Life in the garden

Health warning!

Guess what?

These posts are less frequent because I've been working in the garden, plus yesterday I had almost finished the post and then pressed the wrong button and the whole thing disappeared. It was probably rubbish anyway so here goes for second try.

I think one of the biggest changes I have recognised since moving here is that I'm in the car a lot more than I used to be.

I had a major health shock in 2012 and decided to start getting more exercise, I used the NHS couch to 5k podcasts and began walking to work and abandoning my car. I lost lots of weight and became a fitness pain in the neck, running in the rain and snow and it was great. Then I got painful Achilles tendons and other foot pain and eventually due to numerous other issues the car crept in.

The car is kind of essential right now, supporting me to fulfill caring duties and for getting supplies but I love the fact I have a really good excuse to be outside. The garden I'm lucky to have is big enough to be all consuming.

Wildlife in the garden in Aberdeen consisted of slugs, snails, sparrows, blackbirds and occasional sparrowhawk and of course cats. Wow! Were we in for a shock moving here! All through the night and sometimes during the day we have visitors to our garden. We have been woken by raucous barking from our ever vigilant Romanian rescue dog, thinking that someone was in the garden at 3 in the morning. It turns out that we have hedgehogs, stoats and mice having a party while we sleep. On one occasion a red squirrel unwisely began dancing along the top of the fence until our dog noticed. A few poor birds have hit the windows and in the front garden a few Peter rabbit types have been staging their own rave nibbling and digging at the over wintering plants.

This week I contacted the amazing garden designer who has been helping me to put some ideas into action in the garden. He was pleasantly surprised at how we had managed to advance with things here. Roger Sweetinburgh has written a few books on garden design and he first designed a garden for me in the 1980's. He was at the time offering a garden design service through the Good Housekeeping magazine. Subsequently my mum and my sister had their gardens designed by him. It's been really interesting to see how he managed to fit in all the requirements that we wanted into very different situations.

We have been very happy with the designs and plant suggestions he came up with. It has introduced us to plants that we had no knowledge of and have been delighted with the results.... its easier nowadays to get the plants he was suggesting as the internet has made it easier to source these!

I've had a request to show more of my stitching... random examples of what I have done... paint, machine stitch, hand stitch all with a plant, garden, organic sources.....

We digress.....

This week I have been caring for the little seedlings in my greenhouse...in out shake it all about.

I have courgettes, butternut squash, fennel, cucumber and aubergine seedlings and probably too many to grow on so I will be posting as a swap this week.

I have also been growing marigold seedlings... 2 kinds as I am hoping to use for natural dyeing!

We digress again.....

At the beginning of the year as usual I started thinking about an art/textile project and I decided that natural dyeing is something I would like to do more of. I am surrounded by wonderful and plentiful sources for dyeing. I last did any natural dyeing in 1999 and was woefully unprepared for taking this project forward. So now we are in May and I have just got the fabrics prepared for dyeing. So my through the year dyeing project is starting in May instead of January. Onion skins I have collected are first, along with daffodils and gorse.

Then hopefully a monthly dye bath until next spring.....hoping this will carry me through to a time when we can all breathe a little easier.