my garden and all grown from seed. Hoorah!

Look at these lovely flowers

The garden smells lovely at this time of year. I picked some of the roses, and what you see here is representatives of the Rambling Rector, Madame Alfred Carriere and Compassion (unless I am mistaken about the Compassion, the pinky-peachy one). Now the house smells lovely too.

Big carrot, little carrot

There is not much going on in my garden at the moment to boast about.

For the first time ever, slugs have been eating my courgettes and they are now officially failed courgettes - although we did get a few meals out of them.

The tomato plants that I grew in trays from seed, pricked out and grew on in pots, planted out and staked and from which I had carefully removed side shoots, had dutifully begun to produce tomatoes. Then before the wretched things grew bigger than marbles, the whole crop succumbed to blight and I have just finished hoiking them all out of the mud and into the compost bin.

French beans were okay and the mange touts were not. Carrots, as you see, are variable, but on the whole I would class them as a SUCCESS.

This afternoon after work I started weeding the plot. I have decided to turn it over to flowers for next year, as for the third year running I have found vegetable growing simply too demoralising. I planted out some pyrethrum (I think) plants I grew from seed earlier in the year and I shall get Sarah Raven's book The Cutting Garden to see what she recommends. I love flowers, but buying them is so expensive, and now, apparently, generally unethical - what else is there for a girl to do, but to grow her own?

Atavistic strawberries

The strawberries I planted years ago and whose fruits I once enjoyed, have generally gone or are on their way out. In their place are these tiny little wild strawberries. Presumably they have grown from seed from the cultivated parent, or what, I don't know how these things work.

The red currant thief.

When I go up the garden these days the blackbirds and sparrows and all their no-good pals fly guiltily up out of the fruit bushes with embarrassed squawks. Caught out again - red-beaked. Strawberry, redcurrant, blackcurrant and raspberry - I think of it as my equivalent to a net of peanuts. And sometimes they leave a few berries for me.

Take a look at my Little Gems.

We had one of these in our salad tonight, with Waitrose cucumber and Lidl sun-dried tomatoes. Maybe we could have had our own cucumber, but I never got round to buying the seeds. And the tomatoes are currently only about six inches high, just out of the picture.

You should keep your Little Gems well watered, I've been advised, or they will bolt. We've got very chalky, well-drained soil, and I don't think I've done the watering well enough or often enough. I don't like the look of the yellow hose snaking across my lovely green lawn. And I'm not carting watering cans all the way up to the vegetable plot. The plants must take their chances, like the rest of us, is what I say.

More likely than at Christmas

This is our garden before it became trampled with excited foot prints:

For Miss Blandish

And to prove that not all my potted plants die horribly.

Another picture of our garden in snow

But whiter.

When it snowed

I took a photo and did not get round to posting it to you. Now I look at it on my camera I think it looks a bit like a Japanese woodblock print I saw once in Liberty's in London. Lovely, it was.

That is the Christmas tree in the foreground. We thought it might survive in a pot but I think we may be proved wrong.

Camouflage

I've been out in the garden picking the sugar snap (mangetout) peas and was struck by how well they are camouflaged. It's almost impossible to say truly that you have picked them all because they virtually disappear on the plant. Maybe they could be engineered into a more noticable orange or red so that they don't merge into the stems and leaves quite so well. Though I think hallf the problem is their shape - nice and thin when they are young - which enables them to look like a stalk when looking down on them or from some side angles.

Redcurrants, on the other hand are easy to spot. Despite being so attractive to blackbirds there were plenty for us, and I didn't net them this year (two sparrow fatalities last season).

There are no strawberries this year as I dug them all up and burnt the plants as I thought they had a virus. I think I shall get some new crowns in this November. No doubt I have disappointed the birds in this, although the thrushes are happy and busy. Walking up our garden stepping stones is like walking on eggshells and the garden echoes to the sound of snails.

Merry harvest

New this week: hobbies report:
Book: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clark. Exploring flowers in watercolour by Siriol Sherlock.
CD: Bert Jansch; Ella Fitzgerald sings the Gershwin songbook.
I am painting: a clematis.
I am singing: The Armed Man by Karl Jenkins.

Wednesday I spent the entire evening dealing with redcurrants. The tyranny of the garden. I picked 5lb of fruit and then washed and picked it over and weighed it out into 1lb freezer bags with 40z sugar. Told myself this is work I won't need to do later in the year when I want to make a dessert ..... pavlova, ice cream, creme brulee, crumble, cheesecake and what have you.

Tonight, spent more time picking fruit from our two redcurrant bushes and still there is plenty left in case I find I have an idle moment and have nothing better to do. Then in days to come there will be blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries. When will I finish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, I ask you?

What an idyllic sight we do make here this evening. All sitting on sofas watching Franco Zefferelli's (spelling?) Romeo and Juliet. (One of us is doing this for their GCSE). Even doggy might be listening - though her eyes are shut her ears never are.

We borrowed this DVD from Amazon and I have to say this system has really been a good thing for us. We've seen quite a few French films and one or two German ones too. (One of us is doing French and German GCSEs). I've got "House of Flying Daggers" next as I quite enjoyed Crouching /Hiding. Alwyn Crawshaw's water colour painting course was interesting and it was nice to see Dead of Night again without having to go to all the trouble of videoing it. And the best thing is that I don't have to actually own any of these DVDs and clutter my house up with them. If you are interested, it's £7.99 a month for 4 DVDs.

I had to move a load of eleven year olds out of the way coming back from the corner shop today. They seemingly would have liked me to divert my route off the pavement onto the wet grass verge to get round them but I insisted they move out of the way. They put me in mind of a dog who tries to assert some dominance by lying across the doorway. And another thing; I greeted them cordially and was met with a stony silence and sulky, menacing glares. I have noticed this with children from this age up. They walk past you in the street as if they don't know you from a bar of soap, whereas in the previous year they would have been perfectly happy to say hello. They are children from the school I work at, or friends of my children, or children of my friends. Good manners are so unfashionable. These youths need speaking to. And then they need to speak back.