The Most Unusual Buds In The Garden

Happy Easter!

The holiday has already begun and most people are looking forwards to a long weekend and the start of a new month.  Sadly, the rain has come hand in hand with the holiday where we live, and the next few days are a continuous stream of wet weather and frustrated gardeners. I don’t really want to be known as a fair weather gardener, but being totally soaked for the whole day is no one’s dream of heaven.

It looks like we have a window on Sunday when the tap is turned off and everyone will be able to rush out and tidy the garden, albeit it will be pretty soggy by that point.

On the positive side, it will mean that people spend some time together avoiding the rain, (I’m clutching at straws), doing some of the jobs that always get put off or shopping for that item that they didn’t manage to get at Xmas.

I hope that you live far enough away from me that your weather is better, or at least dry.

April Flowers

It is that particular start of a month where spaghetti grows on trees and the sighting of the Loch Ness monster suddenly rears its head.

Expect the unexpected.

Will Jesus make a reappearance on the anniversary of his rising from the dead? Will we see the first chocolate egg fruiting bush? Is there a hot cross bun that is giving us a sign?

I am not religious and I don’t want to offend anyone who is, but I am sure that whoever Jesus was, he would be very disturbed to come back now and see that his life has been commemorated with enormous consumerism. The discovery of chocolate turning a religious occasion that celebrates resurrection, rebirth and fertility amongst other things, into a question for most children as to how many eggs they got and which relative thinks most highly of them by giving them the biggest egg. I thought that consumerism was rife when I was young, but the current generation of kids have a whole world of consumer facing inputs to contend with, and the Easter eggs come into the shops just after Xmas.

April has actually been a really good month for the garden in recent years. The notion of April showers hasn’t really happened and the weather, especially in Scotland, has been some of the best days of the year. In fact last year I visited Glasgow more or less every week from February until July and I didn’t see any rain. I was probably very lucky, but the weather was mostly beautiful.

This is at odds with my recent visit that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Flowering Currant Bush - Another Sign of Spring

It may not yet be quite the weather we would recognise as spring, but the garden is moving on anyway. The buds are popping, the birds are very active and the grass is starting to grow. Herein lies the frustration that our newly serviced mower can’t be put to good use and scrape a layer of growth off the various lawns.

The badger was particularly destructive at the end of last year and the squirrel has been burying his nuts in the lawns over the winter. We now need to shorten the grass cover a bit and repair the holes that litter the lawn.

I managed to get out heavy roller out recently and flatten some of the digging, but this has left bare patches on the lawns which now need the grass to grow back.

There is a picture opposite of the new growth, but we have not had any sun to capture this in its full glory.

Easter Chocolates

Did you know that the first company in the UK to make chocolate eggs was actually based in Bristol?

A heritage that has been lost in the mists of time.

If you live in Keynsham, then I am sure you will be acutely aware that the former home of chocolate in the West Country and one of the original three large chocolate manufacturers in the UK has been transformed into a housing complex. When Kraft Foods bought Cadbury a few years ago, despite assurances to the contrary, they closed down the site of the chocolate factory and shifted production outside the UK.

But this site was originally owned by J. S. Fry and Sons who invented chocolate eggs in the UK in 1873, along with various other products that you will recognise such as Turkish Delight and Chocolate Cream bars.

Here are a few more interesting facts regarding Easter eggs that you might not know;

• 10% of the UK’s annual spending on chocolate happens at Easter – 80 million eggs
• The average number of Easter eggs per child is – five – double the amount of calories recommended for a week
• Mediaeval Easter eggs were boiled with onions to give them a golden sheen
• Before chocolate eggs, people used to give cardboard eggs filled with gifts
• By 1892, John Cadbury had also started to make Easter eggs and was producing 19 different product lines
•  The tallest chocolate Easter egg ever was made in Italy in 2011. At 10.39 metres in height and 7,200 kg in weight, it was taller than a giraffe and heavier than an elephant!
• In 2007, an egg covered in diamonds sold for almost £9 million. The egg is very special because, every hour, a cockerel made of jewels pops up from the top of the egg, flaps its wings four times, nods its head three times and makes a crowing noise!

Lawn Damage

A few weeks ago I described how we had transformed one of our rooms into a virtual public bar with the addition of a drinks cooler, a truck load of alcohol, a dart board and various games. I decided to keep this arrangement and we have been trying to buy a permanent drinks cooler.

It has been a long saga with various false starts but we finally succeeded this week and it was even in one piece, no broken doors. However, it seems that any progress we make in any one direction always comes with a downside.

The lorry driver who delivered the drinks cooler was particularly useless when it came to driving. As he climbed out of the van and started to unload, he said, “I am sorry about your lawn”. At this stage I hadn’t seen what he had done. He took me to inspect.

As you will see from the picture opposite, he had done an amazing job of driving all over it in several places. I am amazed that some of these drivers are allowed on the road. If he can’t reverse on a drive with no other cars, distractions and things to avoid – imagine what happens when he has a tight spot.

He said, “it was difficult to see where I was going”.

“No **it Sherlock”, was my reply as I looked on aghast. “Why did you have to reverse?”

“I thought it would be easier, I am good at reversing”, he said.

I have added, fixing the lawn, to my list of spring tasks for the garden.

The Harem Does Synchronised Pecking

As I mentioned last time, we have been trying to save as many toads as we can. There are enormous numbers of them and they have a penchant for standing in the middle of the road in the dark.

The tide has slowly turned and there are now many less of them appearing at dusk and venturing out. They are mating everywhere in the garden that they can find a spare partner. To be frank, it is a bit of a sex fest. Not only are the toads at it, but we also have a harem of pheasants in the back garden. The male I photographed last week has a couple of females that he attends to. We are just waiting for some small ones to appear.

The toads have even got confused about where to lay their spawn. The picture below shows some of it in the middle of the lawn.

They have also formed a choir in and around the pond. When the sound of rain stops long enough, one can hear them croaking in unison.

In fact, there are so many of them that we have to be careful not to tread on them if we venture out after dark, or we move anything around in the garden, such as bags of garden waste.

It will soon be over, but then the hatching of so many young frogs and toads has a different challenge. How do I cut the grass without slaughtering all the young ones?

A problem for another day. At least there has been no more toad rage. 

New Look Shrub

With it being a long weekend there are many jobs that need doing in the garden. Last weekend I started the job of cutting back some of the larger shrubs, see opposite. This buddleia was in excess of 20ft high and was flowering only on the ends.

A couple of hours with a large hacksaw, fighting with the enormous brambles that have infiltrated the locality, and we had a shrub that was manageable again. It is said that if there were a nuclear war, the two things that would survive the best are buddleia and cockroaches. Thankfully, we only seem to have the former.

We have also had to get tree surgeons in to “trim” some of our bigger trees. If you leave them for a few years, they soon grow out of control. However, our team of four people can make quite a difference and get rid of all the rubbish. But spending many hundreds of pounds cutting a few trees back always feels like a complete waste of hard earned cash.

I hope you manage to get started on your garden this weekend if you haven’t already. Maybe you are well ahead of me. I will have to simplify my gardening this year so that I can stay on top of it. Travelling to Poland regularly on a Sunday rather eats into my spare gardening time.

But the feeling of fresh air on your face while you work in the garden is so uplifting, I could never stop doing it now that I have the bug. There is nothing better after an intense week, than forgetting it all while working the garden. It is therapy and exercise in one.

"Almost Banksy"

In trying to improve the look of our bar, I invested in some stencils. If you have never tried to spray paint a stencil onto the wall, it is much harder than it looks. No matter how much care you take, the spray paint seeps under the stencil and you lose definition. We now have an “almost Banksy” stencil next to the dart board. Oh well, it will keep me busy while the rain falls.

This weekend the cats have been particularly friendly. The rain limits their time outside and therefore they instantly want entertaining indoors. In working on the stencils, there has been lots of different things for them to explore and they have been at their most explorative. They keep jumping on me at every opportunity, and expect to be cuddled. They also sit by the door and watch the world outside for hours. Oh for the life of a cat!

It would be appropriate to put something Easter related in the way of music here but ceremonial chanting is not really my thing.

But here are a couple of chants that you might enjoy, if not for the song then for the video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5TEqCM-t0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX7hOpvhPtw

My better half went to see Heatwave this week. Not one to repeat unless you are a real die hard fan.

Have a great Easter!

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