Thursday 19 September 2013

Garden 2013 no 9

Garden 2013 no 9

The harvest is completely finished and I seem to have spent the last month or so re-painting my blue gates, fences, doors and garden edging. 

I’ve not done the outside painting for a couple of years and the blue was looking quite worn. I figured if I do it this year and give every thing a couple of coats, maybe it will last another two, or at a push, even three years.
I painted the fence my daughter made a couple of years ago and I painted the new gate that her partner made earlier this year. The old one blew away one stormy day. 
This one has gaps between the wood so the wind blows right through it instead of blowing it off its hinges. It also has a wide strip of rubber nailed to the bottom that touches the ground; this stops the rabbits from coming under the gate into my garden.




I still have all the white walls to paint and retouch, but I’m having a bit of a break from garden painting for a while, I’ll go back and repaint the white later. This hansom couple were loitering in the fence, I didn't see them at first. Glad I noticed them before painting them. They even posed or a photo before diving for cover.
 



I’ve been so busy since retirement I’ve realised I have to prioritise on my activities. The two things I really want to spend my time doing is travel and painting, and I don’t mean painting garden fences either, I mean painting canvases. Therefore the plan is to cut down on the gardening for the next year or so. I want to dig the little vegetable garden and turn the whole thing back into lawn. Actually I’m quite looking forward to it. My lawn never was the pristine golf course sort of lawn, it always was a bit lumpy and bumpy and then I dug up most of it and turned it into a vegetable plot.
So if I carefully dig and level the whole thing and seed it, sometime next summer I should have a pristine lawn that needs a gentle mow every couple of weeks. Or at least that’s the plan. I’ve even bought this little machine to help me.

Before starting the painting I cut back the Tayberries.

I read up on this and found out that you have to cut back in the autumn after the fruit has finished.  All old wood has to go and the strong new canes have to be tied up and trained ready for the fruit they will produce the following year. I know I’ve done mine a bit early but I’ve already had quite a lot of fruit from it. There was some fruit left but it had something wrong with it. The fruit that was left was small, green and hard, and instead of ripening it was going moldy and rotting on the cane. I’m not sure  why this happened, maybe because I didn’t cut it back as I was supposed to last year; but I hope by cutting it back and training it along the fence, the same thing will not happen again next year.  Anyway………..if I had left it until all those little green fruits had gone mouldy and fallen off, I wouldn’t have been able to paint that bit of the fence. I’ve also been dead heading the buddleia, I know this has to be pruned back in the spring not the autumn, but I hate all the old, dead, brown flowers so I cut them off as they appear. I think this actually makes the flowers last longer, as soon as I cut the dead ones off, new ones appear. But, I’m sure I’ve seen the last of them for this year. I’ve cut the bush back a little, just enough to get rid of all the dead flowers and next year, I’m going to prune it quite hard to make sure it doesn’t grow too big and get too out of control.

The other thing I’ve been doing is using the harvest in the kitchen.

I have made loads and loads of rhubarb chutney ( with added red wine),
more jars of pickled onions than I can possibly eat and a whole batch of carrot and coriander soup for the freezer.
I’ve also made more herb oil. The herbs, onions and garlic all came from my garden and the red chillies came from my daughters greenhouse. I can’t grow chillies because I don’t have a greenhouse.
I tried to grow them in the windows last year but even that didn’t work, they really need the warmth of a greenhouse to grow properly here. I have a freezer full of fruit and only half a pot of jam left which means the next big kitchen venture is going to be a mammoth jam making session.
So; that’s my garden almost ready for winter. I still have the white painting to do, and I would like to get the lawn sorted out before winter, but apart from that, the garden is definitely winding down for winter.

14 comments:

  1. Your garden is a work of art in itself as are your preserves, it seems to me your whole life may very well be a work of art Loretta, so changing its shape is only to be be expected I suppose. The blueness looks good with the whiteness like the sky and the green and all the other colours of roosters and metalic ornithology for instance. Its like a patchwork in a way, or that's how it strikes me anyway ....whatever way you look at it, it is a lovely garden in all of its phases and a great credit to you.

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    1. Thanks Aaron :-) there are times when, if my life really is a work of art, it feels like a Jackson Pollock, you know what I mean, bits randomly splattered every where lacking control and direction but ultimately somehow appealing to others.
      guess that's one explanation I never thought of :-)

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  2. Oh yes and how lucky to capture the image of a pair of spiders. Great to see that she hasn't eaten him yet anyway, I like spiders and have photographed a few but I've never captured a pair, congratulations!

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    1. yeah, thanks, I was wondering about those dreaded arachnids. So are they an actual 'couple'?? or are they just two of randoms who happen to be resting on the same gate post? I moved something that was leaning against the fence in order to paint the fence and this is what I found underneath. I sort of assumed they were a mating couple because I had never seen two spiders in the same place before. I don't know if these are the same breed of spider but look different because they are male and female, or if they are two completely different breeds, in which case I would have expected one to be eating the other. My knowledge of spiders is minimal, I'm usually uncomfortable around them but I was too fascinated and eager to get a photo of these to be scared.

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  3. It's all looking really great after your painting session. I really like that shade of blue you have used. Great shot of the arachnids!!

    Wow, you've really been busy in the kitchen, too!!

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    1. Thanks Mitch, maybe you know a bit more about the arachnids that I do ( see above response) if you do know any thing about them please tell :-)

      and yeah.............I've been quite busy both inside and out recently.

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    2. From the patterns on the abdomen, I think they look like the common House Spider (tegenaria duellica). The male is lighter in colour and has longer legs than the female, so this could well be a mating pair.

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    3. Thank Mitch, if these are 'house spiders' I'm very glad they decided to hang out on the garden fence rather than in my house. They were quite big, about 2 1/2 inch from leg to leg. And now I'm off to fix the dreaded word recognition thingy. :-)

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  4. Oh, and PLEASE get rid of that damned robot-checker. It drives me crazy!!

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    1. I am really sorry about the word recognition thingy. I hate it too, unfortunately this is the only way I have found to stop the dreaded spam. I did go through a period where every day all of my blogs were getting hit by spammers advertising any thing and every thing from double glazing to outdoor clothing. It drove me nuts and I couldn't find a way to stop it without using this word thingy. They were leaving random comments with a link back to their own selling site...........I hate those things.

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    2. I've noticed that folks who get troubled by spammers tend to be those who have their settings for comments set to 'anyone'. This allows comments by anonymous users. If you go into Settings > Posts & Comments. Then where it says 'who can comment?', change it to 'Registered Users' this stops anonymous commenting, and usually the spam too. I've had mine set like that from the start and have never been troubled by spammers. Give it a try, see if it helps. If not, you can always go back to the dreaded robot-checker!! LOL.

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  5. Loretta, I just all that blue painted everywhere-really looks nice and country too

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    1. Thanks Kathy............I've always liked the blue and white, it reminds me of Greece or one of the other lovely warm Mediterranean countries. Its sort of; if I can't go there , I'll bring there here :-)

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