Full Metal Wheelbarrow

Carnivorous plant eats blue tit in Somerset

Poor birdie!

It'll be Attack of the Killer Tomatoes next....

Today I toddled out to the nursery/farm shop just outside the village, which had a much better selection of flowers than the garden centre. I bought a tray each of pansies and gazanias and a little yellow sysirinchium. Pictures of those later, but now some photos I took on the way there, to test the image hosting at Imageshack, since Flickr want money if I keep more than 200 photos there.
( Cut for pictures )

The weather has been traditional Bank Holiday sunshine and showers today and yesterday, so not a great deal of work has been done outdoors.
( Flowers! )

We've lived in Melbourne for several years now, so we thought it was about time we went to see the gardens at Melbourne Hall, which are open to the public several afternoons a week and most afternoons in August.

We were charged £3.50 each to go in, and I'm sorry to say that if I were just a tad more bolshie than I actually am, I'd've asked for my money back, because it was a sad disappointment.

There was very little in the way of flowers or shrubs at all. Lovely if you like lawns,  yew hedges and algae filled water features, but not much else at all.

The few photos I tool were mostly quite disappointing too, but here are a few under the cut :-

( Birdcage and flower )

All in all, I can think of several things I'd much rather have spent £3.50 on.

Put in a couple of hours work on the allotment this afternoon and feel I got a fair bit done.

I used the Mantis on my own for the first time, without breaking it or me, which is good :-). I used it to make four rows for planting peas and put up netting on the first one, where I then planted the sugar snap peas I'd been hardening off under a cloche for the last week or so. They were past ready to go out - their roots had grown well beyond their modules and I had to tease them out very carefully to avoid damaging them.

I also tilled the area where the runner beans are going to go - later in the week  I'll start putting up a row of canes to grow them up. I planted some more broad beans to continue the row that's there already and sowed leeks and beetroot in modules in the greenhouse.

I planted out the nasturtium seedlings in a patch at the end of one of the beds. I hope they'll be as nice a display as last year. I think I need to bung some more marigold seed in though, because germination has been very patchy in the ones I sowed earlier. I think one of tomorrow's jobs will be to plant out the sunflowers, as they're already growing through the bottom of their coir pots. The comfrey plants are growing well, and one of them has an offshoot that I can dig up when it's a little bigger and use to continue the row.

I think I've lost three or four of the artichokes, so I need to plant some more of those to fill in the gaps. It feels as if the growing season is beginning to take off at last. I just hope we don't have quite as much rain this summer as last year....

This weekend contained a large amount of Tidying Up and Cleaning with a great deal more of same on the horizon. I can now see most of the kitchen floor and have reduced the number of boxes of assorted Kitchen Stuff by half. I now need to track down some stuff to make better use of the cupboards and thus further reduce the aforementioned boxes.

On Sunday we went to the Plant Sale in the neighbouring village of Ticknall, for once timing our arrival somewhere perfectly before the ravening hordes descended. We bought cowslips, lavender, grape hyacinths, two sorts of euphorbia (wulfenii and robbiae) and an allegedly blue geranium (cranesbill). On Sunday afternoon, I got my potatoes in the ground and planted the lavender in my herb patch (by the edge where I'll brush against it and get that lovely scent when it grows bigger.).

Today they delivered some greenhouse bits. Semi-yay, because the most important bit was there - the gutter section - but only semi, because the bits for the windows weren't, which means we still can't finalise the roof. I rang them again and the chap I spoke to is going to chase it up. I hope it won't be too much longer.

Meanwhile they seem to be having some sort of tractor convention on the cricket field behind our back garden, with Eon vans and all sorts. I don't know what they're doing, but it seems to require a lot of people, machinery and shouting.

I think it was a red admiral, but it fluttered away too quickly to really be sure.

It was horribly windy again yesterday, but the greenhouse is still intact, thankfully. Seedlings are beginning to emerge - lots of baby broccoli and cauliflowers and some sugar snap peas.

Today I planted more seeds - calendulas, coriander, thyme and bronze fennel and made some cloches from the coroplast from the dead greenhouse. I shall leave them to warm the soil for a few days and then I shall plant the survivors from the original batch of cauliflower seedlings under there. They're already bigger than last year's bug-stunted ones, so I'm hoping for an actual crop this time.

The plum trees are starting to open their blossom too - I hope it doesn't get blown away or frosted.

I had a bit of a general tidy up this afternoon - I was going to pull out the remaining rocket plants from last year, but a bumble bee pootled along and was clearly feeding from the flowers, so I'll leave them a bit longer.

There is a mouse living in my compost heap. Not a very clever one as he sat looking at me for ages when I pulled the cardboard off the top. If I were a cat or a hawk, he'd have been dinner. But I don't mind him living there, so he's a lucky mouse .

Rob went out to Ryton today, to meet one of his cycling friends and brought back some pumpkin seeds - thanks to anab1 we knew what to look for and I will be growing Small Sugar pumpkins this year, and hopefully finding out what proper pumpkin pie tastes like :-)

Today we went for a walk out to the nearby village of Ticknall and back via the National Trust property at Calke Abbey (They have a cafe. We're not entirely daft :-)). The start of the walk has been improved mightily by the installation of a pavement on the bit of Cockshut Lane that had previously lacked one. Normally I'm not keen on gratuitous tarmaccing, but that bit of road was quite dangerous to walk on without a pavement.

It had rained overnight, but we didn't think it would be too muddy. We were this : wrong.

If anything, the track through Robin Wood was even squelchier than last time we did this walk, though fortunately there was a diversionary path through the trees that bypassed the worst of it. Just out of Robin Wood we passed this rather splendid tree in which someone has built a treehouse :-


The weather was good for most of the morning - sunshine and light winds. We made decent progress and got to Calke around twenty-five to eleven.

I was rather taken with the green iron gatepost on the way in :-


We didn't have to pay to go in, not having a car to park, and the nice lady on the gate told us about the lambing marquee where we could go and coo over the new lambs :-


Having duly admired the woolly babies we set off in search of tea. Just outside the cafe, which is in part of the Abbey outbuildings, I came across another piece of interesting metalwork:-


Not bad for the stable drains!

There was a shop at the cafe and they also sold plants. I was absolutely delighted to find they had Bowles Mint, a variety that my mother has been after for years. I'm not sure why she was so keen on this particular one, but it's lovely to be able to give her something she particularly wants, there being so few things that fall into that category.

On the way home there were some lovely cheerful primroses out :-


The picture really doesn't do them justice - they were so bright and vibrant, it was lovely.

I was also amused by this fallen tree, which from the angle I saw it from looks rather like a quizzical dog's face :-


Or perhaps I'm just daft :-)

We were pleasantly tired when we got back,having been rained on a little bit,  but managed to stagger down to the allotment to try to prepare the greenhouse for more ghastly windy weather forecast for tomorrow. I've duct-taped the door closed as a precaution and put some tape on to reinforce the dodgy panel.

While I was down there I planted more seeds too - Primo cabbage, Eryngiums, Nasturtiums, Oriental Poppies, Mesembryanthemums, Nemesias and Black-Eyed Susans.

In the kitchen, there is a  small jar of sweet peas which I  picked from the allotment at lunchtime.Not bad for the end of October methinks. 

Went out walking today, firstly to the farm shop to see if they had any straw, and then back into the village via a footpath from the farm shop to the Pool. I took loads of photos today and posted nine of them to 100_snapshots which is more than I expected. I anticipate it will get harder to find appropriate shots as I get through the themes though.

I was particularly pleased with these two photos :-




I'd taken several shots of Lady's Mantle leaves because they're usually  particularly good at collecting raindrops, but the nasturtium leaf was much better.