Brythen is still creeping about looking somewhat woe, but he is a bit brighter. Ten days without walks is going to be... difficult, I suspect.  But at the moment he's being surprisingly good and quiet.  Unlike some of the other residents:

( Certain other members of the household have not been particularly sympathetic )

The garden has been becoming slowly less garden and more jungle.  I quite like it a bit overgrown: I prefer that to the kind of garden where each plant is surrounded by a neatly-raked border of empty brown earth, or everything is covered in gravel.    I like the birds to have space, and to have bees and dragonflies and random flowers popping up ( Read more... )

Watching Doctor Who yesterday, I learned that Santa considers the tangerine to be his signature gift ( Read more... )

Someone tell me I don't need to buy six Chilean Guava bushes.  I am such a sucker for exotic fruits!   And six for a tenner ( Read more... )

I picked some rowan berries last week, which are now in the freezer, becoming milder and more edible in flavour before undergoing transformation into rowan jelly.  There seems to be a bit of a shortage of crabapples this year - most of my favorite crab trees are completely fruitless.   I think this must be down to the dampness of the spring, though ( Read more... )

 There's an excellent letter in the Western Morning News from the secretary of http://www.orchardslive.org.uk/ (the organisation that I think is mostly behind my lovely North Devon Mazzards! )  extolling the virtues of 'traditional'  big apple trees with 10 foot stems in smaller gardens ( Read more... )

News story here : Sales of blueberries have overtaken those of raspberries
is riddled with wrongness!

Britain is mostly on alkaline soil?  That'll be a surprise to all the specialist growers of rhododendrons and azaleas - and to all the people working to try to eliminate invasive wild rhodos from acidic British soils!   It surprised me, as I am ( Read more... )

I'm wondering whether to make the greenhouse primarily a strawberry zone and fill it with early fruit.  The plants in there are storming away producing loads of fruit, and the ones up the garden are still developing ( Read more... )

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This morning I picked 5 1/2 pounds of rowan berries.  Rowan berries are much easier to pick than other berries. No prickles, you don't have to bend down and they are pleasantly firm and don't squish.  No maggots either (there was the odd earwig, but they are easy to spot, and I don't mind earwigs).   I was aiming for 3 pounds, but  I am bad at ( Read more... )