Newly Built West Cork Stone Walls.

Guess it's time I put in a blog appearance? The last eleven weeks have been heart breaking and I have never experienced such profound sadness.  

Now my chauffeur and pal is no longer here to ferry me around.  I have been doing lots of walking.  Last week according to the health app on my mobile phone I walked 51 miles or 102000 steps to the average person.  Last Monday I walked 18 miles.  Yes I'm fit again.  I will be 62 in a couple of weeks.

I have took some photos on my travels and my next blog will about my 18 miles walk along the boreens of our peninsula here in the SouthWest of Ireland.

Any road or anyway.  A few of my blog friends like Yorkshire Pudding appreciate dry stone walls and stone walls even made with sand and cement.

 I have noticed two newly constructed stone walls on my walks recently:

A new stone wall next to a brook.  Notice the hole in the wall with a pipe draining any surface water off the country lane/boreen.

A newly constructed garden wall.  It reminded me of the herring bone basket weave style of dry stone walls you see on our peninsula.  A legacy of when the Cornish miners mined metals like copper, lead and tin here in the nineteenth century.

It's  good to see natural materials like stone being used to construct walls.

Hope you're all ok and I will try to catch up with your posts and write some more blog posts.

A Month's Recycling.

 A car full of dog food cans, packaging and glass bottles.

Number 2 son visited down here in his new to him 7 seater car and suggested I might want to take the recycling I stored in the back of J's Berlingo.  It had given up the ghost a week or two before her passing.

Like most household routines like paying bills and housework and cooking and cleaning and washing .  J took on a multi task of roles.  It's been an awful difficult few weeks trying to know where anything is or where to pay the electricity.? I spent four hours  looking for birth and marriage certificates.  I wish someone would write a booklet for grieving widowers on how to manage house affairs.  Do you know where your marriage certificate is Mr?

I was mainly in charge of the outside of the smallholding, gardening, mucking out the ponies and pigs, chopping wood and carrying anything heavy.  Oh and burying dead rats, removing spiders and catching a bat that had flown down the chimney.  " Just get it outside"  J once screamed at me😊.

I couldn't believe how many bags of recycling I had crammed into the little van in the last month.

We took it to the waste recycling centre in Bantry and paid 3 Euros.  I wonder how much we pay individually for our packing and dog food cans and glass bottles?

We came home and filled up the car with the " Return" beer cans and plastic bottles and took them to Lidl and it was closed.  They had no electricity.  So we drove to Super Valu and started to put each individual can and plastic bottle in the return deposit machine.  We took the paper receipt to the check out and got back 22.50 Euros in cash.  

It's a pity they don't have a return machine for pet food and tinned food and glass bottles.  Are the supermarkets only interested in metal and plastic that makes money like Aluminium beer cans?

Sheep Near The Sheepshead Way.

 It's been a beautiful day today on our peninsula down here in West Cork.  

Thank you all so much for your heartfelt comments at the parting of my  children's motherand my beloved wife.

The funeral service was so beautiful and the Canon conducted it with such skill and kindness and he read our Eulogies.  One wrote by myself and one by our youngest son.

We had traditional hymns like All Things Beautiful and The Day Though Gavest Has Ended and I chose some popular music favourites by Paloma Faith, Chris De Burgh, Heart, The Beautiful South and Whitney Houston.  There was a lot of tears shed that service, mine included.

I not only lost my wife I lost my friend and chauffeur and fellow carboot sale Womble.  It's  difficult getting to town with a very limited Local Link bus service on a Tuesday and Thursday which went last Thursday through the flooded boreens and twenty odd miles picking up four of us.  It cost me 6 Euros including the return fare.   Thankfully the return journey is less than six miles home.

I have got back into walking again.  The Saturday after the funeral I visited J's grave and walked thirteen miles via Durrus and back home.  

I am also reading a book by CS Lewis called A Grief Observed.  It's brilliant and only cost me 74 Cents to download on Kindle.

The last month is probably the hardest month of my life and I like all of us have been through some very difficult times.  I don't know why God took my wife.  I know she wouldn't want to be separated from us.  I had nearly thirty one years of happily married life and she gave me two wonderful sons.

Thanks again.

Dedication.

 I lost the love of my life and sweetheart and pal J last Tuesday.  We buried her on Saturday in a graveyard overlooking the bay.

The people of Bantry and beyond showed J  and my family and myself so much love.

I don't know when or if I will post again for a while.  But I will publish any comments on here.

God bless you all.👍

Sedum Autumn Joy And Bergenias. Winter's On It's Way.

 The pinky red flower is Sedum Autumn Joy.  The cabbage like leafed plants are Bergenia.

Sedums like Buddleia attract butterflies 🦋 to the garden.

They are also a sign to me that Winter is on it's way.

Sedums are one of these easiest perennials there are to propagate from cuttings.  Just cut off a little branch and stick in a pot of sand or compost and I guarantee it will root within 3 to 4 weeks.  It really is that easy.

The Bergenias also nicknamed Elephants Ears and Pig Squeak change their leaf colour through Autumn, Winter and Spring.  The go pink to reddy purple.  They also bring some out of season cheer with a pink flower.

That great English plants woman Gertrude Jekyll  used to make Bergenia like borders in her planting layouts. Going slightly off topic.  Her brother was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson and he borrowed their family name for one of his most famous literary characters.

They are both old garden favourites of mine and prolong our summer that little bit longer.   I think they grow and look better in big clumps or drifts rather than just individual plants.

I like to see the Butterflies hovering and feeding on the Sedum at this time of year.  The Sedums seem to melt through Winter and eventually appear and grow next Spring 

A View From Inside The Rosette Room.

 More rosettes pinned up with the sashes for our prize winning 🐖 🐷.  

The latest rosettes were awarded at Tullamore Agricultural Show a couple of weeks or so.

Joke.  There was a fire at a sleeping football giants stadium.

A rather concerned Chairman asked the fire chief if they had got to the cup room yet.

The fire chief replied:

"No we haven't managed to get into the canteen yet?"

No it wasn't MUFC.

I have been grafting hard all week and haven't had time to blog.  I'm trying to get a few extra quid/ Euros together for my forthcoming Prog Rock festival roughing it trip.

Storm Amy is knocking about our shores tomorrow night.  Batten down the hatches and hopefully it won't visit us.

Potting On The Newly Rooted Plants.

 I potted on all these new plants that I divided and took cuttings of a few weeks ago.

My neighbour down the road had his drive rechipped and tarred.   

They gave us the old top surface It's a very sandy mix.  These are the kind neighbours who leave us the bag of vegetables peelings under a upturned plant pot for the livestock on their garden wall.

One of the contractors came up and asked me if I could find some where for the scrapings?

"Something for free?" 🤔 thinks me.

Two Bobcat skid steer buckets later I had my very own cuttings mix.  On inspection it's very gritty sand and contains soil and well composted plant tissue like leaves.

A nice sandy mix for my cuttings. 

A bucket full of free draining cutting mix and it's  free!

It's  got absolutely perfect drainage and not too rich in nitrogen to start off cuttings.

I took lots of cuttings and divisions and used the scrapings for my cuttings mix.  Remember when I showed you my cuttings floor several blog posts back?

Yesterday I gently tugged the cuttings to see if there was any resistance and pulled them out of the sandy rooting medium.

One rooted Osteospermum (Cape Daisy) cutting.  I never cease to be amazed when I see newly formed roots.  I think Mother Nature sews them on to the cuttings while we sleep.🤔

It's always worth taking some of these frost tender plants cuttings at this time of year.  I lost most of mine in 2010 when we had the biggest snow accumulation for fifty years and we were snowed in for a fortnight.  

I could also have waited for leaves to form and roots to appear out of the drainage holes in the plant pots.

I wanted the room to take more cuttings so I began potting up the newly rooted plants in their own individual plant pots.

There are Osteospermums,  Shasta Daisies,  Bergenia, Hebes,  Hypericum, Cotoneasters, variegated grasses, Phormiums, 🌹 🥀 and Hydrangeas.  Rugosa cuttings are my next project.

Plant propagation costs very little.  All it needs is a pair of scissors ✂️,  some free cuttings, free plant pots (I have hundreds that people have gave me!), a watering can, water and some plant rooting material like that's  preferably free and most of all patience!

Are you propagating plants at the moment?  My plant nursery is getting ever fuller.  I must grow more veg.😀

By the way I have had two thousand seven hundred views so far today.  Either blog stats have gone crazy or there's a lot of folk out there who like Prog Rock?