Blooming inside and out

The cornflowers are beginning to show their pretty blue petals. It won’t be long now, before I have some flowers to keep me company as I work. The yellow backdrop is not the wall of my office, but the laburnum outside my window that is having a good year. I’m surrounded by yellow. Outside there [...]

No Comments Posted in: garden, pansy watch 2009, photos

Beetroot and carrots in da house

For shizzle, yo, isn’t it? Quite. Clearly the seeds I planted at the beginning of the month were just waiting for me to blog about how nothing was happening in the patch before they put on their glad rags and showed themselves. A scattering of carrot and beetroot seedlings had emerged when I went to [...]

No Comments Posted in: garden, photos

True leaves and intruders

I’ve had the first signs of life appear in the vegetable patch. Unfortunately, these were not vegetables that I planted on the bank holiday weekend. No, a couple of potatoes came poking up through the soil, growing from tubers I must have missed when I made my harvest last year. They were also impolite enough [...]

1 Comment Posted in: garden, photos

Two daays in Saarbrücken

Last month Suzy and I headed to Saarbrücken for a concert. This time we were back on land, staying in a boring old hotel for the concert at the Congress Hall, rather than sailing the Neckar on a concert ship with a floating stage like last year. Our posh hotel in Saarbrücken was just a [...]

No Comments Posted in: friends, photos, travels, work

Isn’t it obvious?

John, texting from Florida: Sam and I went on an airboat today. What the hell TV programme was it when we were little that people whizzed about in airboats all the time? Me: I can NEVER remember the title. But there was a bear. Possibly called Ben. John: Gentle Ben. WTF is a bear doing [...]

No Comments Posted in: family

Runaway bean

If only I could know whether it’s an escapee, or one I just dropped and managed not to see any of the billion times I’ve been down there since planting the seeds. Unfortunately for us all, my OCD dictates that we must wait until the rest of the seeds germinate to see whether there’s a [...]

No Comments Posted in: garden

Me and my celebrity vegetables

And so the vegetable patch shenanigans begin. I bought the seeds I needed today and enjoyed a day in the sunshine milling about on my patch. Doing one tiny job at a time, wandering around in between. Perhaps checking email, perhaps rescuing a stag beetle, perhaps dropping a cutworm into the pond for the fish [...]

No Comments Posted in: garden, photos

Cornflowers done grown up, y’all

I haven’t blogged the cornflowers in quite a while and – looky here! – they’re all big and stuff. I never got round to thinning out the seedlings, so they made their own room in the can by growing out sideways before continuing their upward journey. Now that’s my kind of gardening.

No Comments Posted in: garden, pansy watch 2009