February 2017

I have been shopping!

I made the most of the Lidl special offer .... 5 pks for £1 for the veg seeds and 5 pks for £2 for flowers.  Unfortunately I then chose to go through the self service till and somehow managed to over charge myself by £1.60!

My Garden Club always offers half price Thompson & Morgan seeds but this year the lady who organises this decided to quit ... no one was stepping up so I volunteered to take over.  It took some persuading to get to the minimum order level of £100 but we made it on time for the seeds to arrive for the February meeting. I was giving out the seeds when two more orders were handed in .... just when I thought I had finished!

Looking at details of another garden club in a neighbouring village I noticed they had a talk about barn owls.  Now my husband is a keen birder so he agreed to accompany me.  The owners of Tean Valley Meadow, Alan and Sylvia Williams, retired in 2002 and bought 11 acres of meadow and set about creating a nature reserve.  Thirty three young owls have been fledged from their owl boxes over the years.  It sounded idyllic.  What a great thing to do in your retirement. 
 
As a visitor I felt quite cheeky when my number came out first in the club raffle ....  but I desperatly needed a new pair of work gloves and there was a leather pair on the table ... serendipity!

So here is how I wore out my old gloves .... before Christmas I began to tidy up a small area near my house.  I was happy with what I had accomplished and had plans to finish the job when I came back from a three week holiday to India.  Imagine my surprise on our return to find the council had decided to do something about the overgrown mess and had visited with their chainsaws: they destroyed the shrubs and left the mess!

A week later my gloves were in tatters ....

but the ground space was clear.

I have already planted some spring bulbs in there ... obviously not enough .... but they are coming through now.

Before Christmas I had visions of a bluebell wood .... today I visited Hodsocks Priory so I now want a snowdrop wood!

I had a lovely day spotting the different species.  It made me look more carefully at my own snowdrops some of which were in the garden when we moved in twenty four years ago and sure enough I found a small clump with lots of green on the inner petals ... no idea what it is but 'Dragonfly' looks quite similar or it may be Merlin.  I have no plans to start collecting snowdrops.  The cost of some of the bulbs is frightening.

The Hodsock shop was a treat ... lots of bulbs and hellebores and bees all over the place!

 Lots to do in the garden this weekend ... LOVE this time of year!!

A little treat!

 Finally, here's one of the tigers we saw on our birding holiday in India.

Fabulous!