"Bye Jove He's Got It".

A bag of cheap discount supermarket daffodils.

I never thought any of our lads would become obsessed with gardening like yours truly and me, myself and I.

Number 2 son moved a couple of hours away last year.

We weren't happy bunnies and it's the same feeling most parents have to experience and all little birds have to fly the nest some time.

One day we visited them and somehow I was talked into digging off a big border of gravel courtesy of a borrowed shovel from next door and pulling up a big sheet of polythene.  The gravel was deposited on top of gravel on another border.

I pulled out any weeds and was impressed with the rich and fertile soil.  He was going to make a flower garden.

I visited him again and gave him the left over plants from a close by car boot sale we had just visited.  Then we arranged them on the border and guess who got the job of planting them?

He also bought bedding plants and a rose tree and we gave him some more plants.  Especially my Cape Daisies and Shasta Daisies.  Daisies are my plant autograph and you always know when I have planted up a garden.  It will contain my Daisies. 

He purchased some ornamental bark and a lot of his neighbours commented on his 'new' garden and how they would like a garden like it.

He's actually taken an interest in gardening and he even grew lettuce in a hanging basket.

I can't persuade him to put his name down for an allotment yet but he does want to container garden next year and grow vegetables.

Now we text each other about his garden and the latest plant offers in Aldi or Lidl.

I told him he could get a big bag of daffodils from Lidl for ten Euros.  

The other day he drove home and presented me with a quarter of a bag of daffodils.  He said he'd got tired planting his ones.

I have planted them in one of my old decking plank raised beds.

When I was planting them I thought:

"Bye Jove He's Got It!"

At least one of our lads like gardening!
 

When You Plant A Buddleia You Get Yourself A Butterfly 🦋 Bush.

 

Butterflies and Buddleia. 

The 🦋 🦋 butterflies love the Buddleia that I planted to make our patio a bit more private last year. You can see the bay and Beara in the background.  We live in the countryside next to the sea.

Regular readers will know this particular shade of purple/ lilac specimen is an offspring of a Buddleia  cutting I took when I lived in Cheshire.   I filled two wheelie bins full of my shrubs and perennials and manhandled it into the back of a Luton hire van.  

Last year I planted another cutting that had successfully "striked" rootsand now it's attracting the Red Admirals.

When I was trying to sell my Buddleia and other plants at a carboot sale the other week.

I had a conversation with a lovely lady and I told her about the Buddleia or butterfly bush.  I told her if she planted it in her garden it would attract the butterflies 🦋.   Then I said that apparently that butterflies serve no natural purpose other than being beautiful.  We both agreed what could be better than that?  She bought my potted Buddleia and went away happy.

My Sedum Autumn Joy's are now turning pinky purple.  These also attract the butterflies.  Sadly when I see these in flower and the butterflies hovering round them.  I know winter is on the way.  Rather like seeing farmers making second or third cut bales of silage.  So the cattle will have forage in winter. 

Anyone getting lots of butterflies on their Buddleias?

Here's a song by American heavy rock  band Heart.  I saw them play at Birmingham NEC back in the late eighties.  I think it was 1988🤔? Crikey!  That is thirty seven years ago.  Where does the time go?

A Text Message And Some Windfall Apples 🍎 For The Livestock.

I had got a text message from one of my neighbours when I was working in the veg plot.

He had left me a wheelbarrow full of apples that he had collected from his orchard and I could give them to our livestock

Happy apple eating pigs.

Apple munching  ponies.

The pygmy goats 🐐 loved their 🍎 🍎. 

Wheelbarrow of windfall apples.  

It's been a great year for fruit, vegetables and 💐flowers.

 

 

Homemade 🌭 Hotdogs.

 Another snacky post or: "What We Had For Our Tea Last Night!"

Our homemade hotdogs 🌭  made with our organic homegrown Japanese onions 🌰. 

A jar of cheap Bratwurst Lidl sausages, hot dog rolls, onion, mustard and tomato sauce.  Very nice.  Quick and easy.  Perhaps I should get a hot dog van and paint "Dave's Dogs" on it?

I could go to rock festivals and charge a 🤴 ransom or  a "tenner" for one of my hotdogs and listen to the music?

I watched Robert Plant at Cropredy festival on You Tube at the weekend.  I went last year and in 2022.  He's still got an amazing voice.

I never got to see Led Zep but I did see Jimmy Page play at: Monsters Of Rock festival once.

Hope you like the tune?  

I wonder what other snacky snacks we can come up with?  Vinegar butties, banana 🍌 butties..🤔

Growing Beetroot Vegetables Which Are Really Swiss Chard.

 You know how "Algarve' and "Portugal " my beloved polytunnels plastic were ripped and torn by the Atlantic gales?

We still haven't got round to building my new sturdy potting shed/man cave yet.

I bought quite a few of our vegetable seedlings in trays from a garden centre up in  County Kerry.  Their vegetable plantss are excellent.

Unfortunately they had not labelled the seedlings and veg plants.  I had even remembered to bring my Lidl reading glasses with me

Old Clever Clogs (me) jumped in with my size 11 boots and picked what I thought (" I taught I saw a puddy tat") were beetroot.

I have been watching them growing with caution and wondering why no beetroots were not forming under the leaves?🤔

I was weeding the repurposed plastic tanks yesterday and the penny finally dropped:

"They're Swiss chard".

Yes I know they are related to each other in the vegetable family.  Same factory, different department:

Swiss chard with some Nasturtiums invaders.

Anyone else grow Swiss chard?  Do you eat it raw or cook it?  I believe it's a good idea to cut out the hard spine before cooking or eating it?

Snacky Time.

 I am a great believer that the sun feeds you when it's so hot like this fabulous summer.  I have never known a summer so good.

We have a big Kenwood Chef mixing bowl of new potatoes waiting to be ate.  But it's just too hot and we much prefer snacks like corned beef toasties.

I have blogged  about the Kenwood Chef stainless steel  bowl before.  I bought it for a pound on a car boot sale twenty five years ago and we still use it every week.  Especially for collecting new potatoes from the veg plot.  There are still plenty left for me to dig.

Of course I am using our home grown onions and lettuce to accompany the corned beef and toast:

What I had for my tea last night.

What's your favourite snack at the moment?

Do you hear yourself saying:

"It's far too hot 🔥 for 🥔 potatoes. "

"Is it hot or is it me?"

Here's a little bossanova tune to go with this post:

Leeks Growing In A Fym Filled Cut Down IBC Tank.

 I went out this hour to pick one of my Redina lettuces for a corned beef toasty for our tea.

I noticed my leeks growing in a cut down IBC tank.  They seem to be absolutely flying it.  

The docks and weeds outside the tanks seem to also be flourishing   My raised beds have drilled drainage  holes and no doubt the soil nutrients feed the weeds.  If the weeds don't  grow.  Nothing will grow.

I am so pleased with our repurposed plastic tanks filled with fym and planted with organic bought vegetables.

One often praises clay plant pots.  I rarely see any over here.  I am starting to praise plastic pots and containers.   I think they warm up the growing medium and the veg plants flourish.  Have you had similar thoughts?

We harvested one of our first leeks the other day.  It tasted wonderful.  You can pick stuff young and fresh when you grow your own.

The vegetable sugars have not got old and turned into starches like a lot of supermarket old vegetables.

I definitely think the better the depth of soil.  The better the vegetable grows.

A Gunnera And A Tree Fern Growing Here On The Irish Riviera.

 I spotted this Tasmanian tree fern and this Chilean Gunnera growing side by side in a garden on our peninsula in the south west of Ireland.

We live on the Gulf Stream and it is remarkable what will grow in such a mild climate.

Tree ferns or man ferns go for astronomical prices.  You can buy small ones for about 30 Euros.  

If you go to Kells over on the ring of Kerry there is a tree fern forest, garden centre and their head gardener recently won a gold at Chelsea flower show.   I think they also " put you up" or accommodate you even and there's a restaurant.  I have been there once and featured it here on my humble blog.  Way back in 2015.  It's  on my blog search.

The tree ferns were originally used for convict ship ballast returning to Blighty after dropping off deportees in Van Diemen's Land.  The ships returning were empty so they cut down tree ferns and used them for ballast for the long sea journey back to Falmouth.

On return.  They threw the plants into the bay and some people planted them in their estate gardens.  Amazingly they grew and have aerial roots and people started collecting them.

Gunnera originate in Chile and Brazil.  They look like giant rhubarb and their leaves and stalks go brown in Autumn and they do not like frost.  Fuschia is also a Chile native and it grows profusely here in West Cork.  I have also seen growing happily in Devon and Cornwall. 

It was good to see to two plants from different continents growing side by side.

Would you have them in your garden?  I would love a tree fern.

Topping Up The Repurposed Oil Tanks/Raised Beds With FYM.

One of my tv gardener heroes was Geoffrey Smith and I often still watch his gardening videos on good old YouTube.  Here are two gardening quotes by him:

"Put the brown end in the soil, the green end above it , and you're in with a much better chance."

"If I am depressed,  or I think the world's  a filthy place, I just go and look at a flower".

Geoffrey like myself came from Northern England and he believed in hard graft and forking over the ground and leaving the rough clods for the Winter frosts and rain to break them down and make lovely friable soil.

My gardening digging habits have evolved to the Irish climate.  Ireland gets its fair share of gales and very wet winters.  But we rarely get the snow and frost like they get in the north of England.

I am 62 this December and I still grow some crops like new potatoes in the ground.  But in recent times I have been repurposing containers like plastic baths, heating oil tanks, Belfast sinks, rear wheel tractor tyres, mussel and fish crates and IBC tanks...

They give me a lot deeper depth of growing medium and I am gardening at waist or knee height.  I am not no dig and I climb on top of them and dig them over after a crop is harvested. 

The weather is very good this spring and summer.  I took the black plastic cover off the dung heap and filled up my weeding big bucket 🪣(tree plant pot) with fym and filled up some of my vacant plastic raised beds:

Topped up raised beds.  Already for next spring.  The fym contained a lot of fat juicy brandlings worm.  They reminded me of coarse fishing days when I would use such worms 🪱 to lure Perch and other fish to the hook.  

Fishermen are the watchdogs of our waters and gardeners and allotment holders monitor the soil.  The worms will take the fym down into the soil.  I could cover them up with plastic but I will allow the rain to add nitrogen and wash the goodness from the fym into the soil.

I have had great harvests this year in my repurposed raised beds.  You don't  need to have a garden or allotment just some containers to grow your veg and some muck and magic.

Anyone else making use of the fine weather and getting their veg plot topped up with fym and ready for spring?

"A Nice Cup Of Tea In The Morning".

 Rosie having a 'nice'cup of tea.

Rosie is the mother of Bronte my faithful Golden Retriever and walking repurposed railway lines pal.

I have been mad busy working this week and have not had much time to blog.  I hope the photo makes you smile?

I have never been much of a tea drinker.  I prefer 'real' coffee ☕️ in a cafetiere first thing in the morning.

When I lived in the north West of England we would go to Levenshulme in Manchester to a Irish grocers and bring home Barry's tea from Cork and red lemonade.

I remember my holidays here in Ireland and my dad and my my brother and me would try to pike hay on to the cart and chase rabbits and my grandma and my mother would come down the fields with currant cake and bottles of cold tea in a sock.  It was great for quenching your thirst.

I still prefer coffee than tea.

Homemade Plant Cuttings Storage Box Propagator.

I made or repurposed a plastic storage box to get my shrub cuttings to root and keep them in a moist and humid environment 

Propagator with lid on.

I took the lid off a week since planting the Hydrangea cuttings in sand.  They are still moist and don't need watering.

The box cost me nothing and it's now a cuttings greenhouse.

It holds ten small plant pots of cuttings.

August is a good month for taking shrub cuttings like Hydrangeas.

It's been a wonderful year for flowers in particular.  Why not take some cuttings of your favourite shrubs?

 

More Carboot Sale Treasure.

 We were not happy bunnies after our poor plant sales on Saturday. But we still decided to go car booting.  

One needs Womble retail therapy.

Here's some of the things we purchased.  I haven't photographed everything though:

Two Victorian brass candle sticks. I paid 7 Euros fifty for them.  I have eight of them now me thinks?  Did you need them Dave?  No but could I leave them and walk away?  No!

The book is full of fabulous sacred sites in 🇮🇪 Ireland.  I have visited some of them especially in Sligo.  It's also the personal spiritual journey of the author.

The photos are brilliant.  It's more of a browse flick through kind of book for somebody like me with little reading 📚 patience at the moment.  

I would rather read blogs or browse and surf the Internet.  I am sure I will read it proper in the long dark nights from mid August to April. 

A travel bag for personal documents like my Irish passport and money and note books...  I paid five Euros for it.  My old one is looking shabby and the zip sticks.

I bought the Phil Lynott book for 2 Euros.  I already have one book about him.  Thin Lizzy are one of my top two favourite Heavy Rock bands along with Kansas and I remember seeing Phil and the lads when I was just 17.  Lizzy were brilliant and I am always playing their records.

Lastly I bought a mountain bike for me to occasionally go for a cycle on the repurposed greenways that I often write about on here.  I paid 35 Euros for it.

That's the same amount I got for my plants the day before!  Hey my plants paid for my bike.

Serependipity or what?🤔

A Van Full Of Plants.

We loaded up our little van and we went carbooting over the Irish bank holiday weekend with my shrubs and perennials that I have lovingly propagated myself.

Not Van Morrison but a van full of some plants😀👍.

I have always believed everyone should be able to afford to buy plants and have a nice garden.  

Or even be like the old gardeners of old or myself.  

Gardening doesn't need to cost money just tlc and lots of your time!  I only sell my plants  cheap.  The average price was only 2.50.

We got up at 5.30 on Saturday morning, paid our ten Euros pitch and took only 45 Euros.  Which is only 35 Euros if you take off the ten Euros pitch fees.  Forgetting about diesel ⛽️ and our breakfasts.

We met some wonderful people and had some great chats and I gave a few of my veg and plant growing tips and talked about my repurposed raised beds and baths. J sat knitting and had lots of conversations about knitting and showed ladies her many photos of her knitting work.  She made a few contacts for knitting patterns and wool..

It was a enjoyable morning but disappointing plant sales yet again.  Perhaps next time I will have a mixed bag of car boot treasure and just a few crates of plants?

We didn't go plant selling on Sunday.  We did travel to two carboot sales.  I will post what we bought in another post.

Did you go carbooting selling or buying at the weekend?

After the lockdown it's good to go to a carboot sale and chat and sell some of my plants and help raise some funds for a good cause.

Repurposed Planters.

 I spotted these planters outside a supermarket the other day in Kerry:

Sheep or calf nuts troughs looking elegant and filled with seasonal bedding plants.

A wheelbarrow with a flat tyre.  The Ancient Chinese invented this physics defying gravity one wheel contraption.  It looks very nice full of bedding plants.

Note to author of this blog.  Must source new secondhand wheelbarrow.  Yours is on it's  last legs or wheel even.  Far too much carrying fym, concrete blocks and concrete and compost and top soil!

Don't plants brighten up the dullest of containers?

Old Worlde Tools At The Carboot Sale.

 

Farm and turf cutting tools from yester year.

I always look at what tools are for sale at the carboot sales.

I immediately recognised the potato 🥔 fork on the right.  It's got steel baubles on the bottom of the fork tines.  This prevents the potato digger from puncturing the new potatoes.  I often put my fork through them.

The man wanted 40 Euros for it.  I wanted the potato fork very much but I wasn't paying that for it.

Next to the potato 🥔 fork is a slain.  That was or can be used for digging peat or ' turf' they call it here in Ireland.

The slasher with the long handle was used for cutting brambles and briars.  

All very useful tools that require hard physical work.

Dropping Off Piglets And A Walk On A Beach.

 We headed over to Kerry to drop two piglets of ours off to the Maharees in between Brandon Bay and Tralee Bay.

Our piglets over look Bantry Bay and now they have gone to the seaside in County Kerry.

I have featured the Maharees on here before it's a sand dune peninsula scattered with houses and winding boreens, pubs and caravan parks.  

I have camped there a few years ago when we walked a lot of the Dingle Way.  One stretch of the beach from Cloghane to Camp was 12 miles long sand.

After settling in the piglets in their straw bed we set off back and stopped at a little beach on the Maharees.

Bronte went for a run and a swim.

All that seaweed strewn along the beach.  My veggies would love all that natural fertilizer for free.

Bronte having the time of her life.

Nasturtiums growing amongst the rocks protecting the road from the heavy tides in winter.

Straw bales waiting to be collected in the fields.  They looked like they had been there a while.

There are so many virtually empty beaches in Ireland.  Far away from the madding crowd.