Pleasant Growing Days.

 It's the darling buds of May in April this week.  The veg plots and gardens are loving it:

The new veg plot extension where the lawn was.

On the right hand of the plot I have planted shrubs and perennials that I propagated myself.  

There are phormiums, Shasta Daisies, Geraniums, Roses, Fuchsia, Pheasant Berry, Hydrangeas, Hebes and Hydrangeas..  It's  pleasing to know that I can grow plants 🪴 without buying them.  Not forgetting Mother Nature's help of course.  

No sign of repurposed oil tanks or second hand baths yet!  There are more potatoes 🥔 and other vegetables on the left.

My perennials and shrubs carboot sale nursery and potatoes 🥔 growing at the top of the picture. You can also see my big pile of fym covered up with black plastic. 

We sold my polytunnel frame and are going to make a glass house/potting shed/writing/reading/supping room.

I turn on my oscillating hosepipe sprinkler four times a day.  I turn off the tap and move the hosepipe to its  next watering position.  It was a brilliant investment for 4 Euros for the plastic sprinkler from Dealz or Poundland in England.

It must be the best Spring I have known in Ireland this year.  After four years of record breaking winter rainfall.  It's about time the weather picked up.

Leeks And Onions Growing In Their Second Hand Repurposed Beds.

 

Leeks and Japanese onions after I hand weeded them yesterday.

Once again my repurposed baths and plastic oil tanks prove to me that you do not need to have a veg plot or allotment to grow your veggies.  All you need is a container to grow them in.  You could even grow them on concrete?  

Don't worry about allotment  waiting lists.  Get yourself some second hand plastic oil tanks or baths!

They are flying it with mixed sunny and rainy April weather plus constant hand weeding and liberal top dressing them with the pelleted chicken manure.

Some of the leeks look they are about to grow flower heads and go to seed.  I could let them and collect the seed to sow next year.  But I won't I will buy some.

Any one got any good leek recipes please?  We have made lots of potato and leek soup this year:

Leek and potatoes soup with homemade soda 🍞. 

Multiplying Our Phormium Tenax.

 Along with Griselina.  Phormiums are often seen especially in coastal gardens here in West Cork and Kerry.  They  are natives of New Zealand but they seem to do well in the mild West Cork climate.

Here's one I made by division a couple of years ago:

It's a nice variegated specimen.

They make nice ornamental and architectural plants.  They have leathery leaves which don't mind the salt laden wind and rains that we get in our coastal gardens.

Maoris in New Zealand use to make ropes and sewed with them.

April is a good time to divide them like I did yesterday in the relentless rain:

I managed to make 3 new plants.  All for free and used the old trusty bread knife to divide and prize them apart.

I have seen similar plants for sale online from 15 Euros upwards.

 I have been selling them at car boot sales for 5 Euros.

My rainy day plant propagation will reward me for my efforts one day.

I usually leave them to establish and wait for the roots to grow out of the drainage holes in the plant pots.

I might even keep them for nursery plants and plant them in the gardens and divide them every April when it's showery and getting warmer.

Anyone else dividing their Phormiums?

When Your Cat Thinks It's Watching Washing Machine Television.

 

It's always washing machine advert repeats on here!"

Silver Tiger 🐈  likes to watch the washing go round and round.  Especially when it's on the 15 minute Quick Wash cycle.

Japanese Winter Onions.

My Japanese or winter onions 🌰 have swelled greatly with the couple of weeks sunshine 🌞 and now all the April showers and a deluge like yesterday.

I swear by the bucket of poultry manure:

 

"It's a beauty".

It's weed free and full of nitrogen and the plants and vegetables love it.  It's a lot easier to sprinkle than piking and wheelbarrowing fym.  Hungry vegetables like onions need lots of feeding.

I have a big pile of fym all piled up and covered with a black plastic tarpaulin.  I will start spreading it on the soil surface in September and let the worms 🪱 and winter rains take it down.   

Remember the winter onions sets we planted last September?  Some of them are ready to harvest and we will plant something in their place like leafy greens like lettuce, spinach or cabbage.

Don't Call The Rain When The Potato Stalks Are Pushing Through The Soil.

 I covered up my new spudatoes stalks on Bank Holiday Monday.

Then along came the rain and they pushed their plant hands through the soil:

Unbelievable.  A tad bit of soft rain and they are under starters orders.

Mother Nature seems to have had a good sleep and she's tearing to go.

I hope old Jack Frost and the wife don't put in a return.  Potatoes 🥔 🥔 are supposed to grow in the Andes in Peru.  Not on the south side of Bantry Bay in Ireland.

Are your potatoes chewing at the bit?

That pelleted poultry manure seems to have done the trick!

Red Hot Pokers Flowering In A Aldi Carpark.

 Red Hot Pokers. Or Kniphofias if you want their botanical name.

I was putting my two bags of potting compost into the back of our little van the other day and noticed these plants flowering in the landscaped beds of the supermarket car park.

I was most taken back and thought they only flowered in the height of summer. So I wandered over and took the photo on my mobile phone for yours and my perusal dear readers.

Apparently not.  They can flower from March to September and originate in Africa.  Rather like the wild Montbretia that is a garden invazive and also from Africa and you see it growing everywhere here in Ireland.

Perhaps it's because we live on the Gulf Stream that we saw Red Hot Pokers flowering here in April?

They made my day anyway! Hope they make yours?

Shrub Divisions.

 Pheasant Berry.

You can divide shrubs in the same way that you divide perennials. 

Just get the old trusty bread knife 🔪 and cut them in two.

Then pot them up in compost or topsoil.  

This typical showery April weather is perfect for dividing plants at this time of year.

It's a good way of getting new plants for free.

I bought two bags of John Innes based compost from Aldi on Monday.   It's 4.49 a bag and soil based.  

They should keep me quiet for a few hours making new 🪴 plants 🪴. 

It's much better than the cheap stuff which is nothing more than crushed bark or coir and forms a crust on the surface when it dries out.

Anyone else dividing their shrubs and plants at the moment?

Easter Marillion Yet Again Folks!

 The second showing of this video this year on here and the second Easter prog record .  I will be seeing Marillion again in September in Cornwall.  Please God.

It will be my third time of seeing them.  Last time we saw them at The Night Of The Prog Festival at Loreley in Germany in 2017.  I also saw my old mate Fish again at A New Day Festival in 2019 I think?

I hope they play some of the Fish stuff like Script.., Misplaced  Childhood  or Clutching At Straws.

The video is wonderful and so so rural and quintessentially Irish.  See you tomorrow:

Easter Day Prog Rock.

 Happy Easter everyone.

Probably my favourite prog rock  band is Kansas.  The band from Topeka in Kansas who came from a little place and made the big time.  It literally was a story of miracles out of nowhere.

I have often recalled on here that I finally got to see them when I was 50 in 2014.

Since my teenage years I had played their records over and over again and always lit a candle in my bucket list to see them.

Sure enough after over thirty years waiting I finally got to see them in Warsaw, Poland 🇵🇱. 

Thanks to the amazing technology that is at our finger tips like good old YouTube I found a video of that concert.

It's called Portrait.  Apparently Kerry Livgren wrote about Albert Einstein but on converting to Christianity he changed it to be about Jesus.

Enjoy the video and the Easter day and bank holiday:

I was there.

Why don't you have a look for concerts you attended and post them on your blog?

Rainy Day Suit Gardening.

 Monsoon season looks it's returned to the British Isles and to put the tin hat on it.  It is a bank holiday weekend.  Typical isn't it?

My new greenhouse/potting shed is still not at the construction stage yet.  Although we did collect some more materials for free this week.

It's  back to my old time gardening days when I propagate outside in the veg plot at present.

I put on my rainy day suit:  wellingtons waterproofs, anorak, hat and gardening gloves.

Then I find one of my perennials like a Shasta Daisy.  I place it on my garden bench (old kitchen table), take out the plant from it's pot and get my trusty old bread 🔪 and cut it in two.

Shasta Daisy waiting for it's  division.

New plants.

You know the old gardeners mathematical equation:  The only way to mules to divide.

I made twenty new plants like this the other day.  All you do is pot them up with compost or soil and Bob's your uncle!

This rainy weather is perfect for getting out in the garden and making new plants for free.

Heavy Metal Easter (Golgotha).

 It was August 22nd 1987.  We travelled in the back of a packed Ford Transit van to the Monsters Of Rock music festival at Castle Donington in Derbyshire in England.  Incredibly that is 38 years ago.   It seems like another life time.

Bonjovi headlined the festival.  I remember them flying over the biblical multiple of rockers and revellers waving and out of two white helicopters with Bonjovi emblazoned in red on the sides of the helicopters.

WASP were playing at the time  and they seemed annoyed and disgruntled at the helicopter sideshow.

WASP really rocked and played a tight set and played my  favourite song of theirs: " I Wanna Be Somebody".

They were a true archetypal hell raising Rock and Roll band with lost of Anglo Saxon expletives and crude jokes  thrown in.  

Lead singer Blackie Lawless referred to Moses crossing the Red sea and the biblical multitude of the 100,000 plus crowd gathered there that day.

Flash forward to around 2016.  My friend who regular emails me and we go on our annual trip to a Blighty Prog festival and English literature tour. 

 He Informed me that Blackie Lawless had become a Born Again Christian and he recorded an album called Golgotha.  Which means: "The place of the skull".

I watched the following amazing video and it brought home the horror of crucifixion and what Jesus went through on this day:  Good Friday;

Have a great Easter weekend.

Bronte Goes For Another Walk On The Repurposed Railway/Greenway And Shows Her Mum The Way..

 

Rosie and Bronte her daughter and me.

J took this corker of a picture the other day.  

I am leading with Bronte and wearing my new walking/ gardening jacket.  It cost me 4 Euros in a charity  shop and it's  like new. Sometimes you have to put the boat out and splash the cash!😀

We met up with number 2 son and his Golden Retriever Rosie who happens to be Bronte's mum.

He moved out a couple a months ago.  He's 24 and old enough to stand on his own 2 feet.  But I still feel a wee bit sad when he leaves us.  

Goodness knows how parents feel when their children emigrate to far off places like Australia or Scunthorpe?

Any road.  He liked the Greenway.  All 25 million Euros of it.  The jewel in North Kerry and Limerick's jewel in their crown.  "Follow the tarmac road".

He's  going to bring his girlfriend  to see it some time.  He couldn't get over how friendly the walkers, runners and cyclists are greeting each other.  Not to forget how the flat terrain is so easy to walk, run or cycle.

The Greenway draws me back again and again.  There is a lot to be said to be able to walk without cars and traffic.  

The days of walking on the roads where I live have gone and I sometimes feel trapped.  That's the downside of rural living in the twenty first century. 

When I looked at this corker of a photo.  The theme tune from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly began to play in my mental jukebox:

Rusty Donkey Shoe.

Found inside an old wall I was pulling down.

I never find a tin full of Sovereigns or other hidden treasure.  

Don't worry the wall stone is going to be used for the construction  of other walls.

No not Rusty Donkey is not the name of a "Diddly Dee" Ceilidh band.  But it could be.

I found this the other day when I was dismantling an old outhouse building wall.

Me thinks it's a donkey 👞.   I could be wrong.  Could it be for a pony or even a ox?

Answers on a postcard or even in the comments section below please dear readers.

I have brought it in the house and it now resides on our mantlepiece along with our collected treasures..  I hope it brings us some good luck.  

Wasn't I lucky to find the shoe?

Here's a tune to tap your feet to:

Inside The Sedum "Autumn Joy" Pop Bottle Plant Factory.

The Sedums have recovered from their mard softy wither away for winter stage and there are clusters of voluptuous shoots appearing.  I spy new plants.  

All I do is get an old bread knife and split them up.  You don't even need any hormone rooting powder.  

Just pop them in a small plant pot filled with compost and give them a good watering.  Some of them will still have their roots attached.  

Make plant cloches out of plastic bottles.  I repurposed mine last year and use them over again.

They are mini greenhouses and retain moisture and protect vulnerable young veg plants like lettuces from slugs and snails or the "flickers" which I call them.

This really is easy-peasy gardening.

 Here's some I made earlier.  Last year I made a lot of them and propagated lots of cuttings. 

I made 50 Sedum new plants yesterday.  I will make sure they get watered daily until the showers begin this week in earnest. 

In three weeks time there will be 50 rooted Sedum plants 🪴 that cost me nothing.  Just some good potting compost and my time.  

Oh and about half an hour listening to prog rock on Spotify on my mobile phone.  The prog rock listening is not essential but it is to me.😃

I will  probably sell the Sedum plants at a carboot for the bargain price of a Euro each.  I may even pot them on.

I believe anyone can have a nice garden and it doesn't need to cost the earth. Just some compost and some patience is all it takes.  

"It Must Be A Big Baby?"

 It's still knitting season in our little abode in the countryside next to the sea.

I noticed the other night that presumably the baby cardigan was getting rather long?  Perhaps J was knitting without a pattern?

"Say nothing", thinks me.

I heard myself utter:

"It's going to be a big baby isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

The baby cardigan you are knitting".

She started laughing: "It's  not a cardigan you nana.  It's a baby blanket!"

Oh dear.  I got it wrong again.

It's  been a long knitting season.😃

New Young Shrubs.

Shrub cuttings I successfully managed to to "strike" roots last summer.

It's been a fantastic week weather wise and I have been gardening every day.

I feel like I have had another week's holiday already. But here in West Cork instead of the Algarve.

I realised (knew) that I have far too many potted shrubs and perennials and really need to make more vegetable space.

I gave my brother 18 young shrub plants the other day for free.  He's going to top them up with good potting compost and feed them and grow them on in his greenhouse.

I successfully  propagated over fifty shrub cuttings in Autumn.  But you can make soft wood cuttings from Spring and all the way to Autumn when you can make soft and hardwood cuttings going into Winter.

In my photo there are Hydrangea,Hypericum and Fuschia shrubs.

I might chance a few crates of them at a carboot sale at the weekend.  It's forecast twenty percent rain.  The plants will like the rain but the punters might not?

I am sure I will find somewhere to plant them in the gardens or sell them again some time.

Why do car boot sales start so early in the morning?  Why can't  they start later and go on all afternoon?

Do you grow your own plants from cuttings?

"Am I Turning Into Eric Olthwaite?"

 I bought this spade at the carboot sale on Sunday;

A really "interesting" new spade

In Ingerland or Blighty they call this spade/shovel a " Grafter" in the building trade.  They were used by navvies to dig trenches for pipes and cables etc.  

It is quite old and I paid ten Euros for it,  I said to man: " It's a cracker". I sounded like Frank Carson if I had an Irish accent? Well he did live in Blackpool didn't he?🤔

I want the spade/shovel for planting shrubs.  It's such the right weight and strength for the job.  I think I could be turning into Eric Olthwaite:

 

Do you ever buy a tool that feels the right weight and just perfect for the job?  I am not talking about a jemmy for a cat burglar.

Isn't Michael Palin a national treasure? So was Anita Carey who played Eric's sister.  I loved her in: " I Didn't Know You Cared"

Making The Most Of The Dry Weather To Weed The Repurposed Raised Beds.

I think the true April showers begin this weekend and we won't  need to water our newly planted vegetables every day.

So I took the dry weather opportunity to hand weed the repurposed plastic oil drums and baths.  I used a little hand fork to dig over the soil after I had weeded them:

Leeks happily growing in the deep soil and fym filled raised beds.  

The plant beds are ex heating oil tanks that I cut in half and drilled drainage holes in them.  I don't think I will ever need to replace them unlike wooden raised beds.

Knee height or waist high gardening is the way to go for elderly gardeners and deep soil and fym filled beds give good drainage and depth for the vegetables roots systems.

Weeds appearing in the soil is a good indicator that it is warm enough to plant and sow and get good germination.

The last week's weather is like the darling buds of May when everything is in bloom.

I am really enjoying the great weather.  I just hope we don't  pay for it with a wet summer.

Are you busy weeding and sowing and planting in your veg plot or allotment?

Like I often write on here.  Contai er gardening  makes it possible to grow vegetables without the need of a veg plot or allotment.  You grow them even in a concrete yard.

There is still plenty of time to plant your spudatoes..

Old Cow Milk Jug Carboot Sale Find.

 Old cow milk jug ornament.

I presume you pour milk into the hole in its back and pour it out through the hole in its mouth?🤔

There are no makers marks under the cow.  Perhaps it is foreign?  Its definitely very old and another piece of pottery to add to our ever groaning shelves.

It was cold morning and you never know what you will find.

I much prefer browse buying than trying to sell stuff.  It was a lovely spring day.

Digging Over And Weeding A Veg Plot For A Nonagerian Vegetable Gardener.

 I know an elderly man in his early nineties who phones me on his mobile phone every year and asks me to dig over his veg plot on his smallholding a few miles from me.

He covered up the plot in March with great builders plastic sheeting and he rang me again this week to remove the plastic and dig it over and get it ready for planting.

I duly agreed to get up and carry out the task the next morning:

Just starting digging off any vegetation and digging over the plot.

Me digging over the plot.  There is a grass strip around the plot.

All dug over and ready to be planted.

The man told me he would never be able to carry on gardening if it wasn't for me digging it over and getting it ready for him.

I said: "Horses for courses".  We both agreed.

I went away in awe of someone who believes in keeping fit and active and doesn't use chemicals and grows naturally.  What an amazing gentleman.

They have put poultry bedding and manure on the veg plot for over twenty years.  I can honestly say I have never worked such nicer and friable soil.

I hope I am still active and gardening in my nineties.  Perhaps being 61 is still young? Apparently I am in the 60-69 young, old category.

Enjoy the sun this weekend and your garden or allotment?

Garden Drystone Wall Making And Planting Up With My Homegrown Perennials.

 I spent four days helping build some garden walls.  There was 3 of us constructing them with the help of a 3 ton digger to dig out the stones and topsoil and put any large stones into place.  Here's  a photo of one part of the wall:

A brand new drystone wall that looks like it's been there for hundreds of years.

It was backbreaking work yet it was worth it.  My builder friend should take the credit for most of the construction but I did fill every stone layer with stones and soil and laboured and shovelled all day.

Number one son mainly drove the digger bringing big stones and topsoil to us.

One day last week I got up at 6.30 in the morning and filled up our vehicle with plastic crates of my shrubs and perennials that I have grown and propagated myself.

I spent the morning planting shrubs, applying bark and planting the tops of the wall with Sedums, Geraniums, Osteospermums, ajuga..

It was four days hard work.  But when you stand back and admire our work I think we have created something natural and a beauty.

That was a political broadcast on behalf of the unofficial Drystone Wall Society UK and Eire.

A Bucket Of Poultry Manure For The Vegetables.

 A new brand to me but still the same stuff!

Being an organic or natural gardener.  I don't use man-made chemicals on the veg plot.  

I had a big pile of fym but it got spread over a stony area of a field to make top soil and eventually more pasture.

We have a big pile of this year's fym but it's far too fresh to use until Autumn.

So I purchased a bucket of poultry manure for 15 Euros at the weekend from a garden centre.  

I spread the poultry manure pellets on the onions, cabbages and potatoes 🥔 that we have recently planted.

It's smelly stuff and I would  recommend you wear gardening gloves when handling it.  It's  a lot easier than piking and barrowing tons of fym.

That's a job for the Autumn.

Does anyone else use poultry manure pellets?  Do you like them and do give your plants all the minerals and vitamins they require?