Yesterday was the beginning of our "holiday" - I am back working in the shop today but then away for a few days away from the computer, weeding and packing up wire baskets!

We went to Perthshire to fulfil promises made to the girls last year. Last June we all picked a touristy thing we would like to do but then the summer was so gloriously sunny we just played outside all the holidays and didn't venture out at all.

It isn't exactly like that this year so we got in the car and headed for Perthshire.

Zoe's choice was to go and see the ospreys at Loch of the Lowes - this has two great hides with telescopes trained on osprey nests so you can watch the birds flying over the loch, catching perch and then bringing them back to the nest for everyone to feast on. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has a couple of webcams sited at the nest so you can follow the ospreys' progress when back home

Katie's choice was to go to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay - a reconstruction of a crannog - a prehistoric house built on stilts over the loch. It was a very hands on place - we got to sit round a fire in the crannog discussing what would be eaten, who would have lived there, how many people would be in the house, where would they keep their animals. Then we had a chance to have a go at wood turning with a pole lathe, making fire, spinning and pecking holes in weight stones.


The photo shows Katie watching the very impressive demonstration of how to make fire (which has me worried).

Both places were examples of what tourist venues should be - authentic, enthusiastic, realistically priced and completely non-disneyfied.

I have found out that I share a certain garden aesthetic with the iron age - hurdle fences, rough hewn seats, stone weights - I took a lot of photos - I'm sure I could find a use for those weights.


I shall be away from computers until next Thursday.

The most stressful day

I am posting this image of a lovely calming hydrangea heart to compensate for having the MOST STRESSFUL DAY.

This morning was fine - not really my sort of thing but there you go. Katie wanted to spend her holiday money - £13.68 - so we went into Glasgow and she went into a frenzy in Claire's Accessories where they had a special deal where you could get10 sale items for £5.

We now have a very happy 6 year old with lots of glittery bits in her hair.

Then I got back here to find that the buttons on my website were not all working properly - aaaarggggh - lots of individual orders instead of nicely grouped ones. I emailed everyone to confirm their orders and refund their multiple postages and thought "Aha, it is a problem with the shopping baskets - I can fix that"

So I redid all the shopping basket buttons on the website, very tedious work, - loaded it all up and found that now NOTHING worked.

Hmmmm. I was not a happy bunny. I ate a lot of chocolate (73% cocoa - allowed), I stomped around, I phoned the Stirling Enterprise IT man (who was out). In the end it turned out that I had bookmarked paypal and they had subsequently changed their site so none of my buttons matched their baskets. Therefore nothing connected and you just got error messages.

Now I have redone it all again and it looks to be working. I think. Of course I have managed to b****r up all the spacing on the pages in my panic but that is for another day. I have put a note up about contacting me if anything doesn't work.

See pride comes before a fall. How professional I must look.

I am now off to pack up these baskets and calm down so that they can be sent off with love! After the postal strike that is.

Irrelevant mice

Recently I have lost a few stone in weight and in attempting to adjust my steroid medication to fit with my new BMI I have knocked myself out of kilter and am really knackered.
Therefore - instead of spending the evenings pulling thistles and digging beds in advance of the garden club coming on Saturday, I have been making what Euan is terming "those highly irrelevant mice". This is as in "And are Connell Garden Club going to be impressed with these ranks of highly irrelevant mice?". I should point out that, while I am sitting on the deck embroidering dresses for mice, he is busy strimming a path to let the garden club members into the garden.

When I was small the magazine with the craft patterns in it was "Woman's Weekly" - my Gran got it, storing it under her sofa cushions to keep it in mint condition until our visits. Then my Mum would make things from it - mainly small soft furry toys. the main designer was a woman called Jean Greenhowe so when I saw a book of her patterns I snapped it up.




They are a contrast to today's toy patterns - whereas today's hand crafted toys scream out Japanese inspired individuality, these aim for the bland expressionless uniformity of mass production. The aim was to make something as good as you could get in the shops













I was feeling tired, I had some brown felted blanket scraps, I needed something fiddly and fairly brain free to do so I decided to make a dormouse. The photo is from the Jean Greenhowe book - a fleecy dormouse in a dormouse house.

And here is one of my irrelevant mice - oddly they look nothing like the Greenhouse version - it reminds me of being a teenager and desperately trying to fit in, buying the same clothes as everyone else and somehow still looking different.

Schools out for summer - what summer?

Tomorrow school breaks up for the long summer vacation - this is a great benefit of living in Scotland, allowing speedy Scottish parents to take cheaper summer holidays before the English schools break up and it becomes high season prices.

I love the summer holidays - though this year we are not going away. I love the more relaxed pace, the children being able to just mooch and read and draw if they want to, without the pressure and rush of having to be at set places at particular times. I love the fact they don't have to dress up or wear uniform.

We have a relaxed house over the holidays as I still have to work so while I do that, they can do pretty much what they like (as long as it doesn't involve television or power tools).

Last summer was glorious, the sun shone all holiday and the children turned almost feral with sun kissed hair and ingrained dirt from days spent outside making dens and lying in the grass. This year - despite the promised hot summer - it does not look as good. Thank heavens we have not had the rain that has effected Yorkshire but today it is cold with a steady drizzle.

I think that I shall have to go and stock up on lots of glitter and glue.

I am helped as well by the fact that the girls spend 2 weeks each summer with my parents which allows me to compensate for the slower pace of life when they are here. Many other working parents are not as lucky - and it makes you see why mothers are desperate for jobs that have the school holidays off - I know nurses, dentists and pr people who are all working as classroom assistants simply because the holidays fit in with their lives.

The picture is of a box of flower posies destined for the lucky teachers at a local school.

20 years and counting.

Tomorrow Euan and I celebrate dating for 20 years. We have married, bought houses and had children in those 2 decades but 24th June is still the most important date in the year.

We had known each other as friends for a good while when we started "courting" - as my Grandad termed it - so it was never going to be a casual, take it or leave it, affair. There was too much to risk losing.

Still 20 years is a long time and we have both changed a lot from our 18 year old selves. Probably for the better . . . definitely for the better.

Tomorrow I shall be arranging flowers for a wedding in Luss and Euan shall be putting the roof on his shed. Then we have a babysitter booked!

Flowers are very emotive things. I am always reminded of that at this time of year as the first sweet peas and sweet williams arrive in the shop and customers begin to reminisce about their grandparents gardens.

I too associate particular flowers with particular people - foxgloves, at their peak this week, I associate with my Australian friend Sue.

Sue moved with her family to stay in a cottage near our old house for the year of 1998 when her husband Phil worked on a job exchange. Sue is one of these people with a natural ease which makes everything that she does appear to be exactly the way it should be done.

She loves flowers but the exchange rate difference made Scotland a very expensive place to stay, particularly with 3 children. There was no room in her weekly budget for the flowers she was used to buying back in Melbourne. So she would pick cow parsley and foxgloves from the verge outside her house and arrange them in tall jugs in the kitchen. It looked wonderful, as it would.

I was very influenced by Sue- it was her who introduced me to Country Living Magazine and, more importantly, who showed me a more relaxed way to parent. She hates computers so I doubt she will read this.

Does anyone else have flowers that remind them of specific people?

The foxglove in the photo is a variety called "Elsie Kelsie", a sport of the native white foxglove with a very dark mark for the bees to see how to get into the flower.

I'm not sure the food was that good . . .

One of the advantages of being the first of our peers to do the whole " settle down, get a house, have kids, move to the country" thing is that we have a supply of friends and family who, in return for a good meal and some booze, are happy to help with lifting, shifting and general hard labour.

This weekend was one of those occasions. I have a thing about corrugated iron - a large part of the attraction of the van is that it is corrugated, for the same reason I would love a shepherd's hut. The older, more patinated the iron the better.

For the past few months, Euan and I have been discussing the need for a shed - somewhere to move the junk from the garage, somewhere to store tools sensibly, somewhere for the lawn-mower so that it doesn't block the entrance to the polytunnel.

We had looked at wooden sheds but they all looked a bit "kitty" and were really out of our budget anyway.

Then we saw this on e-bay - a large shed/barn in Stirling in very lovely corrugated iron. Euan spent the week of "watching" drawing up plans and costing van hire, notifying our helpers that they should be on call.


We "won" it, hired the van and Euan, John and Peter went off to demolish the shed, break it up into salvagable bits and bring it back here.

I think that they may think very hard about whether they ever want to visit for the weekend again.

Euan is going to transform this van of bits into a lovely useful shed with a tunnel where we can hang the washing when it rains.

An excuse for a play about - wip

At the week end I was asked whether I made rag dolls. I had a material rabbit with me on my stall at the Green Gallery opening that sold encouragingly fast, so I said that I would give it a go.

So this week has been a parade of prototypes - and my girls are now proud owners of a series of slightly wonky versions, rejected because their faces were too fat or because, as Katie said, "Mummy are her feet meant to be backwards?".

I think that I am now getting somewhere and the photo is of the latest prototype - there are some changes to make - everyone preferred an earlier version's hair and I need to work out a better solution for the clothes.

I want the finished doll to be quite old fashioned looking - like those early C19th wooden dolls with their painted on hair and secretive faces but I also want her to work as a dress up doll so that her clothes come off and she can have alternative wardrobes - perhaps a ballet tutu.

I also want her to have outsize hands so that she is easy to hold hands with (perhaps not quite as large as this prototype).

Her name will be Daisy - in homage to the Karine Polwart song that seems to be on constant play here. Perhaps she shall have red hair, perhaps I will work out how to make her dungarees. Perhaps I will stop faffing about and actually make a final version . . .

Repeating the pattern?

When I was growing up my Mum, like many women tried to find piece work that would fit in with being at home after school and in the holidays - she did B&B, she painted pegs to look like soldiers and highland dancers, she helped organise play schemes but most consistently she made toys for a local craft shop.

My clearest memories of Mum before she took up antique dealing are of her sitting each evening in front of the wood burner with a willow basket full of half made animals waiting to be hand finished.

Recently I have been drawn to making toys again - and I am looking back to patterns from the 60s and 70s, probably quite similar in style to the patterns copied from magazines in my youth. This cute pony is my favourite at the moment - made in soft suede effect fabric with felt mane and tail he is just the right size and squashiness for a small hand.

I wonder whether this is a form of broodiness - my girls are growing up fast and are not as attached to soft toys any more (though they pleaded for, and got, all my prototypes for the toys I am working on at the moment). I don't intend to have another baby - perhaps this sewing soft things is a displacement activity (though if you ask me professionally I will spout that I want to develop a children's section for the website)

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.

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.

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.

Warning - this post contains a photo of a dead mole.

Our approach to wildlife is very simple - if it was here before we were then we have to learn to live with it.

Hence we put up with hares (that nibble hedges), voles (that tunnel under growing plants), pheasants (that eat bulbs) and yes, moles (that turn the grass paths and beds into ripples). While most farmers I know are keen on wildlife and do a lot to nurture it, this latter foible is regarded with hilarity (and I suspect a little annoyance) by our farming neighbours who enthusiastically annihilate all moles with a variety of horrible methods. It is of course for a reason, while a mole to me means an unsightly hump and some nice friable soil to steal as potting compost, to our neighbours it means ruined silage as the soil mixes with the harvested grass.

Minou obviously feels the same. The photo above shows Minou the foreman instructing Jasmine to "keep digging" for a mole that he could obviously hear under the ground. The photo was taken at the beginning of a week of frenzied activity - cat issuing instructions, Jasmine digging until her claws hurt and the mole cheekily coming up behind them with 8 fresh hills. This took up most of their waking hours from last Monday.


This morning this is what we found on the lawn - a beautiful sheeny black mole with 2 telltale puncture marks on his neck. Mr Mole is no more. Minou is a great hunter (he usually catches 2 of everything, one for himself, one for Jasmine the sidekick) but is scrupulous about hunting when hungry and then eating his catch. This was something quite different - he just knew that mole was laughing at him.

I am very sad - it is very easy to be sentimental about such a stunningly beautiful animal. Katie had to be persuaded that a dead mole is not a suitable soft toy.

And then they were back on the bus

Well the Easter school holidays are over - and goodness they went quickly. The children were picked up this morning at 8.30 by Alan on the school bus and we are back into routine.

Judging from most of the mothers I meet, I am unusual in actually enjoying the school holidays. I am definitely not a morning person (another reason why I am not a conventional florist - who knows what I would come back with from a 5am flower market) and, though I tend to be up and about quite early, I am not quite all there until 9.30 at the earliest. The morning routine of "get your shoes on . . .get your shoes on . . .GET YOUR SHOES ON !! !" is not my finest hour.

So when all that can be abandoned in favour of free ranging scruffy, layabout kids I am happy. And the fine weather this year has made it a breeze - the children were happy playing outside doing Blytonish things. They produced a local newspaper, they did some elaborate dog training with jumps, they made a veg patch, they just lay for hours on the trampoline reading. We even managed to wean our younger daughter away from the television.

I felt like a really good Mum. For once it all worked - I could keep a benign eye on them from my weeding, we ate when we were hungry and there was no running about from piano to swimming to Brownies. Mind you, you should have seen the colour of the bathwater last night.

And we are all beginning to get back some colour after the peely wally milk bottle colour of a Scottish winter.

Asparagus

My Dad is a very good gardener. He learned from his father and he grows excellent fruit and vegetables on what really amounts to a sand dune in East Lothian.

He remains slightly amazed that I have ended up gardening for a living as I showed neither aptitude nor interest as a child.

I am putting this photograph in for him as he is an occasional reader of this blog.

My Dad grows exceptional asparagus, one of my favourite foods. My birthday is in May, at the height of the asparagus season and I have always associated my father's asparagus bed with my birthday - I have always felt that he grows it especially for me in the way that he plants masses of strawberries for my Mum.

Of course this birthday treat has become more of a problem since I left home and insisted on living outside East Lothian, so a couple of years ago Dad grew me some asparagus plants, and then, when they were ready to plant out, he came over for the day and made me an asparagus bed.

I chose to site the bed near to the house so that I can see when it needs weeding - and here is a picture of it - look Dad, weed free and there is an asparagus shoot!

Family weddings

Yesterday was a family day - we headed over to my parents in East Lothian for a day of catching up and bracing walks along Gullane beach.

We also fitted in a visit to see the church and hotel where my brother Stephen and his fiancee Helen will be getting married in August.

I shall be arranging the flowers so it was a relief that they are both lovely venues - full of light and air. I always dread wedding receptions in those dead corporate type venues where the flowers have to fight against the polystyrene tiles on the roof and the rails left over from audio visual presentations.

At the moment I am trying to build up a visual portfolio of month by month ideas for weddings and events - on actual wedding days there never seems to be enough time for taking anything other than record shots.

The photo shows Zoe modelling a bridesmaid headdress, a half band of individually wired hyacinth florets, each with a couple of amber glass beads in the centre. She looked very, very pretty in it practicing to be a bridesmaid!

Seed sowing

Today has seen the beginning of our seed sowing. I used to sow seeds far too early - champing at the bit in February - forcing seeds to germinate and then having to nurse the seedlings through frosty March and April.

Now I sow only 6 weeks before the last frost (here that is Mid May) so that the seedlings will fill a 9 cm pot just at the right time to go straight out into the garden.

I sow most of my hardy and half hardy annuals into coir jiffy pellets - they are low in nutrients so ideal for seed germination. I line up the pellets in old wooden seedtrays (I bought a load of 1950s seed trays that came from an old nursery - I use most of them but some are available for sale) - 35 to a tray and then put them into a poly bag in the boiler cupboard until they germinate. After germination they go into the tunnel so that they can get a lot of light. If it is going to be frosty I cover them with fleece, but otherwise they get no coddling.

The main problem with the coir is that they dry out quickly - one of the reasons that I squeeze them into the seed trays rather than using wider spaced plastic trays they come with - so you have to be on hand with water a lot. This is also why I pot on - into 9cm pots - as soon as I can see roots.

Euan and the girls are in charge of the vegetable plots this year - so yesterday they got weeding.