Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Well I’m saying it anyway – Happy New Year to you! I hope you had a good time over Christmas. My presents didn’t include a bird box camera, despite the heavy hint, but it’s probably just as well because there are a number of blue tits checking out the box already. I fear if I tamper with it now, I might put them off. There’s always my birthday in July, which would give plenty of time to get a camera installed before 2025. My sister, who works in a school, took the old nest to the children’s Wildlife Club last week – apparently it’s still doing the rounds at the school. The children have been fascinated by how small the eggs are and wanted to know what’s inside them and how big the bird box hole is. I wasn’t brave enough to crack any of the eggs open, but I was able to let them know the hole has a diameter of about 3 cm. So, I didn’t get a bird box camera for Christmas, but GR did give me a very handsome bug hotel, which will be declared open once our new fence is installed in March.

Last week I went to a talk on growing winter salads. Sounds riveting doesn’t it, but actually it was really inspiring. It was delivered by Tony Chalcraft & Jane Thurlow from The Nursery, Acomb, York. They grow mainly fruit and veg and they’re doing some open days in July. As well as providing great advice on what to grow and when, including some more unusual salad varieties, they also highlighted the carbon footprint involved in the production of items like supermarket mixed salad bags. It’s significant when you take into account what goes into the growing stage (which almost certainly includes spraying with pesticides), packaging, transportation across the globe and potential for waste. GR is really into his salads so I’m resolved to improve on my spring and summer salad and veg growing performance this year and extend my efforts into the winter. I now know there are salads I can grow successfully under cover of my unheated plastic greenhouses, right into the New Year. I’ll have to be organised to get the seedlings started over the autumn and not miss the boat like I did with my poinsettia.

I’ve been in a clearing-out frenzy since Christmas. This has included attacking my vast collection of seed packets. Now I’m pretty relaxed about ‘best before’ dates where food is concerned (depending on what it is of course), but some of my opened seed packets were marked sow before 2020, which might be pushing it a bit. Some of the packets were empty – I suspect I kept them because I thought it would remind me to buy more. Anyway I’m super organised now, with the remaining (still numerous) packets stored in envelopes marked up with the months to be sown and whether that should be indoors or outdoors. Do you think I need to get out more?!

Another area I’ve attacked, non garden related really, has been several boxes marked up ‘Slides & Cines‘. These we inherited from GR’s dad, who was a keen amateur photographer. They’ve been on a top shelf in our unheated garage for over 10 years and I very much expected they would have disintegrated. But no – although some are quite dusty, they look pretty good when fed through an old slide viewer. Over the past fortnight I have viewed thousands, most of which were views, but there are some good ones of GR, right from babyhood, through to his awkward teenage years and beyond. Now GR insists he has absolutely no interest in gardening – his mum clearly tried to encourage him to develop green fingers, but failed miserably. I’ll leave you with this slide I scanned – it’s GR aged 3, so it’s survived since 1962!

Winter is upon us, but some days you wouldn’t think so. Yesterday, for example, GR and I were out doing jobs in the garden without coats on. Mind you, I had been sweeping up mounds of wisteria leaves, for what seemed like hours, so I had worked up a sweat. I love the wisteria when it’s flowering – looking stunning and wafting its delicious perfume about. When its numerous leaves are attached to the branches they add interest to a red brick wall and do a pretty good job of camouflaging ugly pipes and cables. I do curse it though, when it sheds those leaves. It’s at it for several weeks – I sweep our terrace and the next time I venture out, it’s time to start again. I think we’re virtually there now, but I’ve filled an entire garden wheelie bin and collections don’t start again until March.

Now what was GR doing while all this was going on, you may ask? Well, he’d been given ladder jobs. The first was to cut back some of the high up, whippy growth the wisteria likes to produce. It’s not really the right time to be doing this, according to gardening experts, but it’s so much easier to see what you’re doing when the leaves aren’t in the way. I point and GR hacks. His second assignment was to climb the ladder once more, to dismantle the nesting box ready for cleaning. This year’s nest was much more substantial than last year’s. I find it utterly amazing that two tiny creatures can construct such an impressive home to raise a family in. There were three eggs left in the nest – maybe Mr & Mrs BT decided their family was big enough. I’m hoping that next year I will see the babies fledge – maybe I’ll get a bird box camera for Christmas?

We do seem to yoyo between warmer winter days and brass monkey weather. We’ve had some snow already – I can’t remember it coming this early for years. I do love looking at Jack Frost’s work – he’d definitely been out the other morning with his icing sugar duster and a pot of glitter.

Happy Christmas everyone!

I’ve mentioned before how amazed I am that I’ve managed to keep a poinsettia alive for over a year – it lost the last of its red bracts recently but the leaves are looking exceedingly healthy. In a moment of feeling less bah humbug than usual, I decided to look up how to encourage more red bracts to grow, so it would look festive for Christmas. It seems I’ve done it all wrong. I should have pruned it hard in February and then put it in a mild, shady spot and deprived it of water until May. Then I should have started to water it and repotted it (oh dear, I did that in October), at the same time keeping it as warm and humid as possible. At the end of September I should have plunged it into darkness for 14 hours a day for 8 weeks, before bringing it back into the light and watering it. Crikey, I feel exhausted – I think I need to set up a Gantt chart for next year – I might just buy a new plant!

I’ve been tidying in the garden again, trying to make best use of the last two garden rubbish collections of the year. I’ve mown the lawn for what I hope is the last time this year and pulled out faded annuals from my numerous pots. We’re having a new fence in our back garden in spring so I thought I’d also move pots away from it. This meant making many woodlice temporarily homeless as they scurried away when each pot was lifted. I was reading about woodlice this week. I didn’t know they are crustaceans, related to shrimps and crabs. I suppose when you think about their armour-like bodies, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’m rather partial to seafood but woodlice look decidedly unappetising! Apparently if you have an abundance of them in your garden it means it’s in good health, so I must be doing something right. I’m not keen on their fondness for my downstairs bathroom though. They find their way up the outside wall, through the extractor fan vent and then traverse the ceiling before dropping into the light fitting, where they inconveniently give up the ghost. It’s a 2 person job to get that light fitting off and back on again – GR does the ladder bit and I deal with the deceased.

I missed storm Debi when it hit Yorkshire – I was having a few days in ‘the smoke’. I hope you didn’t suffer any damage. Victoria lost some fence panels but, while I was out of the county, she was able to reassure me that my plastic greenhouses were still standing. I was worried because I’d left the flaps partially open to allow some ventilation. Unbeknown to me GR zipped them up before we left home – he does have his uses! 

Oh, and I can’t finish without imparting the exciting news that my Café au Lait dahlia has beaten Jack Frost and burst into flamboyant bloom!

It’s been a busy few weeks here. Victoria and Albert have had a new summerhouse installed and we’ve had a proper roof put on our conservatory.

The summerhouse was royally declared open and we sat in it with cups of tea and iced buns, enjoying the autumn sunshine. Its long windows to the front and sides provide not quite 360 degree views of the V&A garden, but not far off. Victoria set-to painting the exterior, in what I think is a very tasteful Farrow & Ballesque colour of green. Their cat, Sweet Pea loves the summerhouse too – the roof has become a lookout post. We were a bit worried a fight was about to ensue when a new kid on the block decided to investigate. I think you can see by Sweet Pea’s stance (she’s the one with white tail tip) that you’d have to be a brave kitten to stick around for long, so fortunately fur did not fly on this occasion!

I’ve been painting too – funnily enough while listening to Elizabeth Taylor’s biography, which naturally includes stories about her making the film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman. Elizabeth had an interior designer as part of her entourage, so I doubt she ever did any decorating herself. The idea behind having the roof replaced on our conservatory is to conserve heat, so that we are able to spend more time enjoying it during the winter months. Sitting in there we have a great view of our garden, the visiting birds, the antics of the squirrels and various feline visitors. To date, even with heating, it was cold. Painting the ceiling was a precarious task. The style of the roof is Edwardian, meaning that in places it is over 3 metres high. The first coat on the new plaster was a messy business. I read up that for fresh plaster, the first coat should be a ‘mist’ coat. This involved mixing 3 parts emulsion to one part water. I think I ended up wearing more of it than was on the ceiling. I did use a roller on a pole for as much as possible, but doing the edges and crevices necessitated balancing on the top of Victoria’s ladders, paintbrush in one hand and paint pot in the other. I spent much of my time hoping I would not soon be featured on TV as the latest victim on 24 Hours in A &E – you know the scenario – bleep bleep of a phone, followed by nurse scribbling down ‘65 year old woman, fallen 6 ft from ladders’. Anyway luckily I survived unscathed, other than sporting white hair and freckles.

I have been doing some gardening too – well, more like tidying. I’ve repotted the geraniums I had in hanging baskets and cut them back for overwintering, taking cuttings from the offcuts. I’ve sown some sweet peas – the usual annuals, but I’m also trying some of the perennial type this year. I discovered that some lavender in my front garden had seeded in the cracks of the block paving. I used to love my mum’s patio which was overrun with self seeded lavender – the bees were in their element – but I knew GR would not take kindly to this look on our front drive. So, I yanked out the seedlings and potted them up – even if only one survives, it’s a plant for free!

I have to say, that for this time of year, I’m pretty chuffed with how colourful my border at the bottom of the garden is looking – what do you think? I’m just hoping my Café au Lait dahlia flowers will get the chance to open before Jack Frost finishes them off.

I have a favourite saying, which some might say I overuse. For example when we moan that the clocks are about to change, and for a while we’re going to be spending much of the day in the dark, I empathise wholeheartedly, but can’t resist adding – ‘still, it happens every year‘. Also when some of us start to chunter about the impending Christmas season (I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit bah humbug), I do acknowledge – ‘I know, it happens every year‘.

Of course in the plant world, perennials are the ones that happen every year. Historically I’ve grown mainly annuals to plant in my herbaceous border (that’s probably a bit of a grand description for the flower bed at the bottom of my garden). Annuals are the ones that flower in the same year as you plant them and then die. Before they peg-it they do produce seeds though, which you can collect, if you’re organised enough. Otherwise they cleverly scatter them, generating seedlings that pop up in the garden the following year – usually in the wrong place! Here’s an example of some alyssum seeds that found their way out of a pot that sat by this bench last year.

I’m only just getting to grips with understanding biennials. To my simple mind, they grow leaves in the first year, but don’t produce flowers until the following year, after which they produce seeds, ready for the two year cycle to start again. I grew some ox-eye daisies from seed – they’re biennials. I kept them in my plastic greenhouse and planted them out this summer – they’ve been amazing, but it is a long time to wait – gardening does try to teach you to be patient. I guess I need to get organised and sow some every year to avoid disappointment – although they should also do their own reseeding.

Most foxgloves are biennials. Victoria kindly gave me a whole load of seedlings from her garden and I had masses flowering last year. I think I might have been a bit keen with the dead heading though, because I’ve only found a few seedlings popping up this summer and of course no flowering ones, which I was sad about because they transport me back to my childhood and the story of Jemima Puddleduck.

Some poppies are biennial – I thought they wouldn’t be fussy – they seem to pop up happily in fields. However I’m told they are quite hard to get established. Another friend gave me some poppy seeds last year – apparently they’re the big blousy red variety, but I’ve yet to find out. The seedlings grew OK but when I planted them out all but one got eaten by slugs and snails overnight. The survivor hasn’t flowered yet, so I’m assuming it’s a biennial variety – I’ll let you know if it puts on a good show next year.

Anyway, while we’re waiting for all this to happen, I have some exciting news! The plum gin I told you about is ready. I’ve strained it and bottled it – look at the beautiful colour. While I was at it I did taste one of the boozy plums – I was restrained on account of it being 8am – it had a real kick, so I sampled some with ice cream last night. I know the plums in their pickled form don’t look that appetising (in fact they look decidedly suspect), and you may notice I missed stoning one, but my goodness they were delicious. The rest of my stock will be lucky to see the week out – I don’t think the gin will last long either – it tastes great with ginger ale but it’s amazing neat – eek …

At last some sun! My green tomatoes are gradually turning red but the flower on my pepper plant shrivelled up and fell off, so alas my first attempt at growing them has been a failure. The garden still looks pretty colourful and I’ve started preparing for next year. That’s probably bigging it up a bit – I’ve sown 18 Astrantia seeds to be precise. I ran out of compost and couldn’t be bothered to make a trip to the garden centre – never do today what you can put off until tomorrow is my motto. I have had one success, well 3 actually – I took cuttings from my mum’s Christmas cactus and they’ve taken – one has even started to produce a bud – sorry, it does look a bit rude but I think I’ve just captured it at an unfortunate angle.

It’s been quite an interesting few weeks where garden wildlife is concerned. I noticed something was eating the leaves of one of my rose bushes – I’ve not encountered this before. Anyway I’ve looked it up and discovered that the hundreds of little caterpillar things are rose sawfly larvae. I’ve consulted various wildlife Facebook groups and am told they won’t kill the rose. I’ve also been informed that rose leaves are their only food source, so I’ve left them in situ – I don’t want to starve them, but I hope the advice is right!

I spotted this colourful little bug enjoying my lavender – apparently it’s a Rhopalidae – Corizus hyoscyami – I have to say I prefer its common name – Cinnamon Bug. Up until recently they were confined to the south of England but they wanted more adventure in their lives, so they’ve travelled as far as Yorkshire now – that would explain why I’ve not noticed one in my garden before.

And take a look at this beastie – originally from Morocco it arrived on the south coast of England in 1957 and took about 50 years to reach Scotland. I spotted this one on one of my water butts. It’s a type of Opiliones – Dicranopalpus – it’s not a spider, it’s a Harvestman (or woman, I can’t tell). Hope I don’t put you off your tea, but look at its body – it’s like a suit of armour. In case you see one, please don’t swat it, they’re harmless to humans. They do try to deter predators by secreting foul tasting chemicals and if all else fails they self amputate one of their legs. This is a bit creepy – the detached leg keeps moving for a while, the theory being it might confuse a predator and allow the other legs time to run to safety. Mine had all its legs at the time of being photographed.

I was in my bedroom a few weeks ago and thought I heard a squeaky toy – I checked but Lily hadn’t got one. Then I realised the noise was coming from outside. I looked out of the window and saw two birds perching on two of my patio chairs. I rushed for my phone but only managed to capture one (on camera that is). I’m told they’re juvenile sparrowhawks. Now you may have noticed the ‘bird’ in the middle of the table. We purchased him some years ago as a pigeon scarer – he was useless, but we gave him a second chance recently when we wanted to discourage a pair of wood pigeons from nesting above our back door. I asked a twitcher friend whether the sparrowhawks might have thought it was their mum. He looked at me a bit despairingly before acknowledging that anything is possible. The juveniles sat there for over quarter of an hour before one flew off, followed quite a bit later by the other. I think they had eventually realised that their ‘mum’ wasn’t going to provide them with dinner and they’d better sort something out for themselves!

In June we were crying out for rain, now I’m wondering if it’s ever going to stop. My water butts are all full and overflowing – I could do with my own reservoir!

I’ve been a bit upset about the slow progress of my tomatoes this year. Friends have, cruelly I would say, been sending me photos of their ripening fruits for weeks now. I only had flowers, but look, mine are just late developers!

Mind you, they’ll probably succumb to one of the numerous blights or moulds that can afflict tomatoes, particularly when there’s a lot of rain at this stage in the year. I’ve also been concerned about my sweet peppers – it’s the first time I’ve tried growing them. Something likes eating the leaves and there wasn’t much sign of any action going on in the fruit department – until yesterday, when I spotted the minutest flower bud. Can you see it? My eyesight isn’t good, but it’s obviously been there a little while. It might be too late in the season now for anything to come of it, especially on account of the lack of sunshine, but I’ll keep you posted.

Now, someone who isn’t having any problems producing fruit, is a good friend of mine. She has a plum tree which has excelled itself this year, so she’s overrun with the things. The other morning she brought me a lovely jar of plum jam, a number of cartons of stewed plums for the freezer and 2 kilos of fresh ones. I stewed most of them but then started thinking about how much I enjoy rhubarb gin. One thing led to another and hey presto I found a recipe for plum gin. It specified a 2 litre sealable jar would be required. I’m not one of those domestic goddesses who has shelves full of Kilner jars for homemade preserves and chutneys, so the spaghetti got rehomed. I set too with the lovingly prepared fruit (removing all the stones does get a bit tedious), some caster sugar and most important of all, gin. I have to shake the jar every few days to make sure everything keeps mixed together and in a few weeks I should have my plum gin and some boozy fruit to eat with ice cream. The only thing is my jar doesn’t seem to be completely airtight, because when I shake it a little bit of gin escapes, so I could end up with a jar full of mouldy plums and wasted gin. At the moment it looks a bit like something you’d find in a science lab soaking in formaldehyde. But you know what they say – you learn by your mistakes – well, most people do. I tend to make them over and over again. I’ll let you know the outcome in my next blog.

We have had some visitors to the garden who haven’t made themselves too popular. Now you know me, I love my wildlife and normally get very excited when nests are being built in my garden. However, a pair of loved up wood pigeons clearly had their sights set on my wisteria. I wouldn’t mind this so much, except they had decided on siting their love nest directly above my back door and below my bedroom window. Luckily we spotted the signs early on so no nest or eggs were destroyed in persuading them to relocate. Wood pigeon eggs take 17 days to hatch and then it’s another 30+ days before the babies fledge. I think you will understand that I wasn’t keen on the prospect of a chorus of cooing from dawn onwards, before stepping into a pile of pigeon poo when I took Lily out in the back garden first thing. Our deterrent doesn’t look pretty but they’ve finally found a much more secluded spot to raise their little family.

And finally, I’ve had a beautiful visitor to my garden this week. I’ve joined another excellent FaceBook group – UK Dragonflies & Damselflies – you might remember the bee one I joined earlier in the year? Anyway, apparently it’s a Common Darter. I’ve never seen one in my garden before, so it’s certainly not ‘common’ as far as I’m concerned. Maybe my mini pond is doing the trick?

So much has been happening since my last blog! The blue tit babies have flown the nest again without telling me. One day I could hear their hungry little squeaks – Mr & Mrs BT flying constantly back and forth with tasty morsels (they were looking quite skinny by that stage) – the next minute they’d all gone. How do they do it so secretly? I thought they would at least need a few practice flights involving some crash landings – but no, they seem to master the art of flying in a flash.

The other morning I went to retrieve the milk and eggs from the doorstep, to find carnage awaited me. Magpies had dragged the egg boxes onto the drive, managed to prise the lids open and helped themselves to several eggs. I must have disturbed them because they hadn’t quite finished their feast – what a mess. We’ve got a cool bag now for the milk people to put stuff in, although the pizza delivery man was most perturbed – he thought I’d left my handbag on the doorstep. He probably thinks I’m a forgetful old dear with poor taste when it comes to accessories!

In case you weren’t aware, 20 May was World Bee Day. Well, they obviously wanted to celebrate in style in our garden. That week I was pottering when I noticed a hole had appeared in a flower bed that runs alongside a retaining wall. It was about 18 inches long and the same deep. I thought maybe we were experiencing some kind of subsidence and not wanting the flower bed to cave in, I filled the hole with some cobbles and gravel pilfered from Grumbling Rose’s store. Very quickly, bees began emerging through the stones – they weren’t angry thank goodness, just a bit stunned looking. Wouldn’t you be if someone had just dumped a lorry load of gravel on you! I spent that evening trying to reassure GR that the bees meant no harm to us and that we should just leave them be(e). I did a quick Google and found out they were mining bees. Anyway, next day, I was just going into my Pilates class, when I had a message from Victoria – had I got hundreds of tiny wasps in my house like she and Albert had? No, I hadn’t, but my windows weren’t open. Thankfully within a few hours they had disappeared from their house. The following day I noticed not only the bees I’d seen the day before, making their way in and out of the filled in hole, but also lots of what looked suspiciously like wasps. I neglected to mention this discovery to GR, but took some photos of both varieties and hurriedly joined a wonderful FB group – BWARS (UK Bees, Wasps and Ants). Very quickly I had the answer. They were both bees. The one that looks like a typical bee is of the Andrena variety and the one that looks like a wasp is of the Nomada variety.

It gets a bit gory though because apparently the waspy looking ones are parasitic on the cuddly bee looking ones. The waspy ones lay their eggs in brood cells being prepared by cuddly mummy bee. When her eggs hatch, the larvae of the waspy one kill the larvae of the cuddly one and then eat all the food left by the cuddly mummy bee. After a few hearty meals they develop into adult waspy looking bees. Like the blue tits, it looks like they’ve all flown the nest now – I don’t suppose they’ll be choosing our garden again, not after the “welcome” I gave them!