Blooming flowers!

Tulips picked from the garden - 27/03/12

After weeks and months of rain, we certainly should have lots of blossom in the garden!  In the hot spell that we enjoyed at the end of March, I picked these tulips that I had grown from bulb.  Unfortunately, my summer flower seeds and bulbs have not done so well!  Partly the wash-out weather and cool temperatures, but probably more significant is my adolescent dog's digging habits!  I only found out recently that flower bulbs can be poisonous for dogs, although it does not seem to have done our four-legged friend any harm!  Roses would rather have not had so much rain as well, but at least we can enjoy the sun now and I can, finally, happily potter around the garden without feeling cold and wet!

Looking on the bright side, tomatoes in the green-house are thriving and lettuces are doing well.  We haven't checked on the potatoes yet, but we are not so hopeful for a good crop.  So a freak year of weather does not help in sustaining self-sufficiency but every little helps.  My hope is now pinned on soft fruit - raspberries and blackberries later on!  My best deterrents for buying is firstly the sunshine - the warm day keeps me happy enough in the garden without the need to venture further - but when that is not possible, my other trick is to go into a shop, look at items and even pick them up, but whisper my mantra of "do I really need it?" to myself. This tends to have the result of me putting back the items on the shelf and feeling good!

I am planning to have a good pruning session in the garden this afternoon in a quest to find something to put in a vase, even if not a conventional cut flower!  And will keep you posted on vegetable, fruit and flower updates.

The joys of washing!

My dining-room cushions (that I recently mentioned) have had a temporary make-over.  It is amazing what you can do with some stain remover!  My lovely neighbour who is a sewing whizz said she would make new ones but at £20 a piece that would not be much cheaper than buying replacements, and she was wisely concerned that new covers would not last long with 3 small children!  So she took in the worst affected cushion and returned it looking nearly as good as new - no longer marbled with green and blue paint, but cream again and respectable enough for my book-club get together!  Less than a week later, my children seemed to have an uncontrollable need to release their creative juices - and so out came the green paint... again!  I went in to the room to find a puddle of green on the floor - and a sea of green on our table (luckily covered by an oil cloth)!  So the cushions back into the wash while I continue my hunt for fabric to re-cover them myself.  Being a seamstress' daughter, I should be a dab-hand at sewing, but my fear of power tools (whether it be a sewing machine or band-saw) keeps me away from the sewing machine I inherited from my grandmother.  A phobia which I should persevere in over-coming, as a year on a shoe-string would benefit greatly from home-made items being quickly made up on a machine!

Perhaps I am a little odd, but to me there is nothing better than a basket of clean washing.  There is something very satisfying about solving a problem like a stained shirt by soaking it, scrubbing  it  and then watching it transform into a clean item as if by magic!  With my trusty washing powder and stain-removers our clothes last for season after season, and once we have out-grown the items, I gain much satisfaction from passing on my children's clothes to friends or on to a charity shop where someone else can benefit from them.  For environmental reasons mainly I am not a fan of tumble dryers, but I do have a washer-drier and so when the need occasionally arises to quickly dry school trousers at 7am, or help out a neighbour's teenage son who needs his jeans a.s.a.p. to go out in - it is possible!  A load of sheets or towels will find their way to the drier on a rainy day; unfortunately this summer this has been much more than I had hoped for. They just don't fit on my faithful clothes-horses, and it saves filling every room with draped sheets!  However, this resistance to using tumble driers, although not really financially driven, does save me £40 in energy bills per year. Ironing is also practically non-existent in this household now - thanks to a friend who showed me how to create ceaseless trousers by wiping them with a firm hand. This performs wonders on clothes. Otherwise hanging them out in the sunshine keeps them pretty straight!

Free gifts from nature

I suppose one would think of foraging and what you can eat for free from the countryside around us.  This is a topic which does interest me and which I will return to, but for today my subject is entertaining children for free.  Children are so tuned in to the commercial world that we now live in that they know exactly which toys are the latest fashion, are aware of pocket money and piggy banks, and as they get older are more difficult to persuade to come on a good old-fashioned walk in the country.

We spent the weekend in Devon with my husband's aunt and uncle where we always look forward to a good country break with lots of walks and fun.  On our first day there, my husband took centre stage in entertaining the children, by showing them how to build a dam on the beach and re-direct the stream of water flowing back into the sea.  All three children seemed to devise their own tasks with my daughter distributing sand, my eldest son redirecting the rivulets of water and my second son building the dam - they had such a lovely afternoon, completed by an ice-cream on the beach!

Chris took them rock pooling as well where we found many crabs of all sizes, a shrimp, anemones and again they were all entertained for free.  The children found it so satisfying to help Daddy find the crabs and then collect them in their nets to deposit into the buckets of water.  After some time of splashing in puddles and collecting beautiful shells, we put the sea creatures back and said goodbye before setting off back for a well-earned lunch!

Today, I defeated the world of commerce by successfully entertaining my children with a walk on a tow-path in Devon.  What made me proud was that all I did was pass down secrets of nature that my Mum and Granny had shown me.  Wild grasses can be transformed into catapaults and confetti and the possibility of finding a four-leaved clover can occupy a six year old for at least half an hour.  Nature became a fun and magical world that I think beats computer games and football cards any day!  Our last activity was to head to the dunes by the beach where the boys decided to collect large pebbles and find dips in the sand dunes, so they could sit on their (pebble) dragon eggs and wait for them to hatch, while my daughter had great fun chasing waves and throwing stones into the sea.

I just loved watching them choosing their own games in the natural environment, all having fun for free and learning so much at the same time.  At the end of each activity we had to coax the children back home with the lure of food - otherwise they would have stayed there for hours!