Becoming a control freak

I have always regarded myself as a laid back kind of person but this week I have found myself developing into a horrible control freak.

The first thing that happened was that the dahlias began to bloom and instead of this - Rip City
















There was this - Arabian Knight













As one customer said when I contacted her "Well at least it isn't yellow"




Then the lilies began to bloom and instead of this - Netty's Pride -



















There was this - Sorayo.


















I contacted my supplier - he contacted his and we have agreed that the bulbs and tubers be replaced with the correct varieties in the spring.

I have also contacted the customers that I know bought these but I can't remember everyone - if you bought either from me and it has bloomed as the wrong variety please let me know so that I can refund your money or replace in the Spring. Fortunately it isn't affecting all the lilies - because if there was ever a beauty this is it. I think that it is a case of rogue handfuls being added to make up weight on a popular line.

My supplier, who has to write to me in English as my Dutch is non-existent, sounds very menacing in a second language - he has "forced" his supplier to admit he sold Arabian Knight rather than Rip City; he has "confronted the lily supplier with photographic evidence" and will be "dealing with him severely". I have visions of the lily man being suspended mafia style above a tulip grading machine.

Actually it is not funny - we all depend for our reputation on others and if a supplier is not reliable it condemns us all along the chain. There is nothing I can do this year - and my mantra for the week is Caroline's "well at least they aren't yellow"

Space and simplicity

I have just finished reading Margaret Forster's book Keeping the world away - a novel about the effect that Gwen John's painting of the corner of an attic bedroom has on the women who hang it on their walls.

It is, in part, a study of the yearning for simplicity and control symbolised by the spare, composed painting.

I enjoyed the book very much and was thinking of it today while I drove though the sublime landscape of deep cleft valleys and deep reflective lochs that is between here and Loch Fyne.

It is a beautiful, beautiful drive, I was on my own in the car and it is quite the most relaxing thing I have done this week. I was going up to The Tree Shop, run by the Ardkinglas tree nursery to pick up some beautiful white birch trees - Betula utilis "Jacquemontii snowqueen" which I am intending to use to make a small glade at this wedding in ten days time. The idea is that it will make the large space a bit more intimate and give a sense of enclosure for the guests who want to sit down after the meal away from the music.

At the moment the state of the house is getting to me. It is completely my own fault so I can't really complain - but I do. It isn't really a case of it not being clean - it is just that we have far too much stuff in a house with no storage and I try to run a business at the same time. Add into this mix we bought kitchen furniture before we have enlarged the kitchen and that we are all messy, messy creatures who can't seem to pick up anything off our seemingly magnetic floors.

The result is a feeling of camping in amidst piles of toppling stuff - it is driving me mad and I now want to move out into Gwen John's little attic with only a chair, a desk and a vase of primroses.

Toning it down.

6 or 7 years ago I went to a demonstration given by Sarah Raven in her sister Jane's house in Edinburgh. I can't remember how I heard about it - it was before Raven was that well known in Scotland - and I stuck out a bit as I was oddly young and un-lunchy compared to the other atendees.

At lunch I was at a table of fifty-something "ladies who lunch and attand lectures", next to a very stylish, petite, brunette who did nothing but moan about the (very good) food, the stairs to the demonstration room, the lack of cushions on the chairs and so on. After she had exhausted complaining about that day's entertainment she moved onto the previous week's garden club trip to Great Dixter "And do you know Christopher Lloyd has bindweed in his borders, he has the cheek to open his garden to the public and it has bindweed in it".

I don't know what this obviously unhappy woman moved onto next as I got up, made my excuses and left.

I didn't post over the weekend because I had a very rude group of people visit me here on Saturday and it has taken me 2 days to tone down my response. I am not going to go into details as it is all done and dusted and I have received apologies from some people who were with the group. I know that at least one reads this blog and I hoipe that she will continue to do so as it was nice to meet her.

The result, however, is that we shall be following the lead of other working gardens and we shall no longer be opening up to groups. It was particularly galling as - had I not been waiting in for this pre-arranged visit - I would have been watching my daughter perform in George Square in Glasgow.

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.

The winner in the weather

These leopard lilies (lilium pardilinium) seem to revel in the cool, damp weather we have been getting this summer.

They have completely taken over one half of a long border - rising up through everything else with their glossy whorls of leaves topped by these recurving spotted flowers - like elaborate turbans.

Lilies are an interesting flower from a commercial point of view. They are the most expensive bulbs I buy and as you can't cut them the first year that adds to the cost both in money and space. They are, however, essential at this time of year - taking over from the alliums and filling in the "big bloom" gap until the dahlias, sunflowers and gladioli come on stream.

Lilies are also a standard florist (and supermarket) flower. Amy Stewart's book Flower Confidential documents the development of the Stargazer lily and how it was its upright facing buds and increased "packability" that led to its cornering the market. Certainly you would not want to try and pack these into florists boxes - the buds all hang down and the flowers are short and wide - they also go from bud to bloom in a few hours, though the blooms than have a good vase life.

My customers - and I am aware that they are a self selecting group - are also not that keen on lilies - particularly scented lilies and "no scented lilies" is the most common note on my subscription database. I, however, love these - they are elegant, rich and at the moment taking over the garden.

By the way - ages ago I paid a fortune for some "Bellingham hybrid" leopard lilies as recommended by Christopher Lloyd - these grow in my garden alongside the species variety and I can see no difference at all in looks of vigour (though there is a 4 fold difference in price).

Not knowing "how its always done"

I have always preferred working with people who are outside the field they were trained in. Perhaps it is natural, given that I changed careers from the very academic art gallery curator to the very muddy gardening florist.

It pre-dates that though - the best exhibition I worked on in terms of sheer outside the box excitement was at Kelvingrove museum with Ben Kelly - designer of the Manchester nightclub The Hacienda. He had no concept that things couldn't be done - the problems of listed buildings, crane access, getting porters to work late and so on meant nothing to him as he had never worked within a hierarchical institution like a council art gallery - so miraculously they got done.

To be honest I think it was a nightmare for the Kelvingrove curator in charge of working with him but for a lowly minion it was an eye-opener in how being trained in "how things are done" can be a real disadvantage.

I have been thinking about this this week as I have to work out how I deal with florists who want to buy flowers. Most florists come here because they have been steered in our direction by brides who want to curb their carbon footprint by having Scottish grown flowers at their wedding. It is not usually the florist's idea which is probably not a good start.

Then they visit and we have the problem of the flowers not being on show as it is the wrong season and my photographs all being of things growing in the garden, not laid out in boxes. We have a discussion that goes something like "well will you have any gerberas?", "no", "cream orchids?", "no", "Bacarrat roses?" "no" and as you can tell this is not a good conversation for either of us. I feel lousy, they feel frightened of not being familiar with the flowers that I say I will have and altogether it is a really bad thing. It is something I have to address as it is largely my fault that they go away without understanding what we are trying to do.

By and large these are conventionally trained florists - they wanted to become florists on leaving school, they did their City and Guilds and worked their way up the ranks in a florist shop before opening their own shop. They know exactly how things should be done, what flowers you should use for wedding pedestals and how many stems should be in a bunch. They don't know what to make of me at all.

And then, thank heavens, there is a different kind of florist - florists I love working with. They tend to have worked doing something else before floristry- teaching, pr, car design etc. - and their approach to visiting me is completely different. They show up - they want to see what is growing now because you never know when that will be useful for other events, they want to talk about how I use things, vase life, texture, flexibility of stems, how long will something last out of water, is the stem hollow, will the flower bend to the light. Questions, questions, questions and curiosity. They make a lot of notes, they take a lot of photos, they e-mail me a couple of days later to check out specific cultivars. It is a quite different experience and I feel happy sending my flowers off with them.

The difference is so great that I do wonder whether a compulsory career change should be brought in aged 28 for the benefit of the creativity and drive of the country.

This is an unfair generalisation of course - Jane Packer is a work up from the bottom career florist, Paula Pryke a career change teacher, as for Shane Conolly - my own favourite celebrity florist- I haven't a clue what his background is, I just know he obviously loves his flowers.

Perhaps I should have a questionnaire.

Jack and the giant plume poppies

Here we are with a rare overview of the garden - I pick so much that I am always aware that it is very green and doesn't really look like a cut flower garden. I am also aware that these photos demonstrate that the grass paths need cut pronto - the excuse is that it just hasn't been dry enough.

In the photos is one of 2 long borders - they divide the two parts of the cutting garden and are filled with all the tall clumpy plants I love but which would take over a raised cutting patch very quickly.

I wanted to put the photos in to show just how tall everything perennial is growing this year. The plume poppy is now 10 feet tall, the stipa gigantea isn't far behind and just look at the size of that yellow lily - far too big to cut! Here is Minou to give some sense of scale.

What a contrast to the annuals - particularly the not-too-hardy annuals like dill and larkspur. I have never had such pathetic looking plants!

Today I got a phonecall from a grower in Fife, desperate for flowers for a wedding that she is doing at the end of the month, so it is obviously not just me.

Unfortunately I couldn't help at all as I also have a wedding on that weekend and will need all my flowers for that. The other grower depends very much on annuals and is now looking at buying in flowers from Holland for the event. Thank goodness I now have plenty of (giant) perennials in the beds.

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.

A suprise amongst the thistles

I am not the world's greatest weeder - somehow it just all gets away from me and I am stuck at this time of year saying "just where did all those thistles come from?", "How can we have so much couch grass?", "What would actually exterminate creeping buttercup?"

The garden goes from looking artily meadowish to being a great lump of unstoppable weeds (oh the garden club visiting in a fortnight will not be impressed).

However one advantage is this - look a self sown orchid - it is only a common orchid, we have then down in the damp field, but it has sown itself in a patch of briza maxima grass and looks suitably exotic.

This evening I have ordered our pigs - two piglets arrive a week today so tomorrow we shall have to get the patch of ground ready for them - the idea is that they will clear the ground so that we can plant willows and dogwoods in the autumn. I am very fond of pigs but shall have to remember not to get too fond of these ones

Reception rant

The wedding where I was arranging the flowers had the reception at one of the hotels on the banks of Loch Lomond. The hotel attracts wedding couples with its spectacular views over the Loch but on days like yesterday - where you couldn't actually see the water from the function room - it presumably has to offer something else.

I am not mentioning the name of the hotel as this is going to be a wee bit of a rant.

The bride wanted very simple understated flowers so at the reception there was just to be small table centres - so far, so easy - I was just to drop them off after I had arranged the church flowers.

At least that was the idea - I arrived and this was the entrance for the wedding party. Actually that is not quite true as I took this photo after I had already done a lot of litter picking. 2 rather ill looking bay trees in chipped plastic pots and weedy soil - covered in old dirty plastic ribbons, most of which had come undone.

I spoke to the hotel about it and they said "Oh the brides usually bring their own ribbon" - not "Oh goodness you are right that looks terrible I shall get someone onto it" - not even "Do you have any suggestions?" just a "that's not my problem" attitude. I still can't believe that they were happy for the bridal party to arrive in their lovely clothes, step from their fancy cars into an area of soiled decorations, seedy looking trees and cigarette ends.

There wasn't really that much I could really - I weeded the trees, picked up the litter, removed the dirty curly ribbon and cut off the yellow dead leaves. I had some wired grosgrain ribbon left over from the church flowers so I tied that round the trunks and cut some oxe-eye daisies from the carpark verge, threading them into the trees as a bit of decoration. There was nothing I could do about the chipped pots or the general air of sodden neglect.

It all seems so unnecessary.



These are the table decorations for the inside! A mix of mint, rosa "William Lobb", sweetpea "Matucana"; eryngium "Miss Willmotts Ghost" and nepeta "Souvenir d'Andre Chaumont".

Business guru

This is the man I have been spending the past couple of days with (well in print anyway) - he is Michael Gerber, author of the book The E Myth Revisited.

As I have explained before I tend to lose books, sending them home with people and then never getting them back again. This happened last summer with my copy of the E Myth and I have finally cracked and picked up another copy.

The reason is, besides my compulsive book buying habit, is that it is quite simply an inspirational book. It shows how small businesses, particularly ones like mine founded on the fact that I can technically do things (sewing, gardening), fail because you are so busy, busy, busy doing the day to day stuff - the making, the selling, the invoicing, the packing, the meetings with clients, the floor sweeping, the weeding- that you forget to give any time over to actually building the business itself.

This is one of those books that pinpoint all your faults, make you accept them and THEN shows you how to change them.

It takes a lot of discipline though - it is a lot of hard work of a different kind, working on and not in your business - and I am just at the beginning.

But the change is in my brain - all day it has been fizzing fizzing, fizzing with ideas and plans and concrete ways forward to have the kind of integrated life and business that I want. And it does physically feel as though I am fizzing - peculiar.

Now I just need to carry it all through and create this wonderful thing that is Snapdragon.

I would also like to point out that I am not a self-help book kind of person - I phoned the only other person I know of who has systematically gone through the whole E-myth process (rather than just read the book and say "that's a good idea") and she was even more effusive - even though I was phoning out of the blue - it has completely changed her life and business. Well that is some recommendation.

I'll let you know how I get on. Fizzz, fizzzzz, fizzzzz

Connections

Connection is the word that we would have inscribed above the door in Snapdragon's imaginary shop. It is the word at the core of what we aspire to do. Connect with the seasons, with the soil, connect with our customers, with the community. Only connect. This blog is a symptom of that quest.

Yesterday Carolyn wrote a very astute comment on my post about the demise of the Country Living Scottish Fair, questioning whether handmade was enough of an intrinsic value in itself.

It was a comment that made me think - because I am very vociferous about the fact that the similar catch all "organic" covers a multitude of sugary sins. I think that she is right - why do I get worked up about the need to preserve the hand made in Britain?

If I want to buy a salad bowl why do I go to the local craft gallery rather than Habitat? If I wanted to buy a doorstop why Primrose Hill rather than Cath Kidston?

And I think that it stems from this basic need for connection - connection at some level to a discernable human maker.

I do not feel comfortable buying from chain shops - I was in Edinburgh shopping yesterday and was very put off by the impersonal nature of the shops. The place where I did buy ( a party dress from East) was largely because of a wonderfully engaging member of staff. When I do part with my money it tends to be either in craft or antique shops.

I don't really know where this post is going - I think it is very hard to justify the allure of the handmade using pure logic. Yet it seems that, like lighting an open fire, growing your own vegetables or making jam, there is something more, something unmeasurable. All these things, if judged on a strict value for time and money basis, would probably fail, yet they are the parts of life that give me connection and are therefore, for me, beyond value.

That is how I feel about the hand made (though not all handmade) and the reason that I think it is worth fighting to promote.

I would be very interested to hear what items people value as hand-made and which they don't.

Thanks again for all your comments and e-mails.

Not quite the golden egg you would think.

Last week I got a letter from Upper Street Events who run the Country Living Fairs to say that they would not be having a Fair in Scotland next Spring.

It has turned out not to be an viable event for them.

It is a strange thing - talk to the stall holders and they feel that they are paying too much for their space, talk to the customers and they feel that the ticket price is too high, talk to the organisers and they say that they cannot make a profit on the event.

Perhaps there are not enough people in Scotland/North of England to justify the event - certainly, speaking to people who do both the London and the Glasgow Fair there are far fewer people at the Scottish event, spending far less per person.

That is perhaps the rub.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who had just bought a beautiful quilt from a catalogue specialising in Fair Trade goods. It was a lovely piece of work - the pieces had been carefully toned and my friend had bought it because of that, but also because it had been made by someone being paid properly for the work. She felt that she paid about a £70 premium for the good feeling that she has buying Fair Trade.

How many people would (or perhaps also could afford to) do that?

The Country Living Fair tries to reflect the magazine - to have a high proportion of stalls selling hand made, locally sourced, high production cost items - whether that is bags made from vintage materials or hand made jewellery.

The problem is that the price of those goods reflect the fact that they take time to make. With the Scottish Fair what seemed to happen was that each year there were fewer and fewer of these specialist stalls as too few people bought from them and they did not cover costs. Gradually stalls importing mass produced jewellery, enamelware, trinkets and so on began to dominate. Even the stalls which sold handmade items began to supplement with bought in goods, which were cheaper and therefore easier to sell. This applies to me as much as anyone else - whereas everything bar some hyacinth vases was made by me in the "home section" of my stall, there were pots and hand tools in the "garden" bit which were bought in - and available at another stall in the hall.

There were approximately 12,000 visitors to the Scottish Fair - that means to cover costs on a small stall you have every single person who comes in that door spend 30p with you. That is very high indeed. No wonder so many stallholders - with lovely stalls - hardly make a profit.

I really don't know what the answer is - if I could change one thing about our consumer society I would have people buy less but spend more time and money on their individual purchases. This Primark, disposable society depresses me. People look at a hand made object like a basket and think that it is expensive, if they began to think of the time taken to make it and what hourly rate they think would be fair, I expect that it would suddenly seem a great bargain. -

A Christmas Fair has been suggested for October 2008 and I hope that that comes off and that people use it as an excuse to get all their Christmas presents in one handcrafted, unique, happy shopping day.

I would be interested in hearing what people think from a customers' point of view.

Balmy balmy weather

At last we have the warm balmy air that the half hardy annuals need to start growing.

This has been a very peculiar and rather difficult year as far as flower growing goes. The very hot April brought on tulips very fast and they flowered in a great lump of colour over two and a half weeks rather than 6. The very cold wet May delayed all the flowers that should have taken over from them an for a few weeks, until the alliums emerged we were scrabbling around for flowers to sell.

The seedlings I planted out a few weeks ago - cornflowers, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers - all seem to have stayed still until this week (unfortunately not something I could say about the weeds) but in the past 3 days of hot clammy weather they have doubled in size and finally look as if they might turn into proper plants.

I am turning into a proper farmer with my ability to complain about the weather whatever it is. Next year I wonder about starting the seedlings off under tunnel hoops until the weather warms. We really have such a short growing season here it may be the only way in a chilly spring. That said - I really don't want the cutting garden to look like a strawberry field with chenilles of plastic glinting in the sunshine.

This poppy is Papaver orientale "Manhattan", a stunner if ever there was one.

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.

Busy bees

This week Sally and I have been getting our fingers out and buzzing all over the place to let people know we are here. It is something we should have done 3 weeks ago.

When I began to sell from the house 2 years ago we had a very specific group of people who came each week - we were on the routine run between the Friday farmshop at France Farm and Killearn jumping beans. They were largely people that I knew socially through toddler groups and their friends.

A couple of weeks ago I began to notice that we no longer get this 11 am rush, so on Friday Sally and I sat down to think about the whys and wherefores, going through all the ex-11 am regulars. Some now come later on the way back from the afternoon school run - their children have simply outgrown toddlerhood. Others have returned to full time work and are not about at all on a Friday. Some have extended their maternity leaves, or returned to college, or taken up some arty non-paying job, they are down a wage and without cash to spend on flowers except for special occasions.

It all made me realise that I have been too complacent - we are always generally busy so I haven't been thinking about who our customers are and how we can continue to get them coming back. We have done a big effort on leafleting neighbouring villages to recruit a new generation of those toddler Mums and have our thinking caps on about how we can be more convenient for the rest.

I am very bad at this sort of thing, so it is a good job that I have Sally working with me. I would be the man with the better designed mousetrap waiting for people to beat a path to the door.

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.

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.

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.