Belated Spring Wishes

Hello Friends,
I'd hoped to post this in time to wish you all a Happy Spring Solstice, but our laptop has developed a bizarre problem which makes typing almost impossible. Yes, a naughty homunculus living within is inserting square brackets after every couple of characters. When these are deleted, s/he takes umbrage & exacts revenge by producing scores more brackets, rows of the bloody things & on one occasion, a full screen! So far, the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship's inspired high tech response to this has been to remove the 'a' key. Result? Well, yes, if you were looking for the added frustration of being without a major vowel to go along with the chore of having to delete around 93,000,000 brackets every time you want to type an email, then that's job done! Grrrrr!

So a quick post from me this week, with some pics of our garden to celebrate Spring:

These pink primroses breed like Easter bunnies. The original plant was given to me by my Mum for my old garden in Nottingham. I potted it up when we moved & it has founded a dynasty. I divide them up most years for heaps of free ones.

More free plants (my favourite kind!) are our wild primroses (Primula vulgaris) which self-seed all over the garden, including in the lawn.

The bulbs are looking cheery too. 

And the flowering currant is livening up a dull stretch of hedge.

In the greenhouse, the sweet peas are pretty much ready to plant out............

.......and there are seeds sprouting up all over.

I've concentrated on flowers today, but the veggies are cracking on too. They can wait till next time.

Now, for those of you who may have been wondering how Albert Whiskers has been getting on with the bargainmongous claw-scratching pad he helpfully tested last time....... I'm afraid I have to report that he is still chiefly using it as a cat-nip delivery device. This means that instead of contributing to his bed & board by guarding my broad beans from the robbing beaks of wood pigeons, he's been spending rather a lot of his time like this...........

Oh well, I suppose at least to our knowledge, he's not going off to the all-night garage afterwards for carry-outs of crisps & dodgy pasties......
Till next time,
Belated Spring Solstice blessings to all,
C x

In which Albert Whiskers road-tests a bargain cat scratching pad........

Hi Friends,
Well, you may know that since we adopted Albert Whiskers in Summer last year, the state of our rugs & carpets have taken a distinct turn for the worse & a couple of them are now looking distinctly trampy. I declined to part with £20 for a cat scratching pad which was little more than a piece of cheapo carpet glued onto a twist of metal but the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship then spotted an environmentally sustainable & very affordable option, which Albert Whiskers will be putting through its paces. If it's any good, I'll finally be able to start choosing new rugs.

Well, he's ready & waiting, so here we go. The item being tested is the Catkins Compact Catnip Card Scratcher from Petface, Ltd. Cost £2.99 from the pet department at a local garden centre. I like the sustainability of this. There is no plastic, just cardboard, which can be composted or added to our household recycling collection.  

It's described on the packaging as 'Claw & paw-friendly' & comes 'complete with catnip for extra claw attention'.

The bag of catnip certainly got him off the sofa.

In fact a couple of seconds after this photo, he made a grab for the entire bag & if this hadn't caused me to drop my phone, I'd have had an action shot. 

The lid of the scratcher has a perforated edge for easy removal, & catnip is then sprinkled on top & shaken into the corrugated card folds.

So what did Albert Whiskers think of it?

Well, he......... 

....licked it, 

....leaned on it,

....played with it,

.....got stoned on it,

....sat on it,

......& posed on it (while slightly ripped to the whiskers).....but did he sharpen his claws on it? 

No, he did not! The only time those claws made direct contact lasted for about 5 seconds & that was only so he could spend the next 10 mins inhaling catnip off his paws. 

The next morning, I presented him with the scratcher again. He ran straight up to it.......then stopped approx. 2 cms away & PROCEEDED TO STROP HIS CLAWS ON THE RUG with even more gusto than usual. Aaaaggghhh!!  So the results of Albert Whiskers' testing of the Catkins Compact Catnip Cat Scratcher? As yet, we have seen no evidence of him using this product as a scratching pad. He has certainly had fun with it, but not in the way we hoped would save our rugs from further destruction. We will persevere, but if it doesn't happen, will need to accept that we may just have spent £2.99 on a big card bong.

Until next time,

C x

My February De-cluttering Challenge

Hello Friends,
I've been out in the sunshine digging over a border this morning, so I thought I'd illustrate today's post with some signs of Spring, rather than pictures of what I'm actually going to write about.....which is clutter!  So here's a lovely early iris to enjoy before I start talking tat.

During February, I challenged myself to a month of MinsGame  The idea is to start on the 1st of the month by de-cluttering 1 item. On the 2nd, it's 2 items, on the 3rd, 3 items, & so on, until the final day of Feb when, after 28 items have been chucked, the challenge is complete. I adapted the rules a little. The rules state that the de-cluttered items must be out of the house by midnight of each day, but this wasn't always practical for me, so I set up a 'De-cluttered Items Zone' on the spare bed & anything that had been officially placed in it, could not be reclaimed. I can report that during February, I shed a total of 406 items. 16 items were listed on ebay, 182 items went in the household recycling, 23 winged their way to the charity shop, 44 were given away, 55 were shredded up for the worm composter (nom nom) & 86 went to landfill. I'd have liked the landfill quota to have been a lot less, but there are materials which cannot be recycled & the only way to get around this is really to think twice about buying such items in the first place. Here's another tiny glimpse of Spring, while loins are being girded to talk rubbish:

Now, I totally understand that other people's clutter is not exactly up there on many reading lists, so if you've about reached your limit, do sign out & go & make a cup of tea or something, because I'm nowhere near done with rubbish yet! What I really hope to convey is just how much I enjoyed doing this challenge. As each day's growing batch of tat was sorted into charity bags, bin, etc, I felt a growing sense of achievement. Just halfway through the month, I noticed how much easier it had become to find things in my desk drawers, without having to move half a dozen inconsequential items each time. I kept a list of everything I de-cluttered. As the list grew, I was amazed at how much real TAT I was finding. I'm not a hoarder. You won't turn on your TV one day & see me on one of those programmes featuring homes so stuffed with horrible crud that the owner has had to resort to living in a square metre of space between the freezer & the half century of yellow newspapers. I like a clean house & I'm quite tidy.....which is why I was surprised to see just how many of my de-cluttered items were not even remotely fit for purpose. I'll just show you our first cheery clump of daffodils, then I'll tell you about the 406 items which were ejected from 'Hagstones' during February:

And here they are: 1 top, 1 money box, 21 magazines, 5 out of date catalogues, 1 make-up bag, 1 manky make-up brush, 1 pair rubbish tweezers (couldn't remove an eyebrow if their survival depended on it....which ultimately, it did), 1 prehistoric herb tea, 1 fridge magnet which wouldn't stick, 2 pairs of slutty tights, 1 hair band which wouldn't go round my head, 1 bra, 1 shrug (neither of them up t'job in the boob department, unfortunately), 1 useless hair styling spray (like spritzing hair with superglue), 1 dried out felt-tip, 3 ornaments, 1 tin, 7 frowsty lavender hearts, 1 (too titchy) washbag, 3 pendants, 1 bookmark, 1 shoddily altered (by me) velvet bag, 2 rusty pencil sharpeners, 1 unidentified piece of wooden dowling, 19 leaflets, 15 broken earrings, 1 badge, 1 scarf, 1 craft knife which didn't cut, 1 ribbon-curling gizmo which didn't curl ribbon, 2 gunky freezer boxes, 1 light-pull, 12 plastic bottles, 1 dry-cleaning bag, 91 photos, 4 news cuttings, 4 books, 1 pair of gloves, 4 old cheque books, 2 broken bird feeders, 1 blue bottle (glass, not dead fly!), 2 items of plastic cutlery, 1 candle with no wick, 7 postcards, 24 packets of seed, 7 empty film cannisters, 1 utterly irrelevant CDrom, 1 ancient concert programme, 54 unnecessary documents, 1 skankrous stained glass window sticker, 1 defunct loyalty card, 1 dried-out Tippex, 6 plastic wallets, 1 box, 1 broken choker, 26 old birthday cards, 1 brooch (never worn), 1 packet reindeer sequins, 1 disgusting foil baking tray, 1 grotty cash bag, 1 strange small plastic duck, 1 glue brush with no bristles, 1 unidentified metal gizmo, 1 business card, a pair of scissors which didn't cut properly, 1 Pritt stick (dessicated), 2 defunct vouchers, 1 craft instruction for something I will quite literally never make, 3 pictures, 4 old gift-tags, 1 motivational quotation, 1 horrid plastic book jacket, 1 pair of gardening gloves (with ONLY ONE THUMB, for heaven's sake!!), 1 joss stick holder which doesn't accommodate any size of joss stick I have ever purchased, 4 coasters, 1 frog game, 3 bottle stoppers, 1 odd length of chain, 1 salad dressing bottle, 1 lid-less mustard pot, 1 lah-di-dah fancypants hairbrush (for which I paid a shocking £18 only to find surprise, surprise, it was no better than my bog standard ordinary one), 1 ancient tea cosy, 4 equally ancient cloths, 1 pill box with a hole in the bottom so all the pills fall out, 1 remote control, 1 cracked spice jar, 1 aerobic step (not a friend to thighs), 1 manky bracelet, 1 non-working watch, 1 colour wheel & 3 letters.

And that, friends, is 406 items of tat de-cluttered by me from the People & Cats Republic during February!! The reason I've itemised everything is to demonstrate how, even as a non-hoarder & organised person, I still had all this stuff cluttering up drawers, cupboards, not to mention my head. So many of these items were broken, out of date or just plain unfit for purpose. I mean, gardening gloves with only one thumb, gizmos that didn't work, odd earrings....so much of this stuff was just rubbish. For those of you who remember The Rise & Fall of Reginald Perrin, I have to say that some of these items put me in mind of the Grot Shop! I found doing this challenge enjoyable & empowering. In fact, now that it's finished, I quite miss it. I'm now turning my attentions to clearing the remaining beds in the garden so that's helping my continuing urge to straighten & simplify. 

I should add that I have been very honourable during the course of this challenge. I have only de-cluttered items belonging to myself or the general household. I have not de-cluttered any of these.......

....and tempting though it was, neither have I binned this..........

........a favourite mouse which some very good friends of ours bought for Albert Whiskers. Needless to say, it's been well & truly ripped open & the stuffing is hanging out, but he really enjoys fetching it out for a game, so I hadn't got the heart to make it Item 407!

So, if you too are getting tired of seeing the same weary old clutter, I can truly recommend doing a month of this challenge. You've seen the tragic list of stuff to which I had inexplicably given house room, what will you find?

Till next time,
C x

Yay! Free foxgloves!

Morning Friends,

Aren't these fab? 

Well, no, of COURSE I haven't got foxgloves flowering in my garden yet. It's way too early. I have been busy with foxglove plants though, ensuring we'll get a similar display of wild flower loveliness this June.
And, the best thing is that they are FREE! Once you have a foxglove in your garden, it's likely that you'll be able to have them every year for as long as you want them. I definitely do want them. I love them. They are definitely one of my favourite flowers. I can remember showing a visitor around my garden years ago, & when I commented that I really needed to do some weeding, she said 'Well, you can hoike that one straight out, that's a foxglove'. Needless to say it was not 'hoiked out'. It was nurtured into a beautiful specimen much like the one pictured above & when it finished flowering, I left it for the seed to ripen, then shook the seed head randomly over my flower beds. And so my annual fix of foxgloves began! 

I no longer bother wafting seed heads around. I find that foxgloves are very good at doing this themselves. At this time of year, I simply see where the new plants have come up & move them to better places in the flower borders. I also pot up all the decent-sized plants which have self-seeded into our veggie garden. As the Big Hairy Half of the Relationship has been making noises this week about digging over his potato bed, I have been busy on Mission Foxgloves Rescue.

I potted up 39 free foxglove plants from the veggie garden alone (plus one big stray primrose) and have made a start on re-planting them around my borders. Unlike a lot of plants, they do well under trees, so thought I may as well start there.

The remaining plants will sit quite happily in their pots for a couple of weeks while I gradually get them planted out. They are useful at the back of borders to give a bit of height or anywhere where you want a pop of colour.

Our self-seeded foxgloves usually emerge as the traditional bright/magenta pink, but there are often paler pink ones & I've even had a few cream ones with burgundy-coloured markings. I particularly love the white ones. I can just about tell from the leaves which plants will produce white & which will produce pink flowers, but not with 100% accuracy, meaning that I sometimes think I've planted a white drift, only to find a bright pink one standing proudly in the middle. I quite like that though.

When you look closely at foxgloves, you see that there are never really two that are identical. Even if the colour is similar, the markings will be a different colour or pattern. 

Every now & again, I try to widen the gene pool of my 'Hagstones foxgloves' by sprinkling a packet of seed (usually Foxglove 'alba') randomly around the borders. I don't know if it does any good, but it sounds sort of 'sciency'. I also enjoy experimenting with sowing different varieties. This year I acquired a free packet of 'Primrose Carousel', which I've sown this week.

These are beautiful pale yellow foxgloves with speckly middles, but I'll admit I don't have a lot of success either with full germination or over-wintering this variety, whereas the Hagstones Foxgloves are as tough as old boots. Anyway, clearing foxgloves out of the veggie beds & deciding where I'd like to enjoy seeing those fab flower spikes this summer has been a really positive job this week, & a sign of sunny gardens to come :-)

It's definitely been a little warmer this past week, as Albert Whiskers opted for some al fresco ablutions.

It was also the week that we decided Albert Whiskers is arguably the worst behaved cat we've ever owned. He is very funny though. I often catch the BHO having whole conversations with him. This week, I overheard the following regarding the imminent viewing of some old Dr Who:
     "OK, Albert Whiskers, which Doctor shall we watch? Shall we watch the First Doctor?" 
There was a pause, while he waited to see if there was to be a consenting meow. There was not. He then proceeded to list "The 2nd doctor, the 3rd doctor, etc......right up to the 14th or how ever many of the bloody things there are. There was NO MEOW, which I naturally took to mean that Albert Whiskers did not want to watch ANY Dr Who, but it turned out that I had misinterpreted this. Apparently, what it ACTUALLY meant that he was just unable to decided on a season or episode, meaning that the BHO had to choose for him. Hmm.

The sunshine is streaming through the windows of 'Cathy HQ'. I find something to enjoy in every month, but I'm ready for Spring now. Bring it on!
Hope you are all staying lergy-free.....& remember, if you had a foxglove last year or the year before or if you've seen them in your neighbour's garden, have a look in your own garden to see if you've got any free ones coming up. They're our native wild flowers, the bees love them & they're gorgeous! Go on, get your trowel out!
Till next time,
C x 

Oooooh, & we're off the blocks!

Hello Friends,
Well, Spring is now officially hoving into view as I've just sown the first seeds of the year this morning. We had a great year for home-grown fruit & veg in 2014 & I'm hoping for a repeat performance this year, if that isn't a cue for every known pest & disease to start making a slow sinister crawl over to 'Hagstones'.

Yes, I've dusted off my little heated propagator & sown my chilli seeds.

I've chosen 'Heatwave' this year. I usually sow one very hot variety & some jalapenos, but I still have plenty of last year's lovely juicy jalapeno crop in the freezer, and have also (so far!) successfully managed to overwinter three plants on a bedroom windowsill.

One of them has even produced a chilli....not something I expected to see in the depths of winter. Chilli seed packets often state 'March or April' for sowing, but I find that here, they usually need an earlier start to get a decent growing season, probably because we're not in a very warm country. If you haven't grown them before, give them a try. They make attractive plants & it's great to be able to snip the fruits off & chuck them straight into a curry or slice them onto a pizza. They freeze well too. 
Over the next 3 or 4 weeks, I'll be sowing tomatoes, peppers, aubergines & cucumbers, as well as making a start on all the free packets of flower seed I've accumulated. As a gardener, I just feel my spirits soar as soon as I can get outside & get my mitts in the soil. Like, like, like......AND free vitamin D!

I'm also busy this month doing a de-cluttering challenge. It's called Minsgame if anyone fancies checking out the rules & joining in. The basic idea is to begin on the first day of the month & to increase the target amount of items to de-clutter each day. So on Feb 1st, I got rid of 1 item, on Feb 2nd, 2 items, etc. Today being the 9th, I have shed 9 items. According to the big hairy half of the relationship, I shall have de-cluttered a total of 406 items by the end of the month. So far, I am not finding this challenge difficult, although that may change when I am having to find 20+ items each day. More to the point, I'm enjoying it! Will let you know how I get on at the end of Feb.

Beautiful sunshine today, although a fierce frost froze the garden completely white overnight. I'd like to say that all residents at 'Hagstones' have been kicking up their personal effort levels, but I'm afraid there are still a lot of fireside scenarios like this, where a certain be-whiskered individual is concerned!

Hope everyone is managing to stay lergy-free. I can't remember the last time I had a cold.....but I do seem to get through approximately my own bodyweight in hand-gel every year, so maybe that's helping to nuke a few germs.    
Until next time,
Cathy x

Tiny signs of Spring at 'Hagstones'

Hello Friends,
Oh my days, I'm not sure where January went. It seems to have disappeared straight up its own you-know-what! And now it's February, which means spring gardening season is on its way. (Like, like, like. Big smiley face!) Decided to mark the new month by having a walk around our garden looking for signs of life.

Some of the winter shrubs are still adding a flash of colour. This pyracantha has been covered in bright berries for what seems like months now.........

........and the winter jasmine, while almost over, still has a few cheery yellow flowers.

Even the witch hazel, which is pretty much pot-bound at the moment is ignoring my neglect & throwing out a few spiky blooms.

The bulbs are mostly poking through the soil now, despite the cold of the last week, with the snowdrops just beginning to get underway..........

.  

 .......and the daffodils & pots of iris reticulata I planted are showing promise of good things to come.

Dotted here & there are tiny splashes of colour where primulae are defying the biting winds to add their own little touch of spring promise.

Meanwhile in the Vegetable Plot, there are positive signs of future food! The late autumn-planted garlic has sprouted well.......

......and the frosty nights this past week should have helped the bulbs to form decent cloves. The sorrel is putting up new leaves, which add a fresh lemony tang to salads, as well as making great soup later in the season.

I popped the rhubarb crock into place last week.......

......& a quick peep down the top this morning revealed the first signs of pale pink loveliness which will almost certainly find their way into a crumble when they've climbed to the top of the crock :-)

I have had to put a little bit of work into the broad beans this week, as the weight of the Boxing Day snow collapsed half of my support frame & netting, then the gales saw off the rest. Spent a bright chilly morning replacing damaged plants, tying them in & re-staking, while our tame robin sang to me from the apple tree. 

Robin-help was cheery & uplifting. I wish I could say the same about Cat-help, but swiftly came to the conclusion that cats have little to offer in broad bean cultivation which can be deemed remotely constructive. Albert Whiskers was of the opinion that I had wrapped myself in 4 layers of clothing & even more layers of mud for his own personal amusement. As fast as I wound twine around my bean canes, he pounced on the other end & pulled it off.

Unless I've missed something, fishy cat saliva does not much add to the strength or tying properties of twine. Thankfully his assistance levels dwindled significantly when the Tabster & Big Massive Blackie took it upon themselves to cross the garden & had to be Promptly Dealt With!

So those are the signs of life in our garden today. What's happening in yours? I'd love to know.
Until next time, when I'll be telling youo about the big decluttering challenge I'm attempting throughout February. Yes, it has started today!
C x