red mum

I love these ears.

(August 10th)

‘You expect me to move.’

I REALLY should at some stage put together a video of all the dog’s tricks, I know I have bored you at different stages with all her wonderful cuteness, but there’s more. One of her favourite play things of which there are many is empty plastic drink bottles. She can even get all enthusiastic and knock over bottles that aren’t empty cos she wants to play.

She’ll throw it around the place and pounce on it, once she is sure she has killed it, she will then prepare the carcass by stripping all its paper off before diligently working to unscrew the cap and she always manages to do it too. This was taken while lying down on my sick sofa last night.

THINGS are ticking along really well in my little yard; all my seedlings are coming up so quickly and the changes from day to day is pretty amazing. I cannot wait until later in the summer when all my efforts literally come to fruition.

I planted out my sweetpea seedlings with my sugar snap pea seedings, there were 12 sweetpea plants and 48 sugar snap peas so I divided them eventually into two troughs, one of which has a grid to grow up and the other I need to get one for.

(peas to the far left) (sweetpeas)

And so far so good. Some of the sweetpeas particularly the ones without support have become collateral damage but I think they may still sprout. The non-supported planter seems to get a lot more sun than the other and is suffering from it so I might have to move it but at the moment there is no space until the

Hopefully in a couple of weeks all my little sugar snap babies will grow up and around the trellis with lovely sweetpea flowers growing around the peas. It is pretty amazing watching the how the peas’ trendils have found the trellis and are now busy winding themselves around it.

The doggie is also enjoying all the smells around the back yard and when I was planting she sat there watching my every move. At one stage I caught rubbing her cheek along the delicate sweetpea shoots like a cat, she is mad.

Nanny was giving out that I had too many green things growing and not enough flowers so I made a hanging basket with all the other flowers I’ve been nurturing. Again the doggie became attached to the lining and I discovered it all over the place after she had a fight with it, it was rescued and put into a bag. I should have actually moved the bag for the second pic, but then again this series is more about documenting my wee yard’s transformation than anything else. I want to look back at pics and think wow. So far it is really working.

As I mentioned earlier there has been some collateral damage, I also discovered it was better to grow the kale seeds directly into little pots where they can grow for longer rather than in seed trays and then into bigger pots. I have a couple of little pots that haven’t survived, one or two which are hanging on by a thread, meanwhile others I planted directly into the same size pots weeks later are absolutely thriving and doing better than the others were at twice the time.

Overall though things are doing great but I need to get some shelving up to hold all my tomato plants, I plan to get some steel shelves up against the wall that is currently housing bin bags and put the tomato plants into growbags on the shelves. We’ll see how it goes.

Finally my berries… One berry bush is thriving, the other was unfortunately not planted quickly enough and is just refusing to do anything and my strawberries, mmhhh, coming along nicely. So far it is hard to tell which will yield more strawberries, my cut-up welly boot or the hanging basket but both are covered in flowers with little strawberries coming up.

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After all that gardening there isn’t anything better than a snooze.