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1707 and all that . . .
2007-05-20 11:22:00
Yesterday was my birthday and the chance to do some party flowers for one of my longest standing customers - one of the customers who has been taking a couple of bunches from me weekly since 2002 when I didn't even have somewhere proper to grow them.It was her wedding anniversary and an excuse to hold a themed party. The theme was 1707 - this year sees the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union of Scotland and England and also of the birth of Linnaeus the Swedish scientist who came up with the system we still use today to categorise plants and animals - so it had layers of Swedish style (she is Swedish), historicism and flowers.I was asked to provide small arrangements for the long trestle tables and the buffet.I love working to a brief like this. One of the great advantages of having so many antique dealers in the family is that I have the chance to pick up vases etc. and squirrel them away for the right occasion. About 6 months ago I bought some french pewter goblets and plate...
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Seduced by sewing threads
2007-05-17 17:46:00
Over the past ten days or so I have been wishing for a good rainy day so that I can snuggle inside and do some hand sewing.However, though every weather forecast claimed that it was raining, it was actually lovely and sunny and I spent my days outside potting on seedlings and trying (and failing) to keep on top of the weeding.Today it was a bit drizzly - weather I would normally brave - but I declared it a wet day and indulged myself with some sewing.The reason for this is that I recently acquired a stash of vintage embroidery silks - one is fabulously labelled "Flosette for Flourishing etc" - and I have been using them to make up a selection of one off cushions. Until today it has all been evening work and therefore very slow but today I have been able to work without children and with the table all to myself. To make the cushion bodies I am using vintage wool blankets which I have felted and dyed. My favourite is a soft raspberry pink and the panel will be the vase of flowers sh...
More About: Sewing , Wing , Thread

New home for Tim . . .
2007-05-16 09:28:00
An update on Tim - the dog we are fostering - for all the e-mailing well wishers.After a delay caused by tying up legal loose ends there is now a permanent home for Tim to go to. It will be back in Dumbarton, near to where he used to live, so I think that he will be happy. We shall have him here for the next 10 days or so and then deliver him to his new owner.He is a really lovely dog but I am glad that he is moving on. He has become very attached to me and follows me round all the time - tap, tap, tap on the chipboard floors. This has got more pronounced over the last week and now he howls if I have to go out. Hopefully he will make the transition to his new home smoothly. Fingers crossed.His main complaints about our house are the presence of cats and the absence of biscuits. With the enforced diet and the cat chasing, he is definitely leaving a trimmer dog than he arrived.
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One of those tedious posts about blogging . . .
2007-05-15 09:50:00
Yes - look away now if you can't take another self-indulgent post about "Why I blog".In sensible society I think that bloggers are regarded as slightly odd - perhaps we have far to much time on our hands, perhaps we have no friends. I try to blog every day so I am even odder.And I do think it is a peculiar thing to do. I blog every day as I find it is a good discipline - and to be honest I only have 2 speeds - I can either do something immediately or not at all. If I aimed a blog a couple of times a week I would never do it at all.I have had this site since 2005, a time when there were fewer people with weblogs, and I read 60 or so sites on a more or less weekly basis. These were mainly American sites about gardening, self sufficiency, marketing and eating.Now the British blogging scene has exploded and it is impossible to keep up. Yesterday Cherry at Tales from Pixie Wood was beating herself up for being behind in individually answering all the people who comment on her site....
More About: Blogging , Those , Hose , Posts , Blogg

foraging for food
2007-05-14 09:46:00
May in Scotland sees the hungry gap in the self sufficient calender - stored root vegetables are past their best and the peas and beans of June are not yet here. Unless you are going to survive on asparagus, rhubarb and baby salad leaves you are going to have to look outside the vegetable patch for sustenance.As I've mentioned before we are much more gardeners for fun than gardeners for self sufficiency but I love the idea of foraging for food. Over the years I have tried to convince the family of the joys of pignuts and gorse buds. Over the years I have failed. There is a lot of digging and picking involved for very little and to be honest, if we were trying to live on it we would be dead.However - nettles are a different story. We have a lot of nettles, we have an awful lot of nettles, and ten minutes picking gives us enough in the basket to make cream of nettle (mint and parsley) soup. A soup the children will actually eat. Mind you it is hardly self sufficient as it involv...
More About: Food , Aging

A busy day
2007-05-13 11:53:00
First a photo of some lavender sellers - Rebecca, Katherine and Sally - also helping were Zoe, Jan, Hannah and Esther. They made over £70 which is fabulous - and as it is ring - fenced money for the school grounds the children get to keep that feeling of achievement and ownership rather than it being part of the PTA pot. We shall be planting out the remaining plants as a lavender hedge - hopefully on Monday.The plants all looked small in comparison to the artificially souped up plants of a garden centre - I'm sure that many plants bought because they were the school's plants - but I am also sure that they will find the plants outperform the larger garden centre plants in the end as they are used to the cold and haven't been fed a diet of junk food.Yesterday was a packed day as I was also making up table flowers for a party - here they are crammed into a wooden trug, ready to be transported to Killearn.Then in the evening it was a Guatemalan night in the village hall - hosted b...
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Drymen Primary School Fair
2007-05-11 09:43:00
I am very, very keen on getting children gardening, or at least getting their hands into the soil. I have a C19th belief that growing things is good for the soul and to this end I am working with Drymen Prim a ry School 's Eco board to raise funds for growing things in the school grounds.Tomorrow there is a school fun day with lots of stalls, activities and a football tournament and the eco board shall be selling lavender plants - see above - which have been growing away in my polytunnel. The plants are still small but they are good sturdy wee plants and the ideal size for planting out as a hedge or patch as they will grow away quickly with minimal root disturbance.Everyone is welcome at the funday - there will be homebaking and teas - it is not just a school thing.So far the school's new raised beds have been planted with strawberries, peas and carrots. They still have one bed to plant and they still have to decide what to put in it. I love going down to help plant - the enthusi...
More About: Fair

Closed Friday 11th May
2007-05-10 10:00:00
All the roads surrounding us are closed to non residents as part of Sirling Council's long overdue frenzy of road repairs. We have therefore decided to close on Frida y .If anyone needs flowers desperately give us a call - 01360 660 903.Subscription deliveries and anything pre-ordered continues as usual.
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The first sweet - pea
2007-05-08 12:07:00
I suspect that this flower is a bit of a fluke - I wouldn't expect the plants to flower until the end of May - but nevertheless, there it is, the first sweet pea of the year - a 3 flowered bloom on a Matucana plant.This year Euan has built me 2 sweet pea supports out of alder branches he chopped in the wood (guess who got a chainsaw for his Christmas???). The supports are very beautiful - even without the sweet peas growing on them and give a height to the garden which is otherwise lacking at the moment. They are much, much better than the cane structures I usually make which have a tendency to fall down in the September winds. I am hoping that these will stay for a good long while.
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And then they were gone . . .
2007-05-06 18:05:00
Because I plant such a wide range of tulips with differing flowering times I usually have flowers for 5-6 weeks.Last year I did a school fair the equivalent of next weekend and had 12 different varieties blooming and some still to flower in the cutting garden.This year with the warm sunny weather they have all flowered in one spectacular whoosh! and are now sold out.The flower in the photograph is Blue parrot, misnamed really as it is much more purple than blue. It is an unusual colour, a bit like that bruised colour that you get in bearded irises (now that doesn't sound attractive at all and it is in reality gorgeous)The alliums are beginning to flower to take over from the tulips - I just hope that there isn't too much of a gap.
More About: Gone , Were , Then

Voting after all.
2007-05-05 19:14:00
On Thursday it was the election for the members of the Scottish Parliament and local councillors. At the moment there doesn't seem to be a party that represents my views and I seriously thought about not voting at all.Then I thought back to all those history lessons about the long hard fight for the right to vote and headed off to the polling station at the library.As soon as I got there I knew that I had done the right thing - though there was no-one I would say I truly supported there were quite a few parties on the form - such at the UK Independence party - that I definitely do not want anything to do with so I could at least use the opportunity to vote against them.I was doubly glad that I had voted on Friday evening when I came across a Scottish blog entry of shocking xenophobia - it read very like the canvassing letter from UKIP that arrived on my doormat last week. It complained about those hordes of foreigners arriving in our Scottish towns, taking our jobs and leering a...
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The lie of the land
2007-05-04 17:13:00
With the light evenings and the weeding I am not watching much t.v. at the moment but last night I made a point of watching Molly Dineen's programme The Lie of the Land that I had heard previewed on Radio 4's Woman's Hour.It was a film that evolved from Dineen accompanying a flesh run for a pack of hounds - where dead, dying and valueless animals were picked up to become cheap meat for the hounds. It then went on to explore the lives of several other failing farmers whose existence is being threatened by the way that today's consumers chose to buy their meat.Dineen's style is non-interventionist, matter-of-fact and direct. She is not afraid of filming past the point that the majority of viewers will feel queasy. Her straightforwardness, without sentimentalisation or sensationalism made it, for me, compelling and uncomfortable viewing. My worry is that many will have switched off when the first calf was shot, and many more when it was skinned using the landrover.The thing th...

What is it about yellow . . .
2007-05-03 20:28:00
I don't really like yellow flowers . . .I don't really plant them . . . so how come, when I went to select flowers for a gift bouquet, I came back with this?Is it the odes to yellow I have been reading on various blogs? Is it the fabulous sunshiney days? Is it because I am making an effort to become a mellowy yellowy person?Or can we just claim that this bouquet is orange?The tulips are - for those who are interested - Texas Gold, a yellow parrot; Dordogne, an apricot with good long stems, Ballerina, orange lily tulip that smells of freesias but has weedy stems which need to be supported in an arrangement like this, and Gavota rust/burgundy with a yellow edge.They made me feel happy - I hope the person who got the bouquet feels happy too.
More About: Yellow , Yell , Yello

Just what I always wanted . . .
2007-05-02 15:55:00
We do not live on a smallholding and we do not have any pretensions to be self-sufficient. We are not living "The Good Life" but we do grow (some of) our own vegetables and we do keep chickens and ducks. At some point in the future we shall have pigs and a proper coppice. It is very much the lifestyle that I envisaged when we were living in a Glasgow tenement about a decade ago.In my mid 20s I found that a fibroid was growing attached to my womb and I had to have an operation to have the fibroid removed. Before the operation I was given a consent form to sign should a hysterectomy prove necessary.Thanks to good luck and the skill of my consultant (who saw me through 2 subsequent pregnancies) the operation went fine but it meant that Euan and I, not long married, had to have a serious "what if we can't have children?" conversation.The one thing that stood out was that, if we couldn't have children of our own, then I wanted to move to the country and keep chickens and pigs and ...
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Everyone's talking about it. . .
2007-05-01 16:48:00
Cherry Menlove from Tales from Pixie Wood has done a post about the PR fiasco that is the Sainsbury's Anya Hindmarsh "This is not a Plastic Bag". Read about it here.I had held back from commenting on this as it could be interpreted as an attack on a competitor but Cherry's post has given me courage!The bag seems to me to be a failure on all counts - it was given the kind of gimmicky pre-launch hype that turned it from being a useful object into a fashiony "must have" object that will be discarded as soon as it ceases to be fashionable. It seems to be a really bad design in terms of a carry it in your handbag as it is too big to scrunch up - see Jane Perrone's verdict on this aspect of it here and then here. So as soon as the "see me with my Hindmarsh bag" moment is over it will be discarded. Finally and most importantly it is manufactured in factories where there are severe doubts about working conditions (and hereand here).It is all such a travesty - something that should ha...
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Black stemmed cow parsley
2007-04-30 19:51:00
It is glorious weather so this post will be short as there is a lot of weeding still to do and, now that we are almost into May, a lot of daylight to do it by.This photo is of Anthriscus sylvestris "ravenswing", a black stemmed cow parsley recommended by Sarah Raven in her book The Bold and Brilliant Garden. It is a big improvement on the general cow parsley which covers the verges here. Now I love cow parsley - there is no finer sight than verges of cow parsley fluff with the last of the pink campion and a few bluebells - but it is not a garden plant.Ravenswing has daintier flowers which seem to almost sparkle against the dark red leaves and stems. It does self sow but does it very gently (not something you could say of the wild cow parsley) and is a couple of weeks earlier into flower.It also doesn't seem to have the rank smell of cow parsley when cut and looks beautiful in a vase mixed with black and white columbines like "Magpie" and "Guinness".I am looking at wild flowers a...
More About: Black , Emme , Lack , Stem

Warning - this post contains a photo of a dead mole.
2007-04-29 20:11:00
Our approach to wildlife is very simple - if it was here before we were then we have to learn to live with it.Hence we put up with hares (that nibble hedges), voles (that tunnel under growing plants), pheasants (that eat bulbs) and yes, moles (that turn the grass paths and beds into ripples). While most farmers I know are keen on wildlife and do a lot to nurture it, this latter foible is regarded with hilarity (and I suspect a little annoyance) by our farming neighbours who enthusiastically annihilate all moles with a variety of horrible methods. It is of course for a reason, while a mole to me means an unsightly hump and some nice friable soil to steal as potting compost, to our neighbours it means ruined silage as the soil mixes with the harvested grass.Minou obviously feels the same. The photo above shows Minou the foreman instructing Jasmine to "keep digging" for a mole that he could obviously hear under the ground. The photo was taken at the beginning of a week of frenzied ...
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Shop - 27th April
2007-04-27 16:12:00
We are very tulipy today - a medly of orange tulips, including the lily tulip Ballerina which smells like fresias, tall apricot "dordogne", deep purple "recreado", yellow parrot "texas gold" and the giganitically tall cream "purissima".There are also baby moon narcissi and some anenomes, late hyacinths and love lies bleeding.Here is Jasmine sunbathing and waiting for customers to pay her attention.Tomorrow I shall be at Baldernock Garden Club's annual plant sale in Baldernock Church Hall, Balmore Road 12-2. There is usually a very good plant stall so I am taking my money. here are details of the garden club.
More About: April , Shop

Sweetpeas
2007-04-26 15:28:00
There are certain things that I like cooking - mayonnaise, sour dough bread, handmade pasta - that I think appeal to me simply because few other people do them from scratch. At the moment I have a pig's head simmering on the stove to make brawn. All these things are straightforward and easy, and only time consuming if you are not already at home.I am a bit like that about the things I grow as well - I like the straightforward things that no-one else bothers with doing. The flowers that I get the most pleasure from growing are sweet peas - and I suspect that a lot of that is because I sow the seeds in the autumn, overwinter them and am then planting out great plants in 2 litre pots in April, rather than the rather weedy plants available in the garden centre.By popular demand (Claire) I have a limited number of pots for sale tomorrow at the van- they are 2 plants to a 2 litre pot, £3.50 or 3 pots for £9.First come first served.My ideal May meal - fresh eggs from our chickens, ...
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Rain. . . .
2007-04-25 20:38:00
We have been having the very best kind of rain - gentle even warm rain that smells sweet and sinks right down to the roots of the plants. The garden is growing at a fantastic rate - both plants that should be there and weeds that shouldn't - I swear you can see the leaves extending by the hour.I love working outside in this kind of rain - you can't feel yourself getting wet and the earth smells wonderful.We don't water plants here - well they get watered in when they are first planted and again after 5 days if there has been no rain, but after that, not a drop. My theory is that they get better root systems if they have to make an effort to get water and that they encounter more nutrients in the soil.Having said that, it is not that hard a test as we are a wet part of the country - but we had the same heatwave as everyone else last summer and the flowers didn't droop or mildew.Euan is busy designing a system of siphons and water barrels to take rainwater from the house and gre...
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Planting dahlias
2007-04-24 16:25:00
I meant to do this post earlier in the year to encourage people to buy dahlia tubers - but then we sold out of them at the CL fair and I forgot until today when I planted up my own tubers.Dahlia tubers look like mis-shaped potatoes grouped by strings around a central stalk. Every tuber must have a piece of stalk or it will not grow.The shoots will develop at the join between the hangy down bits and the stem.Plan t the tuber with the stem uppermost into a large pot of ordinary potting compost.Fill up the pot but leave the top of the stem above the surface of the compost.Water well and put somewhere warm. I have put mine on a heated mat in the tunnel but on a smaller scale anywhere warm will work. If you put them into the dark make sure you check for sprouts every day or they will become weak and lanky.Within a couple of weeks shoots will begin to develop. Only when this happens should you begin to water. Keep the plants inside until the frosts have passed and then gradually get th...
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Tulips - how to stop them going bendy
2007-04-23 15:20:00
One of the questions I get asked again and again is how to stop tulips going bendy in the vase. So here we go!The bendiness is caused by 2 different things. A bendy stem is usually caused by an airlock in the stem, preventing the water from going right the way up. A bending over head is usually due to the tulip continuing to grow after it has been cut which along with the increasing weight of the head, leads it to bend over.To cure the air lock - take your tulips, make sure the stems are bendy and lay them side by side, all heads level, on a piece of brown paper - them roll it into a tight straight parcel and bind it well with string - see photo.Put the kettle on and pour an inch of boiling water into a mug, cut 1/2 and inch off the bottom of the stems and put them at a slight angle into the mug. You should see an air bubble come out of the bottom of the stem. Put them immediately into a vase of tepid water and wait 2 hours before unwrapping - they should be set in a straight p...
More About: Tulips , Lips , Stop , Bend , Them

Green Gallery Opening
2007-04-22 19:13:00
Sally and I set up our stall outside the new Green Gallery this lunchtime - the sun was shining, the birds were singing, you could feel heat bouncing of the pale pink of the outbuilding wall.By the time the Gallery opened at 2 our basky wee corner had somehow turned into an arctic wind tunneland we were laughingly innappropriate in our dress.That aside, the afternoon was a good one. It was certainly very busy - for a half hour it was like that episode in Jimmy's Farm where they have to have stewards helping people reverse miles down single track roads and comandeer fields to park in.The photographs are of Carneval de Nice tulips, a spring window box with muscari 'fascination', narcissi 'baby moon' and tulip 'gavota', and a cow in the sculpture garden - look at those eyelashes!
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Green Gallery Opening and a temporary addition to our family.
2007-04-21 18:10:00
Today was a day of rest - I just haven't got down to anything - just drifted from one half completed task to another.I began potting on lavender cuttings which will be for sale at Drymen School's Fun day on May 12. The lavender stall will be manned and managed by the school's eco board and all proceeds will be going to pay for improvements to the school playground. I have agreed to nurture the cuttings until the sale. What a responsibility!Tomorrow afternoon I shall have a stall at the opening of the Green Gallery - this is quite exciting. The Green Gallery used to be in Aberfoyle and always had a good mix of art and crafts. Its owner, Becky Walker has a keen eye for the kind of paintings, sculptures and ceramics that actually work in a home. I have never been in the position to buy a painting (though I have coveted a few) but over the years I have bought some lovely pottery and ceramics. Just before Christmas the Gallery moved to Becky's home in Buchlyvie - the Christmas...
More About: Family , Opening , Tempo

Best Day Ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2007-04-20 18:41:00
We opened for the season this morning at 10.30. We had customers arriving from 9.30, calling in on their way back from vegetable shopping at France Farm. From then until 4 it just didn't stop. I am overwhelmed with people's support. One lovely woman travelled all the way from Broxburn having seen us at the CL Fair.I was worried as the hot weather (see never satisfied) brought on some of the tulips and all of the fritillaries too fast so the garden looks beautiful but they are too far out to sell. Also deer got in while I was at the Country Living Fair (who did leave that gate open?) and ate over 800 tulip bulbs in one fantastic feast.From Wednesday I have been prowling the garden. Would there be any flowers to pick? Would there be any customers? Would anyone want what I have.But Sally and I found that when we looked, there were rather a lot of flowers out there. We filled the buckets with them and then was a rush of making up and wrapping all day. We have NO FLOWERS left a...
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Talk, talk . . .
2007-04-19 23:22:00
Tonight I have been at Buchlyvie Garden Club talking about growing cut flowers. It was good fun. I was actually a bit nervous - I was using a borrowed power point projector and worried that something would go wrong with the connections. I can use it if it works, I am lost if something goes wrong.In the end it was something more mundane that caused problems with the visuals. The screen, usually stored in the gents loos, was missing and we were faced with the prospect of having to project the images onto a mustard coloured woodchip papered wall. Lovely.With 2 minutes to go before the start the missing screen was discovered . . . locked in the WRI (Women's Rural Institute) cupboard. Is this inter-club rural rivalry?The flowers in the blue bucket are Narcissus "geranium", one of the longest lasting and most fragrant narcissi- a Sarah Raven recommendation . I picked a few buckets full to take along and sell to raise funds for The Tullochan Trust.
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A post about post . . .
2007-04-18 13:57:00
As a couple of people responded to my comment yesterday about the cost of postage I thought that I would open out the topic a bit and ask for some feedback both from other small mail order businesses and from people who buy mail order.What can small businesses do about the cost of posting things?I do a mailing two or three times a year - at the start of the season, sometimes at the end of the season and before Christmas. Ideally I would like to cut this down to one mailing a year but I do feel that, from a business point of view, a clutch of pretty postcards in the hand is better than any number of e-mails. They can be stuck to a fridge, handed on to friends etc. etc. . . .I hope. Am I right? Do people relish getting a bright hand addressed envelope (Or might they be disappointed that it isn't a birthday card with a fat cheque inside?)There is also the issue of paper. I use recycled paper for all letters and print-outs but I do not use recycled envelopes as I couldn't source ...
More About: Post , About

Prize Draw
2007-04-17 13:26:00
We had a small prize draw at the Country Living Fair - The prize was this basket of gardening goodies - kneeler, soap, giant fork and trowel and a set of aluminium labels.It was won by Wendy Waller of Edzell and (due to holidays) will be dispatched to her today.Today I am stuffing envelopes with my new postcards and an announcement that we are open from Friday. Surrounded by bright green envelopes, it makes me realise how much paper, time and money is spent on mailings. This was partly the reason for the prize draw. To enter we had to be given an e-mail address - not so that we can spam people - just to make it easier to let them know when the season begins and ends and what we are doing for Christmas.Time shortage being what it is, I haven't put the names onto the computer yet . . . . so much for efficiency.
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And then they were back on the bus
2007-04-16 13:15:00
Well the Easter school holidays are over - and goodness they went quickly. The children were picked up this morning at 8.30 by Alan on the school bus and we are back into routine.Judging from most of the mothers I meet, I am unusual in actually enjoying the school holidays. I am definitely not a morning person (another reason why I am not a conventional florist - who knows what I would come back with from a 5am flower market) and, though I tend to be up and about quite early, I am not quite all there until 9.30 at the earliest. The morning routine of "get your shoes on . . .get your shoes on . . .GET YOUR SHOES ON !! !" is not my finest hour.So when all that can be abandoned in favour of free ranging scruffy, layabout kids I am happy. And the fine weather this year has made it a breeze - the children were happy playing outside doing Blytonish things. They produced a local newspaper, they did some elaborate dog training with jumps, they made a veg patch, they just lay for hours ...
More About: Back , The Bus , Were , Then

Drymen Primary School garden
2007-04-15 09:17:00
Yesterday we were at Drymen primary School as part of a parents task force to sort out the beds in the playground.When the school was built flower beds were incorporated into the playground. Unfortunately they were filled with concrete and rubble under a thin layer of soil (Why do they do this?????). They were also flush with the tarmac surface - encouraging children to run straight over them in pursuit of a ball.As places for the children to grow anything they were a disaster - puddles lay on the surface in the rain, and they baked solid in the sun. Apart from daffodils and weeds nothing ever grew.Last year's planting efforts were even more dismal than usual as someone came along with a spade and stole most of the plants. The CCTV which was installed after other vandalism will hopefully stop this happening again.The children at the school are all keen on the idea of planting things and particularly in making their playground a haven for wildlife. It has been a shame that thei...
More About: Garden , Men , Mary , Primary