I have on my bookshelf  a gardening book from 1986 that I highly recommend to people looking for gardening  ideas and I am often looking at it for inspiration.   Cottage Gardening In Town And Country by Philip Swindells.  It's  very cheap to buy these days and it's in hardback.  I saw it for sale yesterday for 2 pounds plus postage online. If you like cottage gardens like I do.  I could not recommend a better book.  I think cottage gardens are a quintessentially English type of gardening.  Although you do see some some lovely cottage ..read more

You know what a bus man's holiday is don't you?  It means going on holiday and doing the same thing that you do at work.  Or on the smallholding to be precise. Number 1 son and his lady friend set off to Balmoral Show near Belfast on Wednesday at three in the morning.  We heard them leaving. They bought their tickets online and they were at the showground by nine in the morning.  It's  about four and a half journey from down here in West Cork. They went to see the pigs in particular.  Regular readers will know that we have pigs on our smallholding.  But app ..read more

 In less than a few months I will be hopefully travelling to Blighty to see some prog bands and a myriad of other eclectic kinds of music.   Living in rural Ireland and about sixty miles to the nearest city.  I don't get much chance to  see any live music.  Not the kind I like anyway.  So it's good to visit some literary places, old churches and visit real England again.  I will write a Dorset post another day. I will be 61 in December and I am still young in my head and the idea of rock and music festivals still excites me.   Even public trans ..read more

 There's a wonderful lady in Wales called Kathy who comments on my blog and own 3 or four really long polytunnels.  She's always giving me and the readers lots of wonderful free veg growing advice. Yesterday Kathy In Wales said her new potatoes were flowering and she hadn't dug any potatoes yet.  I said in previous years I had noticed that some potatoes ? didn't flower. This made me think and sure enough curiosity killed the cat ? or found the new potatoes.  We decided to have a dig.  Look what we found: A big bowl full of new potatoes before a shower under the cold w ..read more

 The Homeguard new potatoes began flowering at the weekend in the polytunnel.   I have been putting the hosepipe and sprinkler on them to give them plenty of water. Yesterday Tuesday we decided to have a look.  My late dad would have suggested that I leave them grow a while and they will soon be a lot bigger. But the secret of growing vegetables in my opinion means that small is beautiful.  Not forgetting freshly picked and chemically free and home cooked.. We had bacon, "our" cabbage and "our" new potatoes  ("they were delicious") with "our" apple mint and spearm ..read more

  Bergenia Cordifolia or elephants ears or pig squeak. Great English plantswoman and garden designer use to plan her gardens using them to form rows in her herbaceous perennials gardens. I am more a patchwork quilt informal cottage gardener. The Bergenias originate in China and Russia and their leaves change colour when they aren't  in flower. Interestingly ours flowered in late winter/ early spring.  I noticed after the heavy rain on Sunday night one of them is back in flower. May is beginning to  look very much like a typical April with sunshine and showers. The Bergenia ..read more

  I spent an hour or so potting on my Osteospermums new plants t? that I propagated from cuttings a couple of months of go. Regular readers will know I have lots of second hand plant pots and I make my potting soil from topsoil and well rotted fym. In total there are forty new plants ready to go in ours and carbooters customers herbaceous perennials borders. All it cost me was giving the cuttings a dip in organic rooting powder, tlc and regular water and potting on. If ever I had to choose my favourite perennial it would be my Cape Daisies or Osteospermums. Do you have a hobby that you l ..read more

 I have been inventing again.   A couple of weeks ago after sowing and getting forty runner beans  germinated plants.  I thought I best make myself a runner bean frame. Of course I never paid anything for my construction.  Just some sticks that I cut with my trusty loppers and I got some baling twine and a piece of scaffolding tubing, a broken spade handle and a old hoe that the blade had rusted and corroded and fell off and tied it altogether. Not bad?  Maybe not aesthetically pleasing on the eye.  But it will do just the job to grow the beans up. I s ..read more

 The dry weather is helping me make so much gardening work done around the gardens and drive and I am revamping a neglected area. One such revamp and planting area is the side of the drive next to a field: Near our beloved pets graves.  One plot marks the grave at the top of a Border Collie.  I named her Zeta after the beautiful Welsh actress Carol Zeta Jones.   Zeta came from a farm and she was so intelligent and even lay down at Pelican crossings and waited for it to beep before crossing. The other  plant pot and dog ornament mark two graves of beloved Jack Ru ..read more

 I said the other day I would take some shots of what's growing outside in the veg plot at the moment. Bim potatoes.  I thought the tubers would be purple coloured but not their stalks?? More Homeguard new potatoes. I dug trenches and removed the soil to make a  raised bed or two without wooden sides.  They are more like the Irish "lazy bed" system of growing vegetables. The peas seem to like this method of growing and it makes the beds more free draining.  I used the soil from the trenches for filling plant pots for my perennials and shrubsplants nursery. Kale c ..read more