Plants!

 

I popped out to Dobbies today to get ericaceous compost (to replant a blueberry bush into a bigger pot) and saw they were clearing out a ton of plants.  I saw these cute dwarf Sansevierias (Snake plant) in wee ceramic pots.  Reduced from £9.99 to £1.99!!! I got one for myself and one for my DIL who loves indoor plants.  They were definitely clearing space to put out new seasonal stuff.  If anyone is looking to get inexpensive gifts ahead of 🎄there were loads of different ones to suit all tastes.  Plus fancy plant pots and containers, propagators etc all half price or less.  Maybe check out any garden centres in your area if you don't have a Dobbies.  

I got £84.93 worth of plants for £15.23!!!  2 echinacea plants, a salvia, pansies and violas (they were each 39p a tray!!) to put in my front garden.  Although technically they were all free as I'm still using the amazing gift card my colleagues gave me when I retired! 

Final push!

 

I finally got the craft room finished today.  Mainly by putting all my crafting materials into 3 large packing boxes and dumping them in the garage!!

Before and after reminder!

It's looking very tidy and a bit sparse!  I put away all my colourful boxes and kept out the black and grey ones to match the fridge freezer.  I did buy a white roller blind to put at this window but I've decided to not put it up.  I'll be able to use in either my next house or my son's flat.

I kept the colourful floor rug for a wee splash of colour.  But it all looks lovely.  Shame I'll never get to actually craft in there.

I also split my peace lily (retirement gift from school) and re potted it.  I got 3 free plants to put around the house.

I'm trying to do the final push this week as I want to get the house on the market ASAP!  A 2 bedroom bungalow went on the market today in exactly the area I want.  It's under budget and needs a bit of modernising but not too much.  So I'm asking everyone to send me positive vibes to get this house sold quickly and let me buy this bungalow! 🤞

It feels like Spring!

It's amazing what a few continuous days of sunshine can do to your mood 😊  It's been cold and frosty  at times but Spring is here at last.  Now it will rain and snow for weeks cos I jinxed it!!  My heather is in full bloom and attracting bees 🐝  My peaches and cream tulips are opening up 🌷 The asparagus is finally popping through the surface.  I was worried planting the strawberries in the same bed had killed them even though they're recommended to be planted together! 🍓  And Tuppence is in good health as you can see by her bright red upright comb 🐔

Today I checked my cuttings from last year and topped them up with fresh compost.  These were the prunings from my bushes at the plot.  They rooted really easily!  So I now have another 3 redcurrant and 3 blackcurrant bushes, all for free!!  The other one is from the goji berry plant my mum rescued and gave me.  I have 2 plants with no idea how to encourage fruit.  I'll need to do some research!

After my big supermarket spending last month I did a stocktake of my cupboards and freezer.  These freezer tubs have single servings of a type of cooked meat (chicken, beef stew, sausage casserole and beef in gravy.)  That's 21 meat based meals plus the cooked chicken sausages from the other day and a pack of smoked duck my DIL got at Lidl for 70p.  So I have plenty of food to last me through April.  I took the last tub of rhubarb out the freezer to make a crumble as this year's rhubarb is almost ready for picking. 

I finished another pair of socks 🧦  These ones are for my friend who is Irish (the one who drew my allotment picture.)  I hope she likes the vivid greens ☘  I've cast on another pair from a ball of sock yarn I've had so long I can't remember if I bought or it was given to me!!  It's an odd combination of white/blue/orange/black.  My DIL said she quite liked the colours so I'm now knitting them for her!  She's a bit excited! 

And just because, here's another photo of my beautiful Sarah Raven tulips! 🌷🌷🌷

Day 11: Rest

 

Today is a much needed rest day, just pottering round the house and my garden.  I noticed I have a lot of beautiful flowers in bloom and realised these were all my rescued plants or given to me for free.

They're all doing well!  Not everything survived but a good 75% made it!!

This one was taken a few weeks ago.  We call it my dad's rose, it's real name is In Loving Memory.  My Lovely Mum bought us all one 2 years ago.  It's more vivid in real life! There are a few more buds on the bush so I'll get more blooms soon.  Not a bargain one but a thoughtful gift 💗

Progress at last!

A quick pop down to the plot and at least one area looks semi decent!  On the left my early potatoes are doing well and on the right the fruit bed is planted up with 2 blackcurrant bushes, a redcurrant, a green gooseberry (donated from my lovely mum's garden) and a red gooseberry bush (mislabelled as 'grun' but def red!!)  It will all need to be netted so I get the berries and not the birds!! 🐦 I'm not expecting much this year but it's a marathon not a sprint!

The currant side

The gooseberry side

On my next visit I'm hoping to pull out the weeds behind this bed and let the wild flowers I planted last year flourish 🤞  So far we've taken 10 bags of weeds to the recycling centre (they have an industrial hot composter system that kills the weed seeds) and filled 5 bags with the resulting free compost they make.  Win win!

I pruned the redcurrant bush before planting and stuck the sticks into wee pots of potting on compost. If they take, I'll have a few more bushes to plant next year!  More free plants!

I planted some strawberry runners in the asparagus bed 🍓  I chopped and froze some rhubarb from the garden as I didn't have time to do anything else with it.  I've picked some mint leaves to dehydrate to make my own mint tea ☕  It feels good to have made a wee start on preserving home grown stuff for the months ahead.  After months of being unable to do much even the smallest of jobs are big progress 😊 

Perennials

 

One of my goals is to plant as many perennials as I can and take as many cuttings as I can.  These are 3 blackcurrant prunings from last Autumn that I stuck in a pot.  I literally pruned my mature bush, just stuck a few of the 'sticks' in a pot and left them out to overwinter.  They're about 10 to 20cm already and the tallest one even has a few currants!  I now have 5 bushes in varying stages of maturity.  Blackcurrants are a bit tart so are best used in something but they're packed with vitamin C.  I'll be making a syrup with them to boost my immune system during the Winter months.  All from free plants!

One of my patio apple trees has 5 teeny apples on it.  Last year they all dropped off in July so fingers crossed they hang on to maturity.  This is my James Grieve tree.  The other is a Charles Ross, both self fertile and suited for my colder climate.  The one on the plot also had a few teeny apples so it's earned a reprieve for another year.  I'll keep on pruning it hard and feeding it.

I've got a few more fruit bushes to plant on the plot this weekend that include a redcurrant and a red gooseberry.  All bargains from B&Q during the initial pandemic lockdown where you could order a mixed bag of fruit bushes for £10 and it was just luck what you got when you went to collect.

It's my lovely mum's 75th birthday today.  We're keeping it low key as she doesn't like a fuss plus I'm not feeling great, again 🙄 We have 2 teachers who tested positive this week, one of whom is a very close friend and has now had it THREE times!!  I'm testing daily and so far I'm negative but it's still out there.  Take care this Bank Holiday weekend everyone!

The day after

 

After a deliberately quiet weekend pottering around my garden in brilliant sunshine, I returned to work yesterday morning.  After just 3 hours with my wee kiddos I came home and collapsed!!!  Then slept 11 hours last night 😴 It's going to take the full phased return to get back up to full speed.  I'm trying to be patient as it will be worth it in the long term but oh it's hard!!!!

At the weekend I had to put up the old Omlet fencing round my raised beds as Tuppence has trashed them.  The small one has my 5 asparagus crowns.  I noticed the first spears popping up so weeded it and topped it up with fresh compost.  I noticed this morning that I have 3 spears that are now a few inches high.  This is year 3 for them so I can harvest lightly 😋  I read that asparagus and strawberry plants grow well together so my lovely mum has planted up some of her runners for me to put in there this Summer.

This longer bed still had a few red kale plants that were nearly finished so I pulled them out and gave them to Tuppence.  I had put cardboard and compost on it for the Winter but she has completely scratched up the decomposing cardboard and it's a mess.  I'll need to work on this bed over the Easter break as this is usually my Summer salad veg bed.

Look at that innocent face!!!

I had planned to potter in the garden today but yesterday has really wiped me out.  So it's a quiet day here, doing a few work things for tomorrow.  I did wander round and do a mental stocktake of what has survived.

Black pots are echinacea (bargain from Sarah Raven last year). It's starting to re grow already.  It'll probably be another year or two before I can harvest it and use it to make tinctures. I do have 2 larger plants in pots in my front garden.  Brown pots have the 3 blackcurrant prunings I literally just stuck in pots and they've rooted!  So that's 3 more bushes to plant at the allotment for my fruit forest bed, for free.  Blackcurrants are high in vitamin C so they're another source of healthy goodness I can preserve for Winter remedies.

This is last year's rescued rosemary plant from B&Q.  It's really doing well!

This is a mature gooseberry bush from my lovely mum's garden as she was clearing out some of her plants.  It's very prickly so will need extra careful handling when I take it to the plot!  More free plants for the fruit forest!

And finally my blueberry bushes.  All 4 have survived the Winter and are in bud.  I gave them a light prune and topped the pots up with ericaceous compost so here's hoping for an even bigger crop this year!  The fig tree has also survived and is doing well in the paler coloured pot on the right.

It's slowly coming together.  It'll take a few more years to get my perennial fruit and veg production levels up but I'm working hard on it.  I doubt I'll ever be on the same level as someone like Vivi but I really want to grow as much as I can.  We're living in scary times so the more self sufficient we can be the better!

Free plants

 

Today's soft fruits from my wee back garden.  The last of the raspberries, the only harvest of gooseberries as it's a very young bush and some blueberries that are now in full production.  No more strawberries though. 🍓 I eat some as I pick and then I pop the rest into the freezer.  The funny thing about all the soft fruit is that it ripens at completely different stages so there's never enough to do 'something' with it.  So all the berries are in the freezer to become either jam or used in smoothies.

Interestingly (at least to me!) the gooseberries are not the variety described on the label.  It says they are Hinnonmaki Gron (gron meaning green) and these gooseberries are definitely red!  They still taste nice even though they're quite small.  They were part of the fruit bush bundle I got last year from B&Q.

I'm currently garden sitting for my neighbours while they're away visiting family.  I'm pretty sure they said they'd be back on the 20th but no sign of them yet.  They have a greenhouse with tomatoes, peppers, chillies and some kind of squashes that they asked I water/check every day.  No problem except the last 2 weeks have been in the high 25+ degrees C or more every day.  So I felt I had to water their whole garden that is filled with fruit, veg and beautiful flowers.  Everything would be dead by now especially stuff in pots if I hadn't.  It takes me a good 30 mins every night to do theirs and then I do mine.  Luckily we don't have restrictions on our water use in Scotland and luckily I really like my neighbours.  They're very good to me. 😊 I have their permission to pick and eat anything that's ready.

I followed Monty Don's tip from last week's Gardener's World and stripped back the poppy leaves to let the seed heads dry out a bit.  Then I saved the seeds. There's millions of them!!  I've added them to my stash of saved seeds that include bluebells and aquilegia. I'm actively trying to save seeds this year to use next year and save money by getting free plants.  I've also had a go at taking some cuttings from my blackcurrant bushes.  Not done it before so it's trial and error but worth a go to save some money and get free fruit bushes!  I'll let you know if they survive!