Everyday I have the best intention to go outside and get some work done but the truth is that often I go out for a while and get too cold so I abandon that. Occasionally we have had a day that is fabulous but it is still only early February and it is true to say I am a fair weather person 😂 I don’t like the cold, I don’t like the rain and I can’t tolerate it too hot, still I persist because I love what I do!
I did manage to get some bits done on Wednesday, planted up Ranuculas in the tunnel. I should have planted a whole lot more but I had a crop failure 😞 They were growing beautifully and I moved them into the greenhouse, put them up high because the first year a mouse ate the bulbs 🙄 then they got infested with bloody greenfly! I didn’t really check them regularly enough because I thought they would be safe it being late autumn/early winter, nope. On top of that we had the very cold snap and I forgot to fleece anything in the greenhouse and so that was the end of most of those 🤪 I did have 10 plants elsewhere that were neither attacked nor suffered from the cold so they are what I have now planted up and all I can say is fingers crossed. I also planted a few sweet pea plants that I had autumn sown, they are also in the tunnel just to get a few early flowers. They did really well in there last spring, too well really as they were like triffids hence why I have just planted about 5 this year (so far, I may be tempted to plant more 😂)
I also managed to get a bit done on one of the beds, this is one I like to call the wildlife bed but it has got rather out of control and by that I mean is had become swamped with couch grass and nettles 😬 It has a fabulous weeping birch in one corner which was given to us years ago in a pot, it outgrew someone’s small garden and we planted it into the ground. It is a graceful tree that throws dappled shade and the branches move effortlessly in the smallest of breezes plus it provides me with material for creating heart shaped memorial flowers and wreaths. Whatever I planted in their originally has long gone, I know I had specialised geraniums in there and a fair few unusual herbs but all that is left are loosestrife, aquilegia and wallflowers. I do have a ‘pond’ that is to say I have a large watertight tub that has served as a pond for a few years. I think it has quite a good little ecosystem going on in there, water forgetmenot is well established, duck weed and some water mint, no doubt if I dug around there would be life in there too, it serves a a drinking pool for the little birds and hopefully somewhere we still have a frog or two. I want to move the pond to underneath the tree so that I can utilise the rest of the bed properly. At the minute the plan is to dig up what I want to save, try to get out as much couch grass and nettle root as possible then cover half of it with membrane to kill or weaken any roots left. The other half I will also dig out what I want to keep but put down some cardboard and then a raised bed on top before replanting what I have saved, after going through the roots of those to get any weed roots out of course.
I was in the middle of all this when I heard the geese making a racket, I looked up across the paddock to see Mia (dog) ambling aimlessly across the paddock, I had to go and get her and actually carry her back. Having a blind, deaf dog was never something I had thought about and if you have an enclosed garden it’s fine but not when there are open fields nearby!
It is of course natural behaviour for a dog in decline to wander off and die somewhere, not something that is recognised by a lot of dog owners these days, I feel there is a complete lack of understanding of pets in general as they become ‘babies’. I am not knocking it but the further away from understanding the species and trying to project humanness on them the more problems we encounter (and bigger vet bills) Our other dog Patch was the underdog for a long time but he is now top dog, this is entirely because Mia has got old and infirm. He now sees her as a threat to the pack safety (even though it’s only those two) his natural instinct is to keep her away from food, oik her out of the best bed and drive her away if he could. All natural instincts that have their origins in the health and safety of a wolf pack. We would do well to remember that sometimes, we may have tamed them and bred them to be pets and house dogs but they still have a lot of those primal instincts. Luckily Mia has us to look out for her, to make sure she gets her food, a nice bed and doesn’t wander off, Patch might think he is top dog but we are firmly in charge lol.
We had a planned power cut on Thursday, apparently this is to repair the network so that we have less power cuts going forward. Hopefully that is the case because we have an average of about five outages every winter, some longer than others. No idea why but hopefully they know and that’s what they are upgrading. Not that I am bothered because I am always prepared lol, we would light the fire, get the kettle boiling on top of it and heat up some pre prepared meal of one sort or another. I also have battery powered lights so that we are not sat in the dark and solar charged battery bank to charge phones and a solar powered radio if needed, that’s what being a prepper is all about, the ‘what if’ moments in life 😂
Friday the wind was biting, I managed a little while outside before I decided enough was enough 😂 I found other jobs to do such as check over my dahlia tubers and ask AI for a planting plan 🙄 I really need to get better at record keeping but at the moment it’s all in my head, I am not a spreadsheet person 🤪
I also had a meet up with a fellow flower farmer that I had only spoken to online before now, we are both subscribers of the same club and she lives down in Somerset but was coming Oxfordshire way to pick something up. I said call in for a coffee if you are going past, so she did 😊
The end of the week and the weekend weather was all pretty much the same, grey, dank and dull. It’s a cold and depressing time of year which might be helped with a hint of sunshine but that seems to have disappeared for the time being. John did a few bits outside over the weekend, I did not 😂 I go out there but the ground is wet, it’s not time to get any seed sowing done and so it is not even worth trying to start anything. The difference a little sun would make is colossal, we are geographically challenged here in the UK as far as weather is concerned 🤪 The worst thing is looking at the forecast it is not goi g to change much for the next week either 🙄
All I can do is wait it out and find other jobs to keep me busy for now. We have a busy couple of weekends coming up as two of our daughters are moving house at almost the same time with just a week inbetween, plenty of hefting furniture around and cleaning to do I expect.
I am lighting the fire earlier and earlier each day since we had the monitor for the electric 😬 In one way it’s good because you can see where you ought to be making savings and using less energy, on the other hand you see the amount go up and up and that is quite stressful. Everyone says just turn it off but it’s a good exercise in wastefulness so for the time being until I have learnt what I need to I will leave it on.
frieslandfarm (flowers) 