Blue Witch

Garden News

Very busy weekend doing lots of Coven Grounds work, even though it's been up to 40 degrees, if one believes the thermometer on the wall, or 31.4 degrees if one believes the weather station's temperature probe in the shade.

Mr BW has been sorting all the veg out - sowing, repotting, planting out, moving in, and give or take a few large tomato plants I now have The Studio back from the green jungle I showed you last week.

Having moved the hens off The Coven Lawn back up into The Orchard, at stupid o'clock on Sunday morning - if we don't pick them out of the hen house while they are still asleep we end up spending hours chasing them around - we're having a bit of a redesign. I felt that some simplification of the existing format was needed as everything was gettting a bit too cluttered.

There's a thin line between 'quirky' and 'kitsch' and we were getting a bit nearer to the latter than felt comfortable. I also wanted to get more things out of pots and into the ground, because I'm no longer able to lug watering cans and they'll be announcing a hosepipe ban again in the south next week no doubt (there's no shortage of water in this country, just poor distribution and a lack of willingness of 'government' to understand that we can't have 11 million new homes built in the south in the next decade without some thought being given to basic infrastructure, like major water pipes from the extreme north and west to the south and east, but, I digress).

One tree (my favourite small tree - a weeping pear) died last autumn and was removed and chopped and chipped (woodburner/compost: waste not want not), leaving an outline brick circle with a paved front, and the old almond tree was getting old and spindly, with leaves only on the end of long long branches which looked untidy. But, we couldn't sacrifice that immediately as it has a wooden seat built around it which we don't want to lose.

So, we chopped the almond tree branches hard back, in the hope that it might rejuvenate, but still leaving a frame for the existing clematises (if that's the plural of clematis?) to scramble over, which immediately changed how everything looked, and started thinking about how we could re-jig the rest.

So far we've decided to use the space where the weeping pear was as the Citrus Grove this summer, and have repotted two existing olive trees that have grown from the '£2.99 twig from Wilkinson's size' from old galvanised pails into two huge pale terracotta pots in a colour that matches the paved front of the brick circle.

I then decided that the garden furniture was just too covered in black goo and green powder to be safe to sit on. In the past I have washed and scrubbed with a stiff brush before re-oiling, but it was well beyond that, and so am I. So, having finished cleaning out the hen houses before they were moved, I turned the power washer on it.

Which, as hopefully you can see, was highly successful. Weathered chair on the left, power washed chair in the middle, washed and teak oiled table on the right.

For years I've said that a power washer would solve many of our problems (cleaning livestock houses, cleaning soffits, cleaning windows, cleaning paved areas, cleaning hardstanding for animal pens), but Mr BW has always been doubtful. I did nothing to further my cause when I borrowed one from a friend three or four years ago, and it proved totally not up to the sort of usage we would give it. In fact, it stopped functioning while we were using it, so it was just as well it was still under guarantee. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that power washers come in different powers, with different price tags attached.

A few weeks back they had an extremely powerful beast in the Aldi Sunday Specials - the sort that is normally around the £250 mark in the DIY sheds - for £79. With a 3-year guarantee. And it's brilliant. It lifts muck off anything. It uses a fraction of the water that doing things with a broom and normal hose does, and a fraction of the time or effort. Very Value.

I reckon you could probably blast unsound/flaking paint off wood with it. Well, that's what I'm hoping as 7 or 8 years ago now, Good Friend BW donated a very old teak garden bench to me that was white gloss painted, with two hundred coats of white gloss (some containing lead no doubt), and no amount of scraping and nitromors has removed all of it, despite another effort each spring when the winter has attacked the remnants. It will be lovely to have it returned to its former glory.

Right, back to some more contemplation of the redesign. The Studio Balcony is a very useful aerial vantage point - oh, by the way, those irises up the top are currently residing there. The stained glass panel in with them is another of Mr BW's crafty creations.

Natural wonders

Our captive breeding programme has been successful.

3 D'Oves locked in the ex-quail cage, to save them after the nasty sparrowhawk dropped by several times, have made 2 progeny. Not quite sure which are the mummy/ies and which the daddy/ies, but...

One tiny hatched one, just minutes old when Mr BW happened to sneak a peek, and one egg breaking open. A D'Ove egg is about a quarter of the mass of a hen egg, and I was amazed at how small this little one is (this picture is easily more than twice life-size). Within a day or so it will be 10 times this size:

Competing with the Magic of Nature, mid-week I magicked up another in the cushion cover series.

This (colours inspired by this very verdant time of year):

With a wave of my wand and my rotary cutter, became this:

Our large thermometer on a west facing external wall hit 37 degrees yesterday. Body temperature. I'm making the most of summer while she lasts.

Friday Question

I've misplaced my list of Friday Questions.

I have to write them down when I think of them, you see, or it gets to Friday and I have mindus blankus.

Given the current state of The Inner Coven, it is unsurprising that I've misplaced the list, actually. Just as soon as I have chucked this lot (*nods to pictures left and right, which are back and front of the same stack*) out of The Studio (yes, the cucumbers and tomatoes and some of the courgettes do already have flowers, and even small fruit, but it's been too cold until this week to empty the fuchsias and grown-on plug-plants for summer tubs out of the 2 greenhouses so that this lot can be planted out in their place (this weekend), so they've been a bit in the way) I might be able to do some sorting spells. Possibly.
... And no Mr BW, thank you, we do not need you telling them that it has actually now been like this for 2 years, since we had to empty The Coven Attic into The Inner Coven so the bui1ders could make The Additional Greenhouse for early spring use Studio :) At least my Witchy Mess is confined to one room.

Perhaps you have Friday Questions that you think should be asked in future?

(NB Following a huge spam attack a couple of weeks ago, the comments are still recuperating - if you get a 'Page not found' don't worry, your comment almost certainly has been noted and will be there if you close the page, wait a few seconds, then reopen it again. Thanks to those who've emailed to let me know and apologies for the temporary annoyance.)

Wednesday

Being suspicious that this current good weather (our outside thermometer measured over 30 degrees yesterday and the day before) could be the summer this year, as happened last year, I am going to switch off my computer and go and do something more interesting instead. If the giant tadpole doesn't eat me first.

Bank Holiday Surrealism

Yesterday it was very sunny.

We went on a 115 mile epic voyage in Mi1dred.

Some of Mi1dred's other classic friends went too.

They were all younger than her.

But everytime we stopped, people looked at her most.

We went down some leafy lanes with grass in the centre of them that we didn't know about.
Even though they were only about 2 miles from The Coven.

They don't seem to be on a latest edition 1:25,000 OS map.

Or on the edition before.

We went on a motorway too.

Mi1dred was scared.

But not as scared as Mr BW.

Even caravans passed Mi1dred.

I shouted, "Poo bag!" at a dog owner with a crappy dog who wasn't using one.

We kept seeing piles of clothes by the sides of roads.

Then we went to see a Nice Lady who gave us tadpoles and a black sheep's f1eece.

One of the big tadpoles ate one of the little tadpoles for tea.

The f1eece was nice and soft.

And had enjoyed its afternoon in the sun on a candlewick bedspread on the Nice Lady's lawn.

We had tea with the Nice Lady and her husband.

The End.

We'll keep the Blue flag flying here :)

I do like the Blueness of the national electoral map. Not that it represents my political stance (I hate them all equally, Vive the BW Party! Good grief, I've just found it was over 3 years ago that I last published any of my Manifesto - click and then scroll down to April 22nd and previous for all 14 parts!), but the Blue is pleasing to me.

We didn't have elections here, but I'm still reeling from the shock of H@rlow (where I once worked) going Blue. Must have been a 15 year old spell finally coming to fruition. That place really is the pits of the earth.

Mr BW has just come home and reported that R2 news is saying that some bookies are paying out on Boris. Given that bookies aren't known for generosity, I'd say that changes are afoot for London.

I'm undecided about whether it will be a good thing. Once an ardent Ken fan (I was a student in London in the 80s in the early days of his London career), I think he (and his cronies) has (have) become very arrogant and dogmatic in his old age. Yes, a lot has been achieved, but there have been a lot of bad decisions, noses in troughs and money wasted or mis-spent in recent years too.

Do you think Boris will get a makeover like Margaret Thatcher did when she came to power? I've just discovered that he's younger than me. And he's got dual nationality. Fascinating. But not so much that I sought to read it before now.

And I want to know how counting a few ballot papers is taking so much longer than expected (latest estimate for results, 10pm). Are they allowing the vote counters to use their mobile phones or something? The hours in every working day in this country that must be wasted on trivial and inconsequential text messaging.

Ah... wait... news just in - one of the counting machines has broken down... A sign of things to come? Or a way of delaying the result so Ken can clear his stuff out of City Hall? Probably not for as long as they did in Zimbabwe though.

Friday Question

Tempting though it is to ask you to respond to Harriet Harman's, ""What we've got to do is be more focused on listening to people and more in touch!" assertion on R4 this morning, and happy as I may be that Golden Brown has been proved to have screwed things up more than Bliar (who must be laughing like a drain today - where does that expression come from?), I think there's more than enough coverage of that issue already. So let's have some trivia instead.

What gadget or device that you use regularly could benefit from modification to make it more user friendly?

I'm voting for those pound coin gadgets on the front of supermarket trolleys. The ones that are meant to ensure you return trolleys in a neat and orderly way. They constantly jam and the dangling chain bits are always getting caught up in the bars of other trolleys. There must be a better way.

Business Culture

Just picking up and elevating a comment from the post below about last night's Apprentice, Dave (have you guessed the name of his baby-to-be yet?) said,

It always amazes me that these, apparently bright, savvy business people can come up with such stupid ideas and make such stupid decisions.

To which I replied,

Do you think they are? I think they're a bunch of nasty scheming wannabes, who haven't a hope in hell of making it any other way.

Would you want to work for, or even with, any of them?

I have to admit that I only half-watch the programme if I happen to be in the room when Mr BW has it on as I have absolutely no respect for how Alan Sugar speaks to people. Bullies and people in positions of 'power' who belittle and treat others the way he does are, I believe, responsible for more unhappiness and sick days in this country than anything else.

Having such a high profile programme on prime time BBC TV, with such characters, just encourages people to think that the only way to be successful is to bully and back-stab, so perpetuating a sick culture of management.

But what are the characteristics of a good boss?

And a bad boss?

May 1st

How did it get to May Day already? And isn't it cold for the time of year?

I turned the central heating off at the beginning of April (probably 3 weeks earlier than normal) when the price of a litre of heating oil went above 50p for the first time. I just refuse to pay that much, so we need to conserve what we have left in the tank. The Middle East holds the rest of the world to ransom methinks. And more to come as the Far East follows suit when it sells us back (at vast cost) all the skills we have outsourced to there and so lost from our own population.

Luckily we have an Aga that provides background warmth throughout the house, as well as providing cooking, drying and some of the hot water (which in turn heats a towel rail heat-leak that keeps the chill off the main bathroom), and two woodburners, one in the lounge (downstairs) and one in the Studio (upstairs), and we still have a huge pile of Jenga blocks recycled from the extension 2 years ago, so heating (when necessary) is free. So we haven't been cold, although it is cold.

Speechless

3 hours to determine the placement of an apostrophe?!

Choosing Baby Names

Tales about how expecting parents select potential names for their unborn child(ren) are not exactly uncommon. People seem to have a lot of trouble choosing that 'perfect' moniker. Unless, of course, they choose to name them after their favourite pop star / F1 driver / BB
contestant.

We're the same, at least when it comes to girl's names. In fact, I'm sure I blogged about it 3-4 years ago when we were last going through this but I can't be bothered to find the post now. With boy's names, we don't have any difficulty at all. We chose our son's name (he's known as 'Cirrus' in this part of blogland but that's obviously not what it says on his birth certificate) long before L got pregnant and we decided upon a second boy's name (first and middle) while she was pregnant. But we never could choose a girl's name that we were both totally happy with. By the time Cirrus was born, we did have a name ready in case it was a girl but I suspect I was more happy with it than L, since it's not longer on the table.

So, fast forward three years and L is pregnant again and we still have trouble. L will suggest a name and I'll screw my face up in displeasure. Or vice versa. L gets to six months and we still don't have a name to use if 'it' turns out to be 'she'.

Before I tell you how we finally solved this problem, let me first tell you about the sort of names we like. For a start, we prefer traditional names, so no Britneys or Jensens or Jades. We also like long, 3-4 syllable names that have a single syllable shortening.

Cirrus' name fits this perfectly. We also have to cope with compatibility problems with our surname. Suffice it to say that rules out names like Joshua and Amy (not that we'd have chosen either of those specifically), which cuts down the available pot of names even further.

So, how have we now ended up with the name sorted, ready for the big day in <=12 weeks? In the end it was simple; L just asked Cirrus (who's barely three) what we should call the baby if it is a girl. He thought about it for a second or so and uttered a single syllable. L and I looked at each other. It was perfect. There's an obvious lengthening that fulfils all of our other criteria and that, it turns out, we both really like. It was then relatively simple to choose a middle name from among the rejected names and within five minutes it was all settled and we were wondering how it could have been so difficult.

There we are then. If we have a daughter in July, then we will one day be able to tell her that her brother had a hand in naming her.

For anybody who's now totally confused, that was a Guest Post from Dave, once of Clear Blue Skies, who some of you will remember (blimey, last post nearly 3 years ago!). It's always nice to have the opportunity to catch up with once-bloggers. And even nicer when one of them sends you a Guest Post when you're too exhausted to write your own posts :)

I asked and Dave said that we can guess what the name is, and he will confirm if anyone gets it correct.

Thought for the day

The highest form of human intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating.

- Krishnamurti