Testing lab

A large percentage of the flowers that I grow and sell are not the kind of flowers that are grown commercially as cut flowers. You will not find them in most florist shops, you cannot look them up in Alan Armitage's reference book on growing cut flowers. There are no DEFRA or USDA figures on yield, vase life or post-harvest treatment.

This is why I have my very low tech testing lab - a row of old glass bottles on the dining room mantlepiece. The site is typical of a house - not in full sun but open to the steam of the kitchen - the bottles are filled with plain tap water and the flowers get no special treatment bar searing where necessary.

For a flower to pass the test it has to last a week.

As I type this we have Gladiolus byzantium, (a small pink gladioli I first saw in the meadow at Great Dixter), Allium christophii; Briza media, (my favourite small grass), Briza maxima, (beautiful but a nightmare to pick); flag iris (which are just going to squeak it to a week I think), wild oats and a bright orange Iceland poppy.

It is an essential part of the process - to let the customer know how best to treat the flowers when they get them home. The gladioli for example will need a bit of flower food and a pinch of sugar in the water to give it the energy to open right up to the top of its spire.

The odd side effect is that this ever changing parade of individual bottles is quite my favourite thing in the house.

Poppies

Every year - at exactly this time - I write a post about poppies.

Every year - at exactly this time - I am overwhelmed by their beauty.

We live in a house that isn't exactly as I would like it to be - when we bought it, it was a typical 1980s farmers bungalow - built as an economical tied house with straight blocky lines, aluminium windows and hardboard doors. We are gradually changing it but it often feels, with our painted chipboard floors and complete lack of storage space, as if we are still a long way away.

The relevance of this to the poppies is this. I think the magic of having cut flowers in a house, and what separates them out from houseplants, is that they change from day to day. The doyennes of this are poppies and tulips and to my mind this makes them the very best of cut flowers.

The top photo is of our living room - with a crock of poppies taken straight from the shop and plonked in the middle of the coffee table. Every time I go into the room it is the poppies I see, more have come out into full flower, some are just ready to burst, darker yellow amongst the bright mass of the open flowers. This somehow stops me noticing or minding so much the piles of junk that are scattered in corners, the discarded sweet wrapper on the settee. If the flowers didn't change so much they wouldn't be so distracting.


Poppies are also one of the most difficult flowers to sell. Most people's experience of poppies in a vase is picking some open red corn poppies on a walk and having them wilt and shed before they are even home. I often end up giving them away the first time and then people come back to buy more.

How to pick poppies - this works with all varieties bar opium poppies, the ones with the giant seedhead.
1. Put the kettle on
2. Pick in bud when you can see the coloured petals shining through, like the ones right at the left of this photo.
3. Put straight into a bucket of water.
4. Take into the house, cut to the length you want the finished flowers, pour 1" of just boiled water into a mug and put the stem ends into it. Count to 5.
5. Put straight into a vase of water and put somewhere cool for an hour.
6. Arrange. If you have to recut the stems sear them again.

They should last a week if you put the vase out of direct sunlight and away from strong draughts

Our woodpecker - at last

Well this is the best I could do - the woodpeckers (there are 2 of them it turns out) are rather shy and the merest zoom of a lens send them flying back down the valley to the wood.

Here he is caught pecking at the monkey nuts hanging from one of our plant supports in the border.

These nut rings have been brilliant - they last for ages as the birds have to work to get their food.

All change

We moved all the chickens to the 2nd field today into a fruit cage - the idea is that they can become a bit more free ranging in a week or so - being let out of the cage to potter about in the long grass during the day and returning to safety of their house at night.

In the short term the netted cage will also stop the buzzard and Minou attacking this gorgeous fluffy chick while still allowing it to socialise with the rest of the hens. As you can see it is still very much with its two "mothers".



Cuddles our rabbit who thinks it is a chicken cannot accompany them to their summer housing - he would just disappear off into the wild I think - so he is now in the old chicken ark awaiting an intense re-socialising programme to get him used to being petted again. Then, when we get the new guinea pigs (soft touch Mummy!) he may or may not be housed with them depending on whether they all get on without fighting.

We have just been outside watching a woodpecker (greater spotted we think) feeding on the peanut rings - he was frightened off by the sound of the zoom lens so we don't have a photo but shall lie in wait over the next week.

A different scale.

One of the things that bothers me about the cut flower industry is how, over the past couple of decades, we have become conditioned to buy what is most convenient for the large scale producers and importers.

90% of the flowers available to buy in the supermarket or florist shop conform to the size which will fit easily into a standard florist package box - smallish head, long straight stem. This cuts costs right down all along the production line from mechanised growing, spraying and harvesting to a certain number of boxes fitting onto a pallet or into a refrigerated van.

What has been lost is a sense of different scales - whether that is eight feet tall plume poppies or miniature astrantia - if it doesn't fit into the system you are unlikely to be able to get it. The most convenient is rarely also the most appropriate or attractive.

One of the flowers shops that I have come across via Amy Stewart's site is the Bonny Doon Garden Company which addresses this, producing a range of posies - many of which fit into a teacup like the one in the photo. I think that these are an ideal solution for those occasions when you want to send flowers - say to celebrate the birth of a baby - but know that the recipient will be inundated with flowers. An arrangement like this - our one is an an elegant C19th gold and white cup - can fit next to a bedside, comes ready arranged so it won't need another vase, and when the flowers fade there will be something left, a beautiful cup which will perhaps become a family heirloom. This one sold on Friday but I usually have a range available from £11.50 at the van, from £16.50 delivered within a 12 mile radius. They are also available as table centres for weddings and parties for when a "village fete" kind of feel is required - it is one way of getting a pretty vintage tea set, though I also loan the cups and saucers out.

I always feel sad when I see so many bunches of flowers propped in sinks or even just left on kitchen work surfaces as there are just no more vases to put flowers in.

Hanging baskets

I have never really made up hanging baskets - there was nowhere to hang them except in the tunnel while they had to be under cover and the thought of banging my head on them while I tended everything else didn't really appeal.

This year I made an exception and made up a few - largely to decorate the greenhouse and make it look generous and full. I went for large sized baskets with good compost and moisture retaining granules to make maintenance more possible. I planted them up in mid April and over the past 5 weeks they have really thrived and bulked up. Now they areready to fly the nest.

It is now the right time to put out summer bedding in Central Scotland - there is not such a drastic temperature swing between day and night and there is only a very slim chance of late frosts.

The hanging baskets have proved to be very useful as presents for men - this photo shows a basket delivered yesterday as a birthday present. It is an elegant mix of silver leaves and white and blue trailing plants. With deadheading and regular watering it should last until the autumn frosts.


These violas are at the door of the greenhouse - they cheer me up every time I pass them.

Updating the website

This afternoon has been drizzly so I have finally put down my hoe and got around to updating some things on the website. I have put up a few more of my Mum's ever popular chicken paintings - these cost about £2.00 to pack and post, and they are ideal for chicken lovers. She is busy working on paintings for a series of exhibitions in East Lothian so I suspect that these are going to be all I can manage to prise of her for the next month or so.

This photo is of Treela, an Isla Brown and our cheekiest chicken. Today I found her in our bathroom, perched on the side of the bath. Neither cats no dogs bother her at all when she is in the house.

I also finished the felted/embroidered cushions and put together some kits.

I have loved making these cushions - they are the ideal work to do in the evenings either outside watching the sunset or inside watching the t.v. The cushions have turned out even better than I thought they would - I was determined not to produce anything that looked like anybody else's, I wanted to make something that looked vintage but not derivative. I hope that I have succeeded. I am not going to be able to produce many though so they are strictly limited editions.

The most uncool post ever!

I have finally got around to buying another copy of Adam Nicolson's book Perch Hill.

I bought my original copy in 1999 or 2000 as part of what Euan refers to as my "stalking" of Nicolson's wife the garden writer Sarah Raven. As far as I can make out, this alleged "stalking" consisted of knowing that she has a cottage on the Sound of Mull, meeting her accidentally a couple of times and buying this book which is about their move to Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex. Perhaps I wittered on a bit as well!

It is at its core one of those "daft city types moving to the country" books, but it is really much more - it chimes with my experience of the seasons, the drive to burrow into a valley, the chill spare reality of mud as well as meadows, the idea that you have to commit to an ideal - Nicolson's "Bright field" - with everything you have.

It is one of the books I re-read regularly. Or at least I did, until I lost it. I know what will have happened - I have a bad habit of forcing people to read books I enjoy, pressing volumes on them as they leave the house. Of course I never get them back and I lose most of my favourite books that way. Now I have it back in my shelves again and have already started the reread.

New Chick

The other excitement on my birthday was the arrival of this little yellow ball of fluff. Unfortunately it was the only one of the eggs that hatched and the rest seem to have been infertile. I am also unsure about what type it is - one bantam and one normal egg have disappeared and there were no shell traces to identify which egg hatched. We shall have to wait and see.

To be honest I am quite glad that we didn't have a mass hatching - I love the whole waiting to see thing and we don't want too many hens - if we could increase our wee flock by 1 or 2 a year that would probably be ideal. We don't rely on selling eggs or hens and they are a kind of garden pet, so it also nice to be able to identify each one individually.

It also stops there being any gender problems - we don't have a cockerel at the moment and are happy to have one so it doesn't matter which sex the ball of fluff is - However we would not have been able to keep 2, 3 or 4 cockerels and would have had to dispatch them sooner rather than later as they are not a meat variety. There isn't a great demand for cockerels as everyone has spares. It isn't a position I relish and is the only down side to hatching.

I have just moved the chick into our ark so that it can venture outside without the dangers of crows or cats carting it off. I have put the 2 broody marans in with it as they seem to be taking turns in chick minding anyway. This morning my stomach lurched as I couldn't find it under the hen that hatched it - fortunately I heard the cheep cheep cheep coming from under the broody hen in the other corner.

This evening I shall tell Katie that it has been born - she will want to handle it and a 3 day chick is a lot more robust than a 1 day chick.

1707 and all that . . .

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 plates, thinking that they would be wonderful for weddings - church candles grouped on the plates, flowers arranged in the goblets.

So when I got a 1707 theme I knew exactly what I wanted to do - loose meadow type flowers - all introduced pre 1707, many native to Scotland and Sweden. I also wanted to make it yellow, blue and white, alluding to the Scottish and Swedish flags. The table centres are pictured above - the goblets are taped in a fine grid of waterproof tape and then hellebores, alliums, pig nuts, columbines and buttercups are arranged as upright as possible. When I delivered them yesterday I was told they looked "just like a Swedish meadow".

I also made a rococo arrangement of grapes, sweet rocket and wisteria (wisteria was actually another 100 years in arriving but visually it worked so well I cheated) and a candlestick draped in grapes and golden hop.

The party had a lot of effort put into the detailing - I am sure it was a fantastic night.

Seduced by sewing threads

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 shown half sewn above. I might put it on the website.

Obviously I can't spend all my time embroidering flowers so I am considering putting together kits with everything to make the cushions - embroidery, hoop, vintage linen, cushion cover, silks and buttons etc. I am not sure whether there is a market though. Feedback would be appreciated.

New home for Tim . . .

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.

One of those tedious posts about blogging . . .

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. I must say that I don't personally e-mail many commenters, I tend to try to reply on my posting but I am aware that that is flawed as I know that I often forget exactly where I have posted a comment and rarely go back to see if there is a reply. I do visit commenters sites and if someone e-mails me I will reply.

One of the great things to happen recently is the Country Living Rebel bloggers. As you know, Country Living had a blogging competition to find a new columnist. It was handled very badly - I think as no-one in charge of the site had an idea about the community aspect of blogging. To make blogging competitive sort of misses the point. Then the site was very slow, difficult to upload photographs, and, as more bloggers joined, posts often only appeared on the main site for a couple of minutes before disappearing into the archives.

The thing that was beneficial though was that it encouraged people to begin blogging and many of them are fantastic writers - approaching blogging from a thoughtful, literary angle which makes for a lovely read.

The CL competition shortlist was again handled rather badly, it turned out to be people who had really submitted short articles rather than consistent blogging. This annoyed the regular committed contributors so much that they jumped ship. I am really glad as it makes it much easier to access the blogs without having to go through the rigmarole of the CL site - they can all be found at Children, Chocolate and Wine.

foraging for food

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 involves a deal of cream and a good chicken stock (and we don't kill our chickens).

As I took my lunch outside to photograph yesterday everyone was (quite justifiably) laughing hysterically. Euan thinks this blogging thing has got out of hand if I, a very greedy person, is putting aesthetics before eating.

A busy day

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 by Maria Casteel in aid of a nursery she is trying to set up in her native Guatemala. The company was great - many of the same faces as the fun day, but this time glammed up and without cake icing or chocolate fountain goo in their hair - the food was fantastic and our attempts at salsa dancing were very very sorry indeed.

Drymen Primary School Fair

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 Primary 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 enthusiasm, particularly from the Primary 2s and 3s is fantastic.

Closed Friday 11th May

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 Friday.

If anyone needs flowers desperately give us a call - 01360 660 903.

Subscription deliveries and anything pre-ordered continues as usual.

A tunnel with a view . . .

The polythene has been on our tunnel for nearly four years and over the winter it began to show signs of wear and tear, which we duly patched with tape.

Last week however the gusty winds took the small holes and made them larger and larger.

On Monday I was potting up tomatoes anxiously watching a rip snake its way across the roof, unable to do anything about it, as even on ladders I can't physically reach.

Euan was out running errands but, as soon as he got back and saw my anguished face, he got up on the ladders and did a drastic cut and paste job, leaving the end bay completely poly-free but the rest of the tunnel intact.

So now we have a tunnel with a view - I can pot on seedlings and watch lambs gambolling in the fields across the glen. It is beautiful. We could repair the tunnel, but my feeling is that we should leave it for the summer - it always gets too hot in there in the sun anyway - a sort of open topped tunnel - I can move the plants gradually along the bench to harden off.

The first sweet - pea

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.

And then they were gone . . .

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.

Voting after all.

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 at our women.

Drymen, where I live, and the surrounding area is an area of fantastic beauty - tourists flock to see Loch Lomond, to climb the hills and to walk the West Highland Way. The area is very reliant on tourism in all its forms and the tourism industry is very reliant on workers from other countries, who are chosing to spend some time working and travelling in Scotland. Just as every other waiter in Sydney seems to be a Scot working their way round Australia, there are a lovely stream of foreign nationals working in our hotels, on our farms, and so on. They add to the area, some come back year on year, some return with their families on holiday.

My constituency now has a Scottish Nationalist Party member of Scottish Parliament. The SNP now have the most MSPs (by 1) but no obvious prospect of forming a coalition government with another party, so no prospect of real power. Their policies, I hasten to add, have no xenophobia in them at all and if it was not for their yen for an independent Scotland many of their left wing policies would probably appeal to me. However I do hope, as an English neighbour said this morning, that they weren't voted in by insular Scots wanting to keep all sasenachs and foreigners out.

In my opinion Scotland's problem is that it isn't diverse enough - it is only because of the recent bolstering of Glasgow's Polish community that we can now get decent rye bread at Partick farmers market!

The lie of the land

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 that I found most telling was one farmer talking about how it is only in the last 35 years that people's eating habits have moved away from buying seperate ingredients and cooking in the home to todays reliance on ready meals. In 1973 average households spent 1/3 of their income on food. What do you suppose it is now? I turn 38 in two weeks time - it is my lifetime.

I think that this should ideally be a series - moving away from the connection with hunting which clouds issues and looking at all food production, not just meat-. It could look more at the way that people's consumer choices impact on farmers' and animals' lives. As consumers our power is in the way we spend our money - Is it on British goods or imported? Do we care about whether our pigs live indoors or out? Are we bothered about whether rural economies work properly or do we just want manicured farms to look good in our holiday snaps? Are we ready to panic about whether Britain is self sufficient in food? I think as a nation we need to be much more aware.

Do we even know how farming works? One of my best friends is a farmer, she farms sheep, cows and hens, I have had illuminating conversations with her husband about the black grouse he want to conserve on his land, I know whether lambing is going well or badly, but I have no idea about the economics of it all.

Dineen's style could confront people with the reality of how our spending makes a difference - she might have to strap some of the audience into their seats though.

And if you saw the programme remember it was filmed in 2005. Two whole years ago.

What is it about yellow . . .

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.

Just what I always wanted . . .

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 foster. Everything was fine in the end but it was a vision which stuck. By the time I was pregnant with Zoe we had moved out to the Kilpatrick Braes and as soon as I was no longer working in Glasagow we moved further out to Stirlingshire. We got the chickens and ducks.

The bit that I enjoy best is breeding from the chickens - Peblo, our fantastic freeranger, is broody at the moment so we have acquired some fertile eggs for her to sit on. 6 are a mixed lot from Jane and Craig at Craigievern and 6 are bantam eggs I bid for on ebay (Craig is very dubious). The lower photo is of Peblo with "her" chick Windixie born last year.

16 days to go.

Everyone's talking about it. . .

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 here
and here).

It is all such a travesty - something that should have been positive - encouraging people not to take a plastic bag at the supermarket - has just been done so badly because people have been blinded by fashiony types and celebrity pre-launches. Am I the only one that actually thinks it is a very unattractive bag anyway? - I like a lot of Hindmarsh's designs but not this

However all is not lost - there are a lot of great bags out there - as well as my bag that folds up into its pocket there are lovely totes at Cherry's and Samanthas which would scrunch up nicely into a handbag. They may be a bit more expensive than the Hindmarsh bag but they are made with love and care in Britain, won't date, are actually designed to work and will last for years and years. Unlike the latest "must have" they are proper "limited editions" and will get people asking you where you got them. Cheapest is usually not best (or cheapest) in the long run.