Spring Fair - 2011 at the NEC.

WE HAVE MOVED

2007-08-28T14:43:00.001Z

We have moved and split in 2 - we are now here
and here
Please come and visit!
J
x

We've moved

2007-08-12T17:29:00.000Z

I've been thinking for a while that I need to do something different with the blog now that many people visit the website first and are primarily interested in photos of our cutting garden and workroom. I am probably most interested in the chance for conversation with a blog, the chance to bat ideas about with people.

I have decided to move to typepad and to split the blog into 2

One part Snapdragon's garden http://snapdragongarden.typepad.com/snapdragons_garden/
will be about the day to day events in the garden - flowers, things I am making, etc.

The other Snapdragon's Chat http://snapdragongarden.typepad.com/snapdragons_chat/ will be about the back issues that crop up while trying to grow the business.

I do hope that you will stop by and have a chat - all comments and objections welcome.

And I know it is a bind, but could the people who generously link to me please change the url?

Thanks
Jane

Why do we hare around?

2007-08-10T13:15:00.001Z

Why is it so desirable to be too busy? Is it an essential part of the human condition?

A lot of people tell me variations on the "I'm too busy" storyline. It tends to be "Oh you are so lucky, I am just too busy to buy from local shops" or "Oh you are so lucky, I am just too busy to help out at the school".

I used to think, in my insecurity, that it was actually being used as a synonym for "too important" - as in "I am too important to help with weeding playgrounds". Now I am deciding that it is a bit more complicated than that.

Like the jacket on the back of the office chair and the boasting about taking a Blackberry on holiday I think that this frantic "busyness" is perhaps itself a sign of insecurity - of needing to be seen to be doing things. A symptom of our tendency to judge people's worth by what they do for a living. A person who does so much that they are always "too busy" much therefore be more important than someone who has time to drink coffee in the sunshine.

We all live busy lives, "too busy" lives, but I also think that we all make decisions about what we prioritise in those lives. I know that when I use the "too busy" phrase it is usually about something I don't want to do anyway - I am, for example, "too busy" to go to the gym or have a manicure. That is indeed rubbish - if I hadn't prioritised reading or gazing at birds in the garden over going to the gym I would indeed have time - as well as a more toned derriere and nicer nails.

My resolution is to find some other, more honest, phrase to explain why I don't do all those things that I perhaps should (ironing, labelling school clothes, going to the theatre are a few more examples) and yet how there still seems to be time for making mayonnaise or embroidering baby shoes.

My theory of time is that expands when I slow down - today the baby housemartins are learning to fly from cherry tree to telephone wire and back. The air is full of their chirps.

We also have Timmy, the Jack Russell we fostered a while back, here for his holidays so I have my click-clicking shadow again.

The hares in the top photo were made as a response to a request for a boy's equivalent of the ragdolls - I toyed with a boy doll but had my reservations - these hares in oilskin dungarees were the solution. The one on the right sold in the shop this morning - the other is available for £28.95. NOW SOLD - Thank you (I might make more when I get time so e-mail me if you want one)

Boden????? Surely not

2007-08-09T12:30:00.000Z

Yesterday Suffolkmum wrote a post about having been namechecked in a newspaper article as one of a group of "Boden bloggers". The article was a good example of snidely written lazy journalism, probably dashed off so the author could get away on holiday, and Suffolkmum was a bit miffed.

I would have been too and it is obvious that the journalist had simply visited the Country Living Magazine website and copied down some of the names without reading the blogs. Suffolkmum strikes me as someone who thinks a lot and writes sensitively and humanely about some very difficult topics. I enjoy reading her blog.

The article as a whole was poking fun at the Boden set - now I suspect that this is one of those groups that we all say "Oh yes, I know who that is" but would never admit to being part of. Even in my wildest fantasies I wouldn't identify myself with the smugly smirking models with "their" spookily groomed children in Johnnie Boden's catalogues. My self image is much more mucky.

And yet back to the article . . . we have decided this year to cut down on flying for leisure so shall be getting the train to Paris in October

. . . and Zoe has mentioned that she fancies holidaying in a yurt . . .and Euan watches airstream caravans on eBay and dreams of one parked in our drive . . .and we have a couple of Emma Bridgewater mugs . . . and a Cath Kidston ironing board cover . . .I've just finished Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (but didn't find it boring) . . . the children have a lot of hand me down Boden t-shirts and I have a pink linen dress. Apart from the school fees, the guilty foreign holidays and the drawstring trousers I pretty much ticked the supposed characteristics of a "Boden blogger".

And yet . . . I am so many, many miles away. In muck.

Fairly depressing reading for a non-conformist though!

The photos today are more cornflowers because I forgot to mention that they last out of water brilliantly so you can cut them up and make jewellery, or if you are being more elegant, cuffs for candles and napkins. These will last a couple of days - ideal for flower fairies.

Cornflowers blue . . .

2007-08-08T13:10:00.000Z

Cornflowers with their searing blue are one of the essentials of the cutting garden.

I grow mine from seed sown in April, though I keep intending to start it off in September and over winter the seedlings - perhaps this year.

I don't actually grow that many plants - just a single row - as the important thing is keeping on top of the picking. Let just a few flowers turn into seedheads and the whole plant will stop flowering.

In the case f cornflowers I find less plants is definitely more flowers.

Some flowers I sell at the van on Fridays but that still leaves a lot flowering through the week that still need harvesting so I have taken to drying them.
It is important to catch them at the right stage or they will disintegrate into (very pretty) petals. While this is ideal for confetti or for sprinkling onto tables it isn't what I want as I have plans for delicate cornflower wreaths.

This top picture shows the stage they need to be harvested at both for drying and as cut flowers- the centre of the flower a pointing inwards tightly - the whole flower seems to be slightly inward looking.

The lower photo shows the next stage - a much more open centre with the stamens spread out. Flowers like this will still dry but just won't keep their shape - if you want confetti just cut the heads off and put them on a tray somewhere warm and dark for a few days, pull them to bits and store them in the dark somewhere dry until the wedding - (if it is ages away, one of those silica sachets you get with shoes would help keep it all very dry).

To dry stems of cornflowers cut flowers as per top photo and then bunch 20 or so stems together with an elastic band. Hang upside down somewhere warm and dark until the stems are stiff enough to support the heads - probably a week to ten days.

If you are storing them wrap carefully in a shoebox and ensure that the stems don't tangle.

On a different note we had Baldernock Garden Club to visit yesterday evening and it was quite a different experience - I knew it would be as they phoned in advance t check they could bring wine. It was a lovely sunny evening with enough of a breeze to keep away the midgies and everyone was an absolute delight.

Farmers markets

2007-08-07T13:07:00.000Z

Yesterday afternoon's Food Programme was about Farmers' Markets - amazingly, despite being a celebration of ten years of Farmers Markets it was an intelligent programme, not just an idealisation of the concept.

I actually have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Farmers' Markets. I love selling at them - the customers tend to be interested and chatty - but I have reservations about them being the answer for either the foodie consumer or the small producer.

There seems to be, to be honest, a big gap between the markets in Scotland and the majority of those in England (don't know about Wales or Ireland - Julia - did I read that your sister used to do markets????). To take a stall trading for 4 -5 hours in Edinburgh or Glasgow costs £70.50, add on petrol and any help you pay for and it means that to break even you need to sell about £200 worth of goods.

This means that unless you have a semi-industrial product with a guaranteed yield it is difficult to regularly attend markets. Everyone who grows their product has this problem - unless I have £300-400 worth flowers ready to pick on the Friday night there is no point in going, the salad, speciality veg and herb sellers are the same. The result is that the markets tend to have the same stalls no matter where you are in central Scotland - Caurnie Soaps, Ella Drinks, Inverawe smoked salmon. Now these are all good stalls selling fine products, but they are medium sized businesses selling to delis, health food stores and supermarkets, they are not the small scale farmer/producers that the markets were originally designed to support. The problem is that unfortunately these growing businesses are not really being joined by new ventures. There is not room at the moment for the Scottish equivalent of the French market trader with his couple of baskets of ceps or samphire.

This means that as a consumer the range of goods available at a Farmers Market is very limited - I did a quick poll round foodie friends and none shop any more at the markets, apart from Partick Farmers market "which has a good bread stall".

One of the questions raised by the Food Programme was whether the rules of a market over restrict the foods on offer, and whether would it be better to have food artisan made but from wider geographical area. I suppose this would in theory turn Partick Farmers market into something more akin to Borough Market. Should we in fact be encouraging people to do more of their weekly shop at a market - does there need to be bananas as well as carrots and swedes even though they cannot be grown commercially in the UK? Does it matter that many Farmers Markets are just a middle class thing? Should we be following Manhattan's lead in having Farmers markets in less affluent areas - should there be more funding available?

It was as I say, an intelligent programme that swam against the knee jerk reaction of "Farmers Markets" = "Good Thing".

I have one farmer friend who feels that, if the markets purport to help farmers, then he should be able to attend with any of his farm diversification be that vegetable boxes or bicycle maintenance.

Do people shop at farmers markets and do they find what they want there? What is more important, quality, choice or locality? The further you get into this food thing the more difficult it becomes.

I also hate buying my meat ready cut and shrink wrapped in plastic so that is 70% stalls ruled out.

Autumn is here?

2007-08-06T14:30:00.001Z

This morning, walking across the garden to feed the pigs, I would have sworn that it was October.

It was beautiful - the valley was hazy with cloud the hills rising above it, all the plants glistened with water droplets and spiders' webs.

It was beautiful but there was no way that it was August.

Saturday was HOT. I fear it may we have been the summer.

I am making things for Christmas photoshoots so I fear I have brought it all on mysef!
Stipa gigantea

A visitor

2007-08-03T11:44:00.000Z

I have a problem with writers I admire. It is probably because writing is an unfulfilled ambition, but I just cannot behave naturally around them.

So when Anna Pavord, author of "The Tulip" and many other books and gardening correspondent for The Independent newspaper, wrote to say she would like to visit I went into a bit of a panic.

Friends and family assumed that it was that I was worrying abut the state of the garden but no - it was much more serious than that.

I am pretty much immune to celebrity culture - usually I meet "famous" people and neglect to notice that they are "famous" - being on tv just doesn't do it for me.

But writers, now that is quite different . . . either I am propelled into being incredibly boring - and I mean incredibly - I once talked to Adam Nicolson about slugs and ways to exterminate them for a full 20 minutes - or I am reduced to a squeak. Very generous friends have in the past introduced me to Candia McWilliam, Claudia Roden, and Naomi Wolf and have been rewarded by me becoming suddenly mute. They don't bother now.

So my panic was worry about which route I would chose - tedium or tongue-tied.

However - neither happened (well I might have been boring but I kept away from the subject of slugs). Anna Pavord is just very, very interesting and interested - it was a delight to meet her and we shall be in The Independent in September.

Staking and storage solved in one

2007-08-02T08:52:00.001Z

I am very bad at staking things in time - every year my garden note book at this time of year says - STAKE!!!!!!!

So as usual, the first days of August have seen me trotting round clumps of plants with string and canes rather than having constructed something artfully tasteful out of hazel in April.

Looking for something to top the canes I suddenly thought of the small coloured glass vials I use for making wreaths and garlands - they fit perfectly on top of the canes and give the whole bed a celebratory feel. They will stop me jabbing my eyes when picking and it solves the problem of where I am going to store 240 small bottles to boot!

Reflections

2007-08-01T07:25:00.001Z

Ginny at the Flour Loft has nominated me for a Blogger reflections award which is very kind of her. Euan's comment was "Reflection or narcissism? Hmm?"
I can never manage to download images or buttons from the web so instead I put a photo of our eldest cats - Bix and Phoebe - drinking from the kitchen tap as there are "reflections" in it - how desperate is that?

The idea is that I now nominate blogs that make me reflect on life, that influence me in some way.

The problem is that I always nominate the same blogs - though I do spend time blog hopping, linking from one to another, there are very few blogs that I visit regularly.

What I value in a blog is honesty and a conversation - I like comments sections which elaborate on the topic. This is why I personally try to answer any comments on a posting, not by e-mail. I particularly like comments that debate, disagree and bring in a different angle. Some blogs seem to achieve this really well though, interestingly, they are not the sites which get the most people commenting.

Some blogs that I visit most days have already been nominated for the award - The ones that haven't are by Heather at Eieflud - a business blog which discusses perfume in a very interesting, emotive way and is honest about the frustrations of running a small business, Gigibird, where Lynne muses on life, ethics and how we live - she has a good small bunch of commenters who are prepared to be cheeky, and Love Honour and Disobey, a relatively new blog where Gina allows herself to be both grouchy and funny in public.

There are other blogs that also make me think, but too often I have just read a single posting and then hopped on somewhere else, unable to find my way back. This serendipity is partly what makes it all interesting.

Becoming a control freak

2007-07-31T12:24:00.001Z

I have always regarded myself as a laid back kind of person but this week I have found myself developing into a horrible control freak.

The first thing that happened was that the dahlias began to bloom and instead of this - Rip City

There was this - Arabian Knight

As one customer said when I contacted her "Well at least it isn't yellow"

Then the lilies began to bloom and instead of this - Netty's Pride -

There was this - Sorayo.

I contacted my supplier - he contacted his and we have agreed that the bulbs and tubers be replaced with the correct varieties in the spring.

I have also contacted the customers that I know bought these but I can't remember everyone - if you bought either from me and it has bloomed as the wrong variety please let me know so that I can refund your money or replace in the Spring. Fortunately it isn't affecting all the lilies - because if there was ever a beauty this is it. I think that it is a case of rogue handfuls being added to make up weight on a popular line.

My supplier, who has to write to me in English as my Dutch is non-existent, sounds very menacing in a second language - he has "forced" his supplier to admit he sold Arabian Knight rather than Rip City; he has "confronted the lily supplier with photographic evidence" and will be "dealing with him severely". I have visions of the lily man being suspended mafia style above a tulip grading machine.

Actually it is not funny - we all depend for our reputation on others and if a supplier is not reliable it condemns us all along the chain. There is nothing I can do this year - and my mantra for the week is Caroline's "well at least they aren't yellow"

wedding photos

2007-07-30T07:36:00.001Z

The sun shone, the flower arch stayed in place and everyone looked like they were having a wonderful time.

I really enjoyed arranging the flowers for this wedding - the venues were great, the caterers (Nairns) provided very classy table settings and were helpful and professional, and the families were open to suggestions.

That said - I now know why I only do one wedding a month, I don't tink I have ever worked as hard in my life.
These are a few photos of the flowers. Not brilliant shots I'm afraid but the photos are always the last thing to be done and tend to be taken in a rush.

First is a pew end bunch with sweet peas, apple mint and hetty's pin cushion.

Second is the pillars in Balfron High School draped in ivy with flowers in coloured glass bottles strung amongst them.

Thirds is the top table with glass cubes of flowers and glass vials wired along the front (I was very pleased with the way this worked - simple and pretty in the sunshine)

Forth is cones of petal confetti - purple sweet pea and delphinium petals and pink roses. This looked gorgeous as all the children took a cone and threw them over the bride and groom as they came out the church. Much much prettier than tissue paper.

Now I am away to do the much, much less fun job of clearing everything away.

I now get a lot of queries about eco-weddings from all over the country and am considering adding a bit to the website about how to do simple things to cut down the carbon footprint of wedding flowers. What do you think?

As requested .

2007-07-27T14:31:00.001Z

Sweet peas on the vine and waiting for the wedding.

Back

2007-07-26T13:37:00.001Z

Well its back to work after a few days spent beach combing on Kingsbarns Beach near to St Andrews. We borrowed a cottage from a friend which was ten minutes walk from the beach - these poppies and ragwort growing out of the top of a wall were one of the things we passed on the way.

Now I am busy working on the flowers for a wedding at the weekend - making moss garlands to put over the arch into the church, taping grids on glass vases and painting barrels to plant up with daisies.

But first I think that I shall make myself a cup of coffee and go and delight in the sight of thousands of blooming sweet peas before they all get cut tomorrow.

2007-07-20T07:30:00.001Z

Yesterday was the beginning of our "holiday" - I am back working in the shop today but then away for a few days away from the computer, weeding and packing up wire baskets!

We went to Perthshire to fulfil promises made to the girls last year. Last June we all picked a touristy thing we would like to do but then the summer was so gloriously sunny we just played outside all the holidays and didn't venture out at all.

It isn't exactly like that this year so we got in the car and headed for Perthshire.

Zoe's choice was to go and see the ospreys at Loch of the Lowes - this has two great hides with telescopes trained on osprey nests so you can watch the birds flying over the loch, catching perch and then bringing them back to the nest for everyone to feast on. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has a couple of webcams sited at the nest so you can follow the ospreys' progress when back home

Katie's choice was to go to the Crannog Centre on Loch Tay - a reconstruction of a crannog - a prehistoric house built on stilts over the loch. It was a very hands on place - we got to sit round a fire in the crannog discussing what would be eaten, who would have lived there, how many people would be in the house, where would they keep their animals. Then we had a chance to have a go at wood turning with a pole lathe, making fire, spinning and pecking holes in weight stones.

The photo shows Katie watching the very impressive demonstration of how to make fire (which has me worried).

Both places were examples of what tourist venues should be - authentic, enthusiastic, realistically priced and completely non-disneyfied.

I have found out that I share a certain garden aesthetic with the iron age - hurdle fences, rough hewn seats, stone weights - I took a lot of photos - I'm sure I could find a use for those weights.

I shall be away from computers until next Thursday.

Space and simplicity

2007-07-18T15:49:00.001Z

I have just finished reading Margaret Forster's book Keeping the world away - a novel about the effect that Gwen John's painting of the corner of an attic bedroom has on the women who hang it on their walls.

It is, in part, a study of the yearning for simplicity and control symbolised by the spare, composed painting.

I enjoyed the book very much and was thinking of it today while I drove though the sublime landscape of deep cleft valleys and deep reflective lochs that is between here and Loch Fyne.

It is a beautiful, beautiful drive, I was on my own in the car and it is quite the most relaxing thing I have done this week. I was going up to The Tree Shop, run by the Ardkinglas tree nursery to pick up some beautiful white birch trees - Betula utilis "Jacquemontii snowqueen" which I am intending to use to make a small glade at this wedding in ten days time. The idea is that it will make the large space a bit more intimate and give a sense of enclosure for the guests who want to sit down after the meal away from the music.

At the moment the state of the house is getting to me. It is completely my own fault so I can't really complain - but I do. It isn't really a case of it not being clean - it is just that we have far too much stuff in a house with no storage and I try to run a business at the same time. Add into this mix we bought kitchen furniture before we have enlarged the kitchen and that we are all messy, messy creatures who can't seem to pick up anything off our seemingly magnetic floors.

The result is a feeling of camping in amidst piles of toppling stuff - it is driving me mad and I now want to move out into Gwen John's little attic with only a chair, a desk and a vase of primroses.

Sturdy but not so you would know.

2007-07-17T14:14:00.001Z

I really dislike the waste that goes into event flowers - the discarded flowers, seen for only 20 minutes - so I am always keen to transport flowers from church to reception or to refashion church flowers as bouquets to be presented later in the day. It makes financial sense too, a flower budget can be stretched that bit further and a more flowery day had overall.

I am working on flowers for a wedding at the moment where the flowers on the church windowsills will transfer to become table centres at the reception. It will work well as it is a large generous wedding and this way the windowsills can be more lavishly decorated - with 5 cube vases full of flowers put together on each- than they would be if the flowers were simply for the service.

The trick is to make the arrangements sturdy enough to survive being packed up quickly as we race from church to reception while the photographs are taken. The extra trick is making them look light and airy and not at all sturdy.

So today I have been playing around with shapes and blooms - a large part of the styling of the wedding is that everything is in clear glass vases so I won't use oasis which would be the obvious solution. I think I shall use a tape grip and a mix of poppy seedheads, thistles and drumstick alliums surrounded by a fluff of parsley flowers as in the photo above.

Toning it down.

2007-07-15T13:21:00.001Z

6 or 7 years ago I went to a demonstration given by Sarah Raven in her sister Jane's house in Edinburgh. I can't remember how I heard about it - it was before Raven was that well known in Scotland - and I stuck out a bit as I was oddly young and un-lunchy compared to the other atendees.

At lunch I was at a table of fifty-something "ladies who lunch and attand lectures", next to a very stylish, petite, brunette who did nothing but moan about the (very good) food, the stairs to the demonstration room, the lack of cushions on the chairs and so on. After she had exhausted complaining about that day's entertainment she moved onto the previous week's garden club trip to Great Dixter "And do you know Christopher Lloyd has bindweed in his borders, he has the cheek to open his garden to the public and it has bindweed in it".

I don't know what this obviously unhappy woman moved onto next as I got up, made my excuses and left.

I didn't post over the weekend because I had a very rude group of people visit me here on Saturday and it has taken me 2 days to tone down my response. I am not going to go into details as it is all done and dusted and I have received apologies from some people who were with the group. I know that at least one reads this blog and I hoipe that she will continue to do so as it was nice to meet her.

The result, however, is that we shall be following the lead of other working gardens and we shall no longer be opening up to groups. It was particularly galling as - had I not been waiting in for this pre-arranged visit - I would have been watching my daughter perform in George Square in Glasgow.

July's flower tutorial

2007-07-13T12:38:00.001Z

I have finally got round to putting up July's tutorial on how to make a rose candle holder with oasis.

The containers I used are small zinc holders - I only sell these at Christmas for people to make their own arrangements but in the meantime they can be got from Caroline Zoob's online store after July 30th (she is closed till then). They are very useful things. As well as being lovely taper holders in their own right you can float flowers round them, fill them with small shells, sweets, beans or make them more elaborate with oasis and a flower arrangement round a bigger candle as here.

A cup and saucer also works well.

I use them all the time for weddings where they also make great place card holders with a bit of looped wire jammed with blutack into the candle hole.

The most stressful day

2007-07-12T15:39:00.001Z

I am posting this image of a lovely calming hydrangea heart to compensate for having the MOST STRESSFUL DAY.

This morning was fine - not really my sort of thing but there you go. Katie wanted to spend her holiday money - £13.68 - so we went into Glasgow and she went into a frenzy in Claire's Accessories where they had a special deal where you could get10 sale items for £5.

We now have a very happy 6 year old with lots of glittery bits in her hair.

Then I got back here to find that the buttons on my website were not all working properly - aaaarggggh - lots of individual orders instead of nicely grouped ones. I emailed everyone to confirm their orders and refund their multiple postages and thought "Aha, it is a problem with the shopping baskets - I can fix that"

So I redid all the shopping basket buttons on the website, very tedious work, - loaded it all up and found that now NOTHING worked.

Hmmmm. I was not a happy bunny. I ate a lot of chocolate (73% cocoa - allowed), I stomped around, I phoned the Stirling Enterprise IT man (who was out). In the end it turned out that I had bookmarked paypal and they had subsequently changed their site so none of my buttons matched their baskets. Therefore nothing connected and you just got error messages.

Now I have redone it all again and it looks to be working. I think. Of course I have managed to b****r up all the spacing on the pages in my panic but that is for another day. I have put a note up about contacting me if anything doesn't work.

See pride comes before a fall. How professional I must look.

I am now off to pack up these baskets and calm down so that they can be sent off with love! After the postal strike that is.

Country Living

2007-07-11T14:24:00.001Z

Hoooo! Woooo! as my youngest would say.
2 posts in one day.
The excuse is my Country Living magazine dropped through the door and there we are - one of our painted handle baskets in the Emporium section!

Irrelevant mice

2007-07-11T07:59:00.000Z

Recently I have lost a few stone in weight and in attempting to adjust my steroid medication to fit with my new BMI I have knocked myself out of kilter and am really knackered.
Therefore - instead of spending the evenings pulling thistles and digging beds in advance of the garden club coming on Saturday, I have been making what Euan is terming "those highly irrelevant mice". This is as in "And are Connell Garden Club going to be impressed with these ranks of highly irrelevant mice?". I should point out that, while I am sitting on the deck embroidering dresses for mice, he is busy strimming a path to let the garden club members into the garden.

When I was small the magazine with the craft patterns in it was "Woman's Weekly" - my Gran got it, storing it under her sofa cushions to keep it in mint condition until our visits. Then my Mum would make things from it - mainly small soft furry toys. the main designer was a woman called Jean Greenhowe so when I saw a book of her patterns I snapped it up.

They are a contrast to today's toy patterns - whereas today's hand crafted toys scream out Japanese inspired individuality, these aim for the bland expressionless uniformity of mass production. The aim was to make something as good as you could get in the shops

I was feeling tired, I had some brown felted blanket scraps, I needed something fiddly and fairly brain free to do so I decided to make a dormouse. The photo is from the Jean Greenhowe book - a fleecy dormouse in a dormouse house.

And here is one of my irrelevant mice - oddly they look nothing like the Greenhouse version - it reminds me of being a teenager and desperately trying to fit in, buying the same clothes as everyone else and somehow still looking different.

The winner in the weather

2007-07-10T07:06:00.000Z

These leopard lilies (lilium pardilinium) seem to revel in the cool, damp weather we have been getting this summer.

They have completely taken over one half of a long border - rising up through everything else with their glossy whorls of leaves topped by these recurving spotted flowers - like elaborate turbans.

Lilies are an interesting flower from a commercial point of view. They are the most expensive bulbs I buy and as you can't cut them the first year that adds to the cost both in money and space. They are, however, essential at this time of year - taking over from the alliums and filling in the "big bloom" gap until the dahlias, sunflowers and gladioli come on stream.

Lilies are also a standard florist (and supermarket) flower. Amy Stewart's book Flower Confidential documents the development of the Stargazer lily and how it was its upright facing buds and increased "packability" that led to its cornering the market. Certainly you would not want to try and pack these into florists boxes - the buds all hang down and the flowers are short and wide - they also go from bud to bloom in a few hours, though the blooms than have a good vase life.

My customers - and I am aware that they are a self selecting group - are also not that keen on lilies - particularly scented lilies and "no scented lilies" is the most common note on my subscription database. I, however, love these - they are elegant, rich and at the moment taking over the garden.

By the way - ages ago I paid a fortune for some "Bellingham hybrid" leopard lilies as recommended by Christopher Lloyd - these grow in my garden alongside the species variety and I can see no difference at all in looks of vigour (though there is a 4 fold difference in price).

Not knowing "how its always done"

2007-07-08T14:59:00.000Z

I have always preferred working with people who are outside the field they were trained in. Perhaps it is natural, given that I changed careers from the very academic art gallery curator to the very muddy gardening florist.

It pre-dates that though - the best exhibition I worked on in terms of sheer outside the box excitement was at Kelvingrove museum with Ben Kelly - designer of the Manchester nightclub The Hacienda. He had no concept that things couldn't be done - the problems of listed buildings, crane access, getting porters to work late and so on meant nothing to him as he had never worked within a hierarchical institution like a council art gallery - so miraculously they got done.

To be honest I think it was a nightmare for the Kelvingrove curator in charge of working with him but for a lowly minion it was an eye-opener in how being trained in "how things are done" can be a real disadvantage.

I have been thinking about this this week as I have to work out how I deal with florists who want to buy flowers. Most florists come here because they have been steered in our direction by brides who want to curb their carbon footprint by having Scottish grown flowers at their wedding. It is not usually the florist's idea which is probably not a good start.

Then they visit and we have the problem of the flowers not being on show as it is the wrong season and my photographs all being of things growing in the garden, not laid out in boxes. We have a discussion that goes something like "well will you have any gerberas?", "no", "cream orchids?", "no", "Bacarrat roses?" "no" and as you can tell this is not a good conversation for either of us. I feel lousy, they feel frightened of not being familiar with the flowers that I say I will have and altogether it is a really bad thing. It is something I have to address as it is largely my fault that they go away without understanding what we are trying to do.

By and large these are conventionally trained florists - they wanted to become florists on leaving school, they did their City and Guilds and worked their way up the ranks in a florist shop before opening their own shop. They know exactly how things should be done, what flowers you should use for wedding pedestals and how many stems should be in a bunch. They don't know what to make of me at all.

And then, thank heavens, there is a different kind of florist - florists I love working with. They tend to have worked doing something else before floristry- teaching, pr, car design etc. - and their approach to visiting me is completely different. They show up - they want to see what is growing now because you never know when that will be useful for other events, they want to talk about how I use things, vase life, texture, flexibility of stems, how long will something last out of water, is the stem hollow, will the flower bend to the light. Questions, questions, questions and curiosity. They make a lot of notes, they take a lot of photos, they e-mail me a couple of days later to check out specific cultivars. It is a quite different experience and I feel happy sending my flowers off with them.

The difference is so great that I do wonder whether a compulsory career change should be brought in aged 28 for the benefit of the creativity and drive of the country.

This is an unfair generalisation of course - Jane Packer is a work up from the bottom career florist, Paula Pryke a career change teacher, as for Shane Conolly - my own favourite celebrity florist- I haven't a clue what his background is, I just know he obviously loves his flowers.

Perhaps I should have a questionnaire.

Jack and the giant plume poppies

2007-07-06T16:15:00.000Z

Here we are with a rare overview of the garden - I pick so much that I am always aware that it is very green and doesn't really look like a cut flower garden. I am also aware that these photos demonstrate that the grass paths need cut pronto - the excuse is that it just hasn't been dry enough.

In the photos is one of 2 long borders - they divide the two parts of the cutting garden and are filled with all the tall clumpy plants I love but which would take over a raised cutting patch very quickly.

I wanted to put the photos in to show just how tall everything perennial is growing this year. The plume poppy is now 10 feet tall, the stipa gigantea isn't far behind and just look at the size of that yellow lily - far too big to cut! Here is Minou to give some sense of scale.

What a contrast to the annuals - particularly the not-too-hardy annuals like dill and larkspur. I have never had such pathetic looking plants!

Today I got a phonecall from a grower in Fife, desperate for flowers for a wedding that she is doing at the end of the month, so it is obviously not just me.

Unfortunately I couldn't help at all as I also have a wedding on that weekend and will need all my flowers for that. The other grower depends very much on annuals and is now looking at buying in flowers from Holland for the event. Thank goodness I now have plenty of (giant) perennials in the beds.

More about the pigs

2007-07-05T12:35:00.001Z

We have been meaning to get pigs for ages - in fact there was a distinct possibility that we were turning into those irritating people who say they are going to do something and never ever get around to it. they just talk a lot.

I had begun to get worried that pig keeping was becoming trendy - Liz Hurley et al - and as I tend to run away from trends we decided that now is the time.

So we have 2 unnamed Oxford Sandy and Blacks - ideal outdoor pigs - who are living in our rough field alongside the chickens with an electric fence to stop them getting into the henhouse and eating the eggs.

They will be with us for only about 10 weeks at which point they will be the right size for slaughtering locally. we could keep them longer and feed them up but we would not be able to use the local abattoir.

I know that the idea of killing animals is a great problem for a lot of people and I think that, if you are a vegetarian then that is fair enough. But we eat meat and we want to know where our meat comes from, we want the animals to be treated well - and for a pig that means living outside with plenty of room to root and forage. We want the slaughter to be humane and not involve a lot of travelling. We want to be sure that every part of the animal is eaten - not just the chops and fillet. So yes - these will be destined for brawn - we respect them too much for anything else.

It will be interesting to see how the children cope - Zoe has said that she wants nothing to do with the pigs as she loves pork. My mother thinks she has bred a monster - my father wants some pork.

They seem to have settled in well but have spurned Euan's lovingly made pig house and are sleeping amongst the long grass under a broom tree.

For anyone local looking for organic outdoor reared pork I recommend Peter and Liz Candy at Easter Ballat Farm, Balfron Station - 01360 440 480.

Look who has arrived

2007-07-04T19:10:00.001Z

2 14 week old pigs and an electric fence!

Jane in a sweetie shop

2007-07-04T09:39:00.001Z

The bulb catalogues have now all arrived so I have that "sweetie shop" time of choosing what I want for next spring. The problem is avoiding buying everything - I need to get a good spread of colours and flowering times and a mix of established favourites and new varieties.

It is important that I get the order in in the next week or so as otherwise varieties are often out of stock in the quality of bulb I want.

The job is made even more interesting this year as I have offered to provide the flowers for the Think Pink Ball which is at Oran Mor in Glasgow's Byers Road on 25th April 2008.

My favourite amongst the paintings that Christine McArthur did of my flowers last year was of a large bunch of pink tulips - each one a different shape and colour. My aim for the Think Pink flowers is to have spiralled bunches of as many pink varieties of tulips that I can get to flower at that time. I have marked up 25 varieties in my catalogues ranging from the elegant lily flowered "Mariette" to the bouffant peony tulip "Angelique".

As to non pink varieties - well I still have to decide. What is everyone's favourite tulip?

Saying yes

2007-07-02T07:47:00.000Z

This New Year's resolution was to say "yes" more often - not the advice you would give to your teenage daughter necessarily but for a 37 year old prone making excuses it seemed a good idea.

So when s woman from the production company SMG phoned me a couple of weeks ago to see whether I would be an "expert" on a reality tv show they were making for Scottish Television and Sky - well I said "yes".

Filming was yesterday - and boy it was fun. I had begun to get cold feet about it earlier in the week, worrying about either sounding like I had just swallowed helium or getting that deer in the headlights look. A friend from my book group, Clara is a tv director, presently on maternity leave and she kindly calmed me down - pointing out there would be 5 hours of filming and only a maximum of 5 minutes footage actually used - surely even I could sound compos mentos for that amount of time.

The photo shows crew and contestants with me in the middle - as foraging expert. I can't say more about the programme as it builds week to week - it is called Capture the Castle and should be on in November.

The crew were fantastic and it was SUCH as good experience - I'm so glad I've started saying "yes"

sweet peas

2007-06-29T14:33:00.001Z

This afternoon I have been trying to get the sweetpeas under control - the strong winds had tangled up a lot of the stems, blowing them off the frame and the miserable weather had made me put off doing anything about them. The result was a whole load of flapping stems at funny angles and hoop shaped stems. Today has been sunny though and it is good to have a job to do that isn't muddy so that I can still serve in the shop.

So I have cut off most of the old leaves and the tendrils - the former so that the plant's energy goes into making long stems rather than supporting the leaves and the latter so that the stems don't get caught and bent by the tendrils clinging on. It is a tedious job really and the sweet pea vine looks much worse afterwards - a gangly mass of awkward stems - but hopefully by the middle of next week it will be covered in flowers again.

The sweet pea bouquet was put together for a man who ordered our whole sweet pea crop (120 stems) today for his wife - how romantic is that?

Schools out for summer - what summer?

2007-06-28T09:22:00.001Z

Tomorrow school breaks up for the long summer vacation - this is a great benefit of living in Scotland, allowing speedy Scottish parents to take cheaper summer holidays before the English schools break up and it becomes high season prices.

I love the summer holidays - though this year we are not going away. I love the more relaxed pace, the children being able to just mooch and read and draw if they want to, without the pressure and rush of having to be at set places at particular times. I love the fact they don't have to dress up or wear uniform.

We have a relaxed house over the holidays as I still have to work so while I do that, they can do pretty much what they like (as long as it doesn't involve television or power tools).

Last summer was glorious, the sun shone all holiday and the children turned almost feral with sun kissed hair and ingrained dirt from days spent outside making dens and lying in the grass. This year - despite the promised hot summer - it does not look as good. Thank heavens we have not had the rain that has effected Yorkshire but today it is cold with a steady drizzle.

I think that I shall have to go and stock up on lots of glitter and glue.

I am helped as well by the fact that the girls spend 2 weeks each summer with my parents which allows me to compensate for the slower pace of life when they are here. Many other working parents are not as lucky - and it makes you see why mothers are desperate for jobs that have the school holidays off - I know nurses, dentists and pr people who are all working as classroom assistants simply because the holidays fit in with their lives.

The picture is of a box of flower posies destined for the lucky teachers at a local school.

A suprise amongst the thistles

2007-06-27T19:37:00.000Z

I am not the world's greatest weeder - somehow it just all gets away from me and I am stuck at this time of year saying "just where did all those thistles come from?", "How can we have so much couch grass?", "What would actually exterminate creeping buttercup?"

The garden goes from looking artily meadowish to being a great lump of unstoppable weeds (oh the garden club visiting in a fortnight will not be impressed).

However one advantage is this - look a self sown orchid - it is only a common orchid, we have then down in the damp field, but it has sown itself in a patch of briza maxima grass and looks suitably exotic.

This evening I have ordered our pigs - two piglets arrive a week today so tomorrow we shall have to get the patch of ground ready for them - the idea is that they will clear the ground so that we can plant willows and dogwoods in the autumn. I am very fond of pigs but shall have to remember not to get too fond of these ones

When to cut flowers - daisy types

2007-06-26T14:52:00.000Z

Today I had a meeting with a bride who is going to be getting married in Scotland in August but who lives in New York. She was wanting wild looking flowers for her wedding but was worried that they would droop and die within the day.

It turns out that she regularly buys flowers from a New York Farmers Market and they are all dead within a couple of days. She thinks it is the type of flower and inevitable.

This really shouldn't happen and that it does is a big problem for me.

My biggest problem in the business is getting people to trust that flowers picked from a garden will last. I guarantee that all but a few varieties (sweetpeas, lilac for example) will last more or less a week, many last longer.

Garden flowers won't last as long as an irradiated carnation but then again do you really want flowers hanging around so long that you have to dust them? They certainly do not die within a couple of days.

I think that part of the problem is that people remember their own clammy hand childhood attempts to pick flowers - the slightly bent bunch presented to Mums after a walk in the country.

It is also something not helped by the magazines - the recent feature in Country Living Magazine on the flowers sold by Wiggly Wigglers is an example.

Now Wiggly Wigglers is a reputable company - they will not be sending over-ripe flowers through the post but the photo shows them proudly displaying a bunch with cosmos flowers in it that have been pollinated and should be in the bin, not in a bouquet. The photo must have been a last minute set up.

Perhaps this seems petty - it is a very pretty photo but it gives people the wrong idea about when flowers should be cut for the house and they won't have good results. I don't think it is good for Wiggly Wigglers either as it presumably misrepresents their product, but then control of the photos after the shoot is very difficult.

Anyway I thought that I would put in a couple of photos of the chrysanthemum "Duro" a lovely small cerise flower that sees me through the early June gap.

The top photo is exactly right - the central boss is tight and flat with only the very outer edge of the yellow showing pollen.

The one at the bottom shows the fluffy pollinated bit halfway up the yellow - this is too far gone, the bees have been at it and all that flower want to do now is curl up and become a seedhead.

The top flower will last 7-10 days away from direct sunlight - the bottom one would do well to stagger through 2!

Reception rant

2007-06-25T10:05:00.001Z

The wedding where I was arranging the flowers had the reception at one of the hotels on the banks of Loch Lomond. The hotel attracts wedding couples with its spectacular views over the Loch but on days like yesterday - where you couldn't actually see the water from the function room - it presumably has to offer something else.

I am not mentioning the name of the hotel as this is going to be a wee bit of a rant.

The bride wanted very simple understated flowers so at the reception there was just to be small table centres - so far, so easy - I was just to drop them off after I had arranged the church flowers.

At least that was the idea - I arrived and this was the entrance for the wedding party. Actually that is not quite true as I took this photo after I had already done a lot of litter picking. 2 rather ill looking bay trees in chipped plastic pots and weedy soil - covered in old dirty plastic ribbons, most of which had come undone.

I spoke to the hotel about it and they said "Oh the brides usually bring their own ribbon" - not "Oh goodness you are right that looks terrible I shall get someone onto it" - not even "Do you have any suggestions?" just a "that's not my problem" attitude. I still can't believe that they were happy for the bridal party to arrive in their lovely clothes, step from their fancy cars into an area of soiled decorations, seedy looking trees and cigarette ends.

There wasn't really that much I could really - I weeded the trees, picked up the litter, removed the dirty curly ribbon and cut off the yellow dead leaves. I had some wired grosgrain ribbon left over from the church flowers so I tied that round the trunks and cut some oxe-eye daisies from the carpark verge, threading them into the trees as a bit of decoration. There was nothing I could do about the chipped pots or the general air of sodden neglect.

It all seems so unnecessary.

These are the table decorations for the inside! A mix of mint, rosa "William Lobb", sweetpea "Matucana"; eryngium "Miss Willmotts Ghost" and nepeta "Souvenir d'Andre Chaumont".

20 years and counting.

2007-06-23T12:31:00.003Z

Tomorrow Euan and I celebrate dating for 20 years. We have married, bought houses and had children in those 2 decades but 24th June is still the most important date in the year.

We had known each other as friends for a good while when we started "courting" - as my Grandad termed it - so it was never going to be a casual, take it or leave it, affair. There was too much to risk losing.

Still 20 years is a long time and we have both changed a lot from our 18 year old selves. Probably for the better . . . definitely for the better.

Tomorrow I shall be arranging flowers for a wedding in Luss and Euan shall be putting the roof on his shed. Then we have a babysitter booked!

William Lobb

2007-06-21T15:06:00.001Z

Despite the fact that they are the most asked for flower, I do not grow many roses. Our climate is really too damp and it is very difficult to grow roses commercially without using a lot of herbicides and fungicides. As Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Company pointed out, brides don't want greenfly climbing out of their bouquets.

Last year however a 3 for 1 end of season offer came in from David Austin that was just too tempting and I plumped for 3 moss roses called William Lobb (named after the Cornish plant collector), planting them with the growth tied to a dome made from hazel so that they will become a flowery heap in the border. Eventually they will be 8' tall.

They have just begun to flower - the bluest dark pink I have ever seen with a lovely scent. They have been a joy since the oddly bumpy buds arrived.

I am doing flowers for a wedding on Sunday and hope to use some of these in the table decorations - if I can bear to part with them that is.

Business guru

2007-06-20T13:53:00.001Z

This is the man I have been spending the past couple of days with (well in print anyway) - he is Michael Gerber, author of the book The E Myth Revisited.

As I have explained before I tend to lose books, sending them home with people and then never getting them back again. This happened last summer with my copy of the E Myth and I have finally cracked and picked up another copy.

The reason is, besides my compulsive book buying habit, is that it is quite simply an inspirational book. It shows how small businesses, particularly ones like mine founded on the fact that I can technically do things (sewing, gardening), fail because you are so busy, busy, busy doing the day to day stuff - the making, the selling, the invoicing, the packing, the meetings with clients, the floor sweeping, the weeding- that you forget to give any time over to actually building the business itself.

This is one of those books that pinpoint all your faults, make you accept them and THEN shows you how to change them.

It takes a lot of discipline though - it is a lot of hard work of a different kind, working on and not in your business - and I am just at the beginning.

But the change is in my brain - all day it has been fizzing fizzing, fizzing with ideas and plans and concrete ways forward to have the kind of integrated life and business that I want. And it does physically feel as though I am fizzing - peculiar.

Now I just need to carry it all through and create this wonderful thing that is Snapdragon.

I would also like to point out that I am not a self-help book kind of person - I phoned the only other person I know of who has systematically gone through the whole E-myth process (rather than just read the book and say "that's a good idea") and she was even more effusive - even though I was phoning out of the blue - it has completely changed her life and business. Well that is some recommendation.

I'll let you know how I get on. Fizzz, fizzzzz, fizzzzz

Magazine madness . . .

2007-06-19T15:33:00.001Z

Yesterday I went into Glasgow to sort out a few things - I had an hour to spare while the shop tried to fix our i-pod battery so went to Borders magazine department.

Ah, fatal - all the imports were just in (its work you know!) - and I am a sucker for nice photos and 101 ways with ric-rac.

Actually the aesthetic of most of the US magazines is a bit too frilly and pristine for me but in some ways that is ideal for inspiration as I can't accidentally slide into full on plagiarism (see Gigibird for an interesting post on this). The uppermost magazine is new to me - an Australian production though with Abigail Ahern's house and also somewhere very very nice and calm in the Netherlands.

Getting this bag bursting lot took 5 minutes so I went for a coffee at the hyper stylish Fifi and Ally.

2007-06-18T14:12:00.001Z

Flowers are very emotive things. I am always reminded of that at this time of year as the first sweet peas and sweet williams arrive in the shop and customers begin to reminisce about their grandparents gardens.

I too associate particular flowers with particular people - foxgloves, at their peak this week, I associate with my Australian friend Sue.

Sue moved with her family to stay in a cottage near our old house for the year of 1998 when her husband Phil worked on a job exchange. Sue is one of these people with a natural ease which makes everything that she does appear to be exactly the way it should be done.

She loves flowers but the exchange rate difference made Scotland a very expensive place to stay, particularly with 3 children. There was no room in her weekly budget for the flowers she was used to buying back in Melbourne. So she would pick cow parsley and foxgloves from the verge outside her house and arrange them in tall jugs in the kitchen. It looked wonderful, as it would.

I was very influenced by Sue- it was her who introduced me to Country Living Magazine and, more importantly, who showed me a more relaxed way to parent. She hates computers so I doubt she will read this.

Does anyone else have flowers that remind them of specific people?

The foxglove in the photo is a variety called "Elsie Kelsie", a sport of the native white foxglove with a very dark mark for the bees to see how to get into the flower.

Baby boots

2007-06-16T10:38:00.000Z

What is it about baby shoes that is just so CUTE???

A couple of days I mentioned that I was embroidering some baby boots - here are the finished versions.

They are for a baby born about 10 days ago - his parents have just aquired chickens - hence the pecking chicks on the fronts of the shoes.

They are made in vintage linen and have been great fun to work out.

I have a Japanese craft book with lovely baby shoes in it but none of them looked very practical as they are more like adult court shoes and I suspect that they would fall off on first outing.

I based these on those lovely leather baby shoes that don't fall off at all.

A frippery perhaps but there is something about new babies which encourages such things.

How to - Part 1

2007-06-15T15:45:00.001Z

I have been meaning to add a kind of "how to" series onto the website. Today I have finally got my act together with time, flowers, space, camera and (probably most importantly) Sally asking questions about when exactly I was planning to get it done.

So here we have a very easy table centre - the instructions are here - it doesn't have to be in a pewter goblet, any small vase will do, and it doesn't have to be sweet peas.

Have a go and let me know how you get on. I'd love suggestions as to what "How to" s people would like. I was so overwhelmed by the number of e-mailed photos of poppies after my poppy tips!

Free Stuff - Fritillary seeds

2007-06-15T10:56:00.001Z

The snakeshead fritillaries have now got ripe seedheads with lots of seed stacked inside - if anyone wants some free of charge let me know by e-mail snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk and then send a stamped addressed envelope to Jane Lindsey, Sunnyside, Gartacharn Road, Balfron Station, G63 0NH. Mark it with what you want as I'm a bit dippy.

Snakeshead fritillaries like damp soil in either sun or shade - they will grow in grass but I would clear them patches of soil to get them started. Christopher Lloyd suggested growing them amongst Gunnera and other plants that are late into growth. I used to have some amongst the rhubarb for the same reason.

Connections

2007-06-14T07:32:00.001Z

Connection is the word that we would have inscribed above the door in Snapdragon's imaginary shop. It is the word at the core of what we aspire to do. Connect with the seasons, with the soil, connect with our customers, with the community. Only connect. This blog is a symptom of that quest.

Yesterday Carolyn wrote a very astute comment on my post about the demise of the Country Living Scottish Fair, questioning whether handmade was enough of an intrinsic value in itself.

It was a comment that made me think - because I am very vociferous about the fact that the similar catch all "organic" covers a multitude of sugary sins. I think that she is right - why do I get worked up about the need to preserve the hand made in Britain?

If I want to buy a salad bowl why do I go to the local craft gallery rather than Habitat? If I wanted to buy a doorstop why Primrose Hill rather than Cath Kidston?

And I think that it stems from this basic need for connection - connection at some level to a discernable human maker.

I do not feel comfortable buying from chain shops - I was in Edinburgh shopping yesterday and was very put off by the impersonal nature of the shops. The place where I did buy ( a party dress from East) was largely because of a wonderfully engaging member of staff. When I do part with my money it tends to be either in craft or antique shops.

I don't really know where this post is going - I think it is very hard to justify the allure of the handmade using pure logic. Yet it seems that, like lighting an open fire, growing your own vegetables or making jam, there is something more, something unmeasurable. All these things, if judged on a strict value for time and money basis, would probably fail, yet they are the parts of life that give me connection and are therefore, for me, beyond value.

That is how I feel about the hand made (though not all handmade) and the reason that I think it is worth fighting to promote.

I would be very interested to hear what items people value as hand-made and which they don't.

Thanks again for all your comments and e-mails.

Not quite the golden egg you would think.

2007-06-12T11:32:00.001Z

Last week I got a letter from Upper Street Events who run the Country Living Fairs to say that they would not be having a Fair in Scotland next Spring.

It has turned out not to be an viable event for them.

It is a strange thing - talk to the stall holders and they feel that they are paying too much for their space, talk to the customers and they feel that the ticket price is too high, talk to the organisers and they say that they cannot make a profit on the event.

Perhaps there are not enough people in Scotland/North of England to justify the event - certainly, speaking to people who do both the London and the Glasgow Fair there are far fewer people at the Scottish event, spending far less per person.

That is perhaps the rub.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who had just bought a beautiful quilt from a catalogue specialising in Fair Trade goods. It was a lovely piece of work - the pieces had been carefully toned and my friend had bought it because of that, but also because it had been made by someone being paid properly for the work. She felt that she paid about a £70 premium for the good feeling that she has buying Fair Trade.

How many people would (or perhaps also could afford to) do that?

The Country Living Fair tries to reflect the magazine - to have a high proportion of stalls selling hand made, locally sourced, high production cost items - whether that is bags made from vintage materials or hand made jewellery.

The problem is that the price of those goods reflect the fact that they take time to make. With the Scottish Fair what seemed to happen was that each year there were fewer and fewer of these specialist stalls as too few people bought from them and they did not cover costs. Gradually stalls importing mass produced jewellery, enamelware, trinkets and so on began to dominate. Even the stalls which sold handmade items began to supplement with bought in goods, which were cheaper and therefore easier to sell. This applies to me as much as anyone else - whereas everything bar some hyacinth vases was made by me in the "home section" of my stall, there were pots and hand tools in the "garden" bit which were bought in - and available at another stall in the hall.

There were approximately 12,000 visitors to the Scottish Fair - that means to cover costs on a small stall you have every single person who comes in that door spend 30p with you. That is very high indeed. No wonder so many stallholders - with lovely stalls - hardly make a profit.

I really don't know what the answer is - if I could change one thing about our consumer society I would have people buy less but spend more time and money on their individual purchases. This Primark, disposable society depresses me. People look at a hand made object like a basket and think that it is expensive, if they began to think of the time taken to make it and what hourly rate they think would be fair, I expect that it would suddenly seem a great bargain. -

A Christmas Fair has been suggested for October 2008 and I hope that that comes off and that people use it as an excuse to get all their Christmas presents in one handcrafted, unique, happy shopping day.

I would be interested in hearing what people think from a customers' point of view.

Balmy balmy weather

2007-06-11T11:03:00.001Z

At last we have the warm balmy air that the half hardy annuals need to start growing.

This has been a very peculiar and rather difficult year as far as flower growing goes. The very hot April brought on tulips very fast and they flowered in a great lump of colour over two and a half weeks rather than 6. The very cold wet May delayed all the flowers that should have taken over from them an for a few weeks, until the alliums emerged we were scrabbling around for flowers to sell.

The seedlings I planted out a few weeks ago - cornflowers, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers - all seem to have stayed still until this week (unfortunately not something I could say about the weeds) but in the past 3 days of hot clammy weather they have doubled in size and finally look as if they might turn into proper plants.

I am turning into a proper farmer with my ability to complain about the weather whatever it is. Next year I wonder about starting the seedlings off under tunnel hoops until the weather warms. We really have such a short growing season here it may be the only way in a chilly spring. That said - I really don't want the cutting garden to look like a strawberry field with chenilles of plastic glinting in the sunshine.

This poppy is Papaver orientale "Manhattan", a stunner if ever there was one.

I'm not sure the food was that good . . .

2007-06-10T16:17:00.001Z

One of the advantages of being the first of our peers to do the whole " settle down, get a house, have kids, move to the country" thing is that we have a supply of friends and family who, in return for a good meal and some booze, are happy to help with lifting, shifting and general hard labour.

This weekend was one of those occasions. I have a thing about corrugated iron - a large part of the attraction of the van is that it is corrugated, for the same reason I would love a shepherd's hut. The older, more patinated the iron the better.

For the past few months, Euan and I have been discussing the need for a shed - somewhere to move the junk from the garage, somewhere to store tools sensibly, somewhere for the lawn-mower so that it doesn't block the entrance to the polytunnel.

We had looked at wooden sheds but they all looked a bit "kitty" and were really out of our budget anyway.

Then we saw this on e-bay - a large shed/barn in Stirling in very lovely corrugated iron. Euan spent the week of "watching" drawing up plans and costing van hire, notifying our helpers that they should be on call.

We "won" it, hired the van and Euan, John and Peter went off to demolish the shed, break it up into salvagable bits and bring it back here.

I think that they may think very hard about whether they ever want to visit for the weekend again.

Euan is going to transform this van of bits into a lovely useful shed with a tunnel where we can hang the washing when it rains.

poppies - free to a good home

2007-06-09T09:56:00.000Z

I have decided to get rid of these pale pink Oriental poppies - I want to be able to sell the darker, dusky pink "Manhattan" in bud without worrying that they will turn out to be a different colour when they come out in the vase.

So these 3 plants are free to a good home (buyer must uplift) - they would look beautiful in a border with catmints, artemesias and roses - one plant has more picotee edges than the other.

I got the original plants from Sue Bell at Floreat Plants but have lost the label so I can't remember the name.

Drop me a line - snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk if you fancy them - first come first served.

The weather today is fabulous - the first day that I have been able to garden in bare feet.

Daisy doll - Mark 63

2007-06-08T14:07:00.001Z

When the girls were younger we had a book of miscellaneous bedtime tales - my favourite was a one called Ruby. I can't remember the author but the story was about the adventures of some toys - led by the eponymous Ruby - who escaped from the reject bin at the toy factory and eventually found happiness by being adopted by a little girl.

They were obviously paying attention to their bedtime stories as the girls' bedrooms are now full of mutanty dolls - scooped from MY reject bin. Dolls with fat heads, dolls with thin heads, dolls with backwards shoes, dolls with felt hair (that did NOT work), dolls whose faces turned out to be really really scary.

I am amazed that I have actually persevered with this - I am not patient by nature - but here we have The Finished Daisy Doll.

Her body is made from vintage French linen and wool gingham with vintage ticking shoes; her titian locks are the jute string I use to bind my sweet peas; her reversible dress is a Liberty print with gingham as the alternative.

My idea with the dolls was to, as I have mentioned in the comments to my last post, make something that could be customised, either as a bridesmaid present or just a really nice present to a little girl. I could match hair colour and style (within reason), eye colour, perhaps even a favourite dress. I would love to have a go at making one as a copy of a bridesmaid's dress.

I do like this red headed girl though - very Scottish - I would have loved long wavy red hair.

She has been sitting in the shop today and has received lots of lovely complements (just look at her blushing) - I need to work out timings and costings before she can go on sale.

An excuse for a play about - wip

2007-06-07T07:37:00.001Z

At the week end I was asked whether I made rag dolls. I had a material rabbit with me on my stall at the Green Gallery opening that sold encouragingly fast, so I said that I would give it a go.

So this week has been a parade of prototypes - and my girls are now proud owners of a series of slightly wonky versions, rejected because their faces were too fat or because, as Katie said, "Mummy are her feet meant to be backwards?".

I think that I am now getting somewhere and the photo is of the latest prototype - there are some changes to make - everyone preferred an earlier version's hair and I need to work out a better solution for the clothes.

I want the finished doll to be quite old fashioned looking - like those early C19th wooden dolls with their painted on hair and secretive faces but I also want her to work as a dress up doll so that her clothes come off and she can have alternative wardrobes - perhaps a ballet tutu.

I also want her to have outsize hands so that she is easy to hold hands with (perhaps not quite as large as this prototype).

Her name will be Daisy - in homage to the Karine Polwart song that seems to be on constant play here. Perhaps she shall have red hair, perhaps I will work out how to make her dungarees. Perhaps I will stop faffing about and actually make a final version . . .

Busy bees

2007-06-05T18:37:00.000Z

This week Sally and I have been getting our fingers out and buzzing all over the place to let people know we are here. It is something we should have done 3 weeks ago.

When I began to sell from the house 2 years ago we had a very specific group of people who came each week - we were on the routine run between the Friday farmshop at France Farm and Killearn jumping beans. They were largely people that I knew socially through toddler groups and their friends.

A couple of weeks ago I began to notice that we no longer get this 11 am rush, so on Friday Sally and I sat down to think about the whys and wherefores, going through all the ex-11 am regulars. Some now come later on the way back from the afternoon school run - their children have simply outgrown toddlerhood. Others have returned to full time work and are not about at all on a Friday. Some have extended their maternity leaves, or returned to college, or taken up some arty non-paying job, they are down a wage and without cash to spend on flowers except for special occasions.

It all made me realise that I have been too complacent - we are always generally busy so I haven't been thinking about who our customers are and how we can continue to get them coming back. We have done a big effort on leafleting neighbouring villages to recruit a new generation of those toddler Mums and have our thinking caps on about how we can be more convenient for the rest.

I am very bad at this sort of thing, so it is a good job that I have Sally working with me. I would be the man with the better designed mousetrap waiting for people to beat a path to the door.

Repeating the pattern?

2007-06-04T11:05:00.000Z

When I was growing up my Mum, like many women tried to find piece work that would fit in with being at home after school and in the holidays - she did B&B, she painted pegs to look like soldiers and highland dancers, she helped organise play schemes but most consistently she made toys for a local craft shop.

My clearest memories of Mum before she took up antique dealing are of her sitting each evening in front of the wood burner with a willow basket full of half made animals waiting to be hand finished.

Recently I have been drawn to making toys again - and I am looking back to patterns from the 60s and 70s, probably quite similar in style to the patterns copied from magazines in my youth. This cute pony is my favourite at the moment - made in soft suede effect fabric with felt mane and tail he is just the right size and squashiness for a small hand.

I wonder whether this is a form of broodiness - my girls are growing up fast and are not as attached to soft toys any more (though they pleaded for, and got, all my prototypes for the toys I am working on at the moment). I don't intend to have another baby - perhaps this sewing soft things is a displacement activity (though if you ask me professionally I will spout that I want to develop a children's section for the website)

Scotland's Garden Show

2007-06-02T19:59:00.001Z

Today I met a friend at Scotland's Garden Show at Ingilston. She has suggested that we do a show garden there next year and we were there to see exactly what was involved and decide whether it would be a good idea.

To be honest I was really disappointed - there were hardly any show gardens and most were quite derivative with plants stuffed in so that they looked like a garden centre shopping trolley after a colour co-ordinated shopping spree.

I was rather glum and hot footed it over to the floral hall where the nurseries exhibit. And there - lo and behold - was the innovation, high quality construction and beautiful planting that was missing in the outdoor show gardens. Unfortunately the lighting isn't great within the hall and I didn't have my big flash so the photos are really bad but this garden was by far my favourite. It is part of the Binny Plants Stall and is a co-operative venture with the Biggar based garden design and construction company Landmarkers (LandmarkersScot@aol.com) and the metal artist Andrea Geile.

Binny Plants is one of my favourite nurseries - they grow their plants well and hard, they don't feed them junk to puff them up for shows and as a result they transplant well into the rigours of a Scottish garden. Their paeonies are second to none for the Scottish garden.

The garden was a gently tiered construction of rusted steel and drystoned slate with a sheet of vertical water at the back and beautiful, effective, natural, zippy and eminently copyable planting throughout. The colours were dark reds, purples and whites like many of the stalls - why fight against nature? - but had a vibrant streak of bright orange which sparked the whole composition up.

Many of the plants that I coveted - like this Troillus x cultorum "Cheddar" had already sold out but I have them written down in my notebook for next year.

This garden made my day. I'm just sorry that the photos are so bad.

The greenhouse today

2007-06-01T12:37:00.000Z

Just a quick post today with photos of the greenhouse and the flowers etc. for sale today.

My favourite flowers are anchusa dropmore - a great deep glowing blue which mixes well with the deep pink chrysanthemum "duro" and red astrantias.

The other photo shows cushions and toys on the vintage french metal cot.

Testing lab

2007-05-31T09:33:00.001Z

A large percentage of the flowers that I grow and sell are not the kind of flowers that are grown commercially as cut flowers. You will not find them in most florist shops, you cannot look them up in Alan Armitage's reference book on growing cut flowers. There are no DEFRA or USDA figures on yield, vase life or post-harvest treatment.

This is why I have my very low tech testing lab - a row of old glass bottles on the dining room mantlepiece. The site is typical of a house - not in full sun but open to the steam of the kitchen - the bottles are filled with plain tap water and the flowers get no special treatment bar searing where necessary.

For a flower to pass the test it has to last a week.

As I type this we have Gladiolus byzantium, (a small pink gladioli I first saw in the meadow at Great Dixter), Allium christophii; Briza media, (my favourite small grass), Briza maxima, (beautiful but a nightmare to pick); flag iris (which are just going to squeak it to a week I think), wild oats and a bright orange Iceland poppy.

It is an essential part of the process - to let the customer know how best to treat the flowers when they get them home. The gladioli for example will need a bit of flower food and a pinch of sugar in the water to give it the energy to open right up to the top of its spire.

The odd side effect is that this ever changing parade of individual bottles is quite my favourite thing in the house.

Poppies

2007-05-30T07:40:00.001Z

Every year - at exactly this time - I write a post about poppies.

Every year - at exactly this time - I am overwhelmed by their beauty.

We live in a house that isn't exactly as I would like it to be - when we bought it, it was a typical 1980s farmers bungalow - built as an economical tied house with straight blocky lines, aluminium windows and hardboard doors. We are gradually changing it but it often feels, with our painted chipboard floors and complete lack of storage space, as if we are still a long way away.

The relevance of this to the poppies is this. I think the magic of having cut flowers in a house, and what separates them out from houseplants, is that they change from day to day. The doyennes of this are poppies and tulips and to my mind this makes them the very best of cut flowers.

The top photo is of our living room - with a crock of poppies taken straight from the shop and plonked in the middle of the coffee table. Every time I go into the room it is the poppies I see, more have come out into full flower, some are just ready to burst, darker yellow amongst the bright mass of the open flowers. This somehow stops me noticing or minding so much the piles of junk that are scattered in corners, the discarded sweet wrapper on the settee. If the flowers didn't change so much they wouldn't be so distracting.

Poppies are also one of the most difficult flowers to sell. Most people's experience of poppies in a vase is picking some open red corn poppies on a walk and having them wilt and shed before they are even home. I often end up giving them away the first time and then people come back to buy more.

How to pick poppies - this works with all varieties bar opium poppies, the ones with the giant seedhead.
1. Put the kettle on
2. Pick in bud when you can see the coloured petals shining through, like the ones right at the left of this photo.
3. Put straight into a bucket of water.
4. Take into the house, cut to the length you want the finished flowers, pour 1" of just boiled water into a mug and put the stem ends into it. Count to 5.
5. Put straight into a vase of water and put somewhere cool for an hour.
6. Arrange. If you have to recut the stems sear them again.

They should last a week if you put the vase out of direct sunlight and away from strong draughts

Our woodpecker - at last

2007-05-29T10:48:00.001Z

Well this is the best I could do - the woodpeckers (there are 2 of them it turns out) are rather shy and the merest zoom of a lens send them flying back down the valley to the wood.

Here he is caught pecking at the monkey nuts hanging from one of our plant supports in the border.

These nut rings have been brilliant - they last for ages as the birds have to work to get their food.

All change

2007-05-27T19:14:00.000Z

We moved all the chickens to the 2nd field today into a fruit cage - the idea is that they can become a bit more free ranging in a week or so - being let out of the cage to potter about in the long grass during the day and returning to safety of their house at night.

In the short term the netted cage will also stop the buzzard and Minou attacking this gorgeous fluffy chick while still allowing it to socialise with the rest of the hens. As you can see it is still very much with its two "mothers".

Cuddles our rabbit who thinks it is a chicken cannot accompany them to their summer housing - he would just disappear off into the wild I think - so he is now in the old chicken ark awaiting an intense re-socialising programme to get him used to being petted again. Then, when we get the new guinea pigs (soft touch Mummy!) he may or may not be housed with them depending on whether they all get on without fighting.

We have just been outside watching a woodpecker (greater spotted we think) feeding on the peanut rings - he was frightened off by the sound of the zoom lens so we don't have a photo but shall lie in wait over the next week.

A different scale.

2007-05-26T14:34:00.001Z

One of the things that bothers me about the cut flower industry is how, over the past couple of decades, we have become conditioned to buy what is most convenient for the large scale producers and importers.

90% of the flowers available to buy in the supermarket or florist shop conform to the size which will fit easily into a standard florist package box - smallish head, long straight stem. This cuts costs right down all along the production line from mechanised growing, spraying and harvesting to a certain number of boxes fitting onto a pallet or into a refrigerated van.

What has been lost is a sense of different scales - whether that is eight feet tall plume poppies or miniature astrantia - if it doesn't fit into the system you are unlikely to be able to get it. The most convenient is rarely also the most appropriate or attractive.

One of the flowers shops that I have come across via Amy Stewart's site is the Bonny Doon Garden Company which addresses this, producing a range of posies - many of which fit into a teacup like the one in the photo. I think that these are an ideal solution for those occasions when you want to send flowers - say to celebrate the birth of a baby - but know that the recipient will be inundated with flowers. An arrangement like this - our one is an an elegant C19th gold and white cup - can fit next to a bedside, comes ready arranged so it won't need another vase, and when the flowers fade there will be something left, a beautiful cup which will perhaps become a family heirloom. This one sold on Friday but I usually have a range available from £11.50 at the van, from £16.50 delivered within a 12 mile radius. They are also available as table centres for weddings and parties for when a "village fete" kind of feel is required - it is one way of getting a pretty vintage tea set, though I also loan the cups and saucers out.

I always feel sad when I see so many bunches of flowers propped in sinks or even just left on kitchen work surfaces as there are just no more vases to put flowers in.

Hanging baskets

2007-05-25T07:17:00.001Z

I have never really made up hanging baskets - there was nowhere to hang them except in the tunnel while they had to be under cover and the thought of banging my head on them while I tended everything else didn't really appeal.

This year I made an exception and made up a few - largely to decorate the greenhouse and make it look generous and full. I went for large sized baskets with good compost and moisture retaining granules to make maintenance more possible. I planted them up in mid April and over the past 5 weeks they have really thrived and bulked up. Now they areready to fly the nest.

It is now the right time to put out summer bedding in Central Scotland - there is not such a drastic temperature swing between day and night and there is only a very slim chance of late frosts.

The hanging baskets have proved to be very useful as presents for men - this photo shows a basket delivered yesterday as a birthday present. It is an elegant mix of silver leaves and white and blue trailing plants. With deadheading and regular watering it should last until the autumn frosts.

These violas are at the door of the greenhouse - they cheer me up every time I pass them.

Updating the website

2007-05-23T16:17:00.001Z

This afternoon has been drizzly so I have finally put down my hoe and got around to updating some things on the website. I have put up a few more of my Mum's ever popular chicken paintings - these cost about £2.00 to pack and post, and they are ideal for chicken lovers. She is busy working on paintings for a series of exhibitions in East Lothian so I suspect that these are going to be all I can manage to prise of her for the next month or so.

This photo is of Treela, an Isla Brown and our cheekiest chicken. Today I found her in our bathroom, perched on the side of the bath. Neither cats no dogs bother her at all when she is in the house.

I also finished the felted/embroidered cushions and put together some kits.

I have loved making these cushions - they are the ideal work to do in the evenings either outside watching the sunset or inside watching the t.v. The cushions have turned out even better than I thought they would - I was determined not to produce anything that looked like anybody else's, I wanted to make something that looked vintage but not derivative. I hope that I have succeeded. I am not going to be able to produce many though so they are strictly limited editions.

The most uncool post ever!

2007-05-22T08:44:00.001Z

I have finally got around to buying another copy of Adam Nicolson's book Perch Hill.

I bought my original copy in 1999 or 2000 as part of what Euan refers to as my "stalking" of Nicolson's wife the garden writer Sarah Raven. As far as I can make out, this alleged "stalking" consisted of knowing that she has a cottage on the Sound of Mull, meeting her accidentally a couple of times and buying this book which is about their move to Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex. Perhaps I wittered on a bit as well!

It is at its core one of those "daft city types moving to the country" books, but it is really much more - it chimes with my experience of the seasons, the drive to burrow into a valley, the chill spare reality of mud as well as meadows, the idea that you have to commit to an ideal - Nicolson's "Bright field" - with everything you have.

It is one of the books I re-read regularly. Or at least I did, until I lost it. I know what will have happened - I have a bad habit of forcing people to read books I enjoy, pressing volumes on them as they leave the house. Of course I never get them back and I lose most of my favourite books that way. Now I have it back in my shelves again and have already started the reread.

New Chick

2007-05-21T07:34:00.001Z

The other excitement on my birthday was the arrival of this little yellow ball of fluff. Unfortunately it was the only one of the eggs that hatched and the rest seem to have been infertile. I am also unsure about what type it is - one bantam and one normal egg have disappeared and there were no shell traces to identify which egg hatched. We shall have to wait and see.

To be honest I am quite glad that we didn't have a mass hatching - I love the whole waiting to see thing and we don't want too many hens - if we could increase our wee flock by 1 or 2 a year that would probably be ideal. We don't rely on selling eggs or hens and they are a kind of garden pet, so it also nice to be able to identify each one individually.

It also stops there being any gender problems - we don't have a cockerel at the moment and are happy to have one so it doesn't matter which sex the ball of fluff is - However we would not have been able to keep 2, 3 or 4 cockerels and would have had to dispatch them sooner rather than later as they are not a meat variety. There isn't a great demand for cockerels as everyone has spares. It isn't a position I relish and is the only down side to hatching.

I have just moved the chick into our ark so that it can venture outside without the dangers of crows or cats carting it off. I have put the 2 broody marans in with it as they seem to be taking turns in chick minding anyway. This morning my stomach lurched as I couldn't find it under the hen that hatched it - fortunately I heard the cheep cheep cheep coming from under the broody hen in the other corner.

This evening I shall tell Katie that it has been born - she will want to handle it and a 3 day chick is a lot more robust than a 1 day chick.

1707 and all that . . .

2007-05-20T09:22:00.001Z

Yesterday was my birthday and the chance to do some party flowers for one of my longest standing customers - one of the customers who has been taking a couple of bunches from me weekly since 2002 when I didn't even have somewhere proper to grow them.

It was her wedding anniversary and an excuse to hold a themed party. The theme was 1707 - this year sees the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union of Scotland and England and also of the birth of Linnaeus the Swedish scientist who came up with the system we still use today to categorise plants and animals - so it had layers of Swedish style (she is Swedish), historicism and flowers.

I was asked to provide small arrangements for the long trestle tables and the buffet.

I love working to a brief like this. One of the great advantages of having so many antique dealers in the family is that I have the chance to pick up vases etc. and squirrel them away for the right occasion. About 6 months ago I bought some french pewter goblets and plates, thinking that they would be wonderful for weddings - church candles grouped on the plates, flowers arranged in the goblets.

So when I got a 1707 theme I knew exactly what I wanted to do - loose meadow type flowers - all introduced pre 1707, many native to Scotland and Sweden. I also wanted to make it yellow, blue and white, alluding to the Scottish and Swedish flags. The table centres are pictured above - the goblets are taped in a fine grid of waterproof tape and then hellebores, alliums, pig nuts, columbines and buttercups are arranged as upright as possible. When I delivered them yesterday I was told they looked "just like a Swedish meadow".

I also made a rococo arrangement of grapes, sweet rocket and wisteria (wisteria was actually another 100 years in arriving but visually it worked so well I cheated) and a candlestick draped in grapes and golden hop.

The party had a lot of effort put into the detailing - I am sure it was a fantastic night.

Seduced by sewing threads

2007-05-17T15:46:00.000Z

Over the past ten days or so I have been wishing for a good rainy day so that I can snuggle inside and do some hand sewing.

However, though every weather forecast claimed that it was raining, it was actually lovely and sunny and I spent my days outside potting on seedlings and trying (and failing) to keep on top of the weeding.

Today it was a bit drizzly - weather I would normally brave - but I declared it a wet day and indulged myself with some sewing.

The reason for this is that I recently acquired a stash of vintage embroidery silks - one is fabulously labelled "Flosette for Flourishing etc" - and I have been using them to make up a selection of one off cushions. Until today it has all been evening work and therefore very slow but today I have been able to work without children and with the table all to myself.

To make the cushion bodies I am using vintage wool blankets which I have felted and dyed. My favourite is a soft raspberry pink and the panel will be the vase of flowers shown half sewn above. I might put it on the website.

Obviously I can't spend all my time embroidering flowers so I am considering putting together kits with everything to make the cushions - embroidery, hoop, vintage linen, cushion cover, silks and buttons etc. I am not sure whether there is a market though. Feedback would be appreciated.

New home for Tim . . .

2007-05-16T07:28:00.000Z

An update on Tim - the dog we are fostering - for all the e-mailing well wishers.

After a delay caused by tying up legal loose ends there is now a permanent home for Tim to go to. It will be back in Dumbarton, near to where he used to live, so I think that he will be happy. We shall have him here for the next 10 days or so and then deliver him to his new owner.

He is a really lovely dog but I am glad that he is moving on. He has become very attached to me and follows me round all the time - tap, tap, tap on the chipboard floors. This has got more pronounced over the last week and now he howls if I have to go out. Hopefully he will make the transition to his new home smoothly. Fingers crossed.

His main complaints about our house are the presence of cats and the absence of biscuits. With the enforced diet and the cat chasing, he is definitely leaving a trimmer dog than he arrived.

One of those tedious posts about blogging . . .

2007-05-15T07:50:00.000Z

Yes - look away now if you can't take another self-indulgent post about "Why I blog".

In sensible society I think that bloggers are regarded as slightly odd - perhaps we have far to much time on our hands, perhaps we have no friends. I try to blog every day so I am even odder.

And I do think it is a peculiar thing to do. I blog every day as I find it is a good discipline - and to be honest I only have 2 speeds - I can either do something immediately or not at all. If I aimed a blog a couple of times a week I would never do it at all.

I have had this site since 2005, a time when there were fewer people with weblogs, and I read 60 or so sites on a more or less weekly basis. These were mainly American sites about gardening, self sufficiency, marketing and eating.

Now the British blogging scene has exploded and it is impossible to keep up. Yesterday Cherry at Tales from Pixie Wood was beating herself up for being behind in individually answering all the people who comment on her site. I must say that I don't personally e-mail many commenters, I tend to try to reply on my posting but I am aware that that is flawed as I know that I often forget exactly where I have posted a comment and rarely go back to see if there is a reply. I do visit commenters sites and if someone e-mails me I will reply.

One of the great things to happen recently is the Country Living Rebel bloggers. As you know, Country Living had a blogging competition to find a new columnist. It was handled very badly - I think as no-one in charge of the site had an idea about the community aspect of blogging. To make blogging competitive sort of misses the point. Then the site was very slow, difficult to upload photographs, and, as more bloggers joined, posts often only appeared on the main site for a couple of minutes before disappearing into the archives.

The thing that was beneficial though was that it encouraged people to begin blogging and many of them are fantastic writers - approaching blogging from a thoughtful, literary angle which makes for a lovely read.

The CL competition shortlist was again handled rather badly, it turned out to be people who had really submitted short articles rather than consistent blogging. This annoyed the regular committed contributors so much that they jumped ship. I am really glad as it makes it much easier to access the blogs without having to go through the rigmarole of the CL site - they can all be found at Children, Chocolate and Wine.

foraging for food

2007-05-14T07:46:00.000Z

May in Scotland sees the hungry gap in the self sufficient calender - stored root vegetables are past their best and the peas and beans of June are not yet here. Unless you are going to survive on asparagus, rhubarb and baby salad leaves you are going to have to look outside the vegetable patch for sustenance.

As I've mentioned before we are much more gardeners for fun than gardeners for self sufficiency but I love the idea of foraging for food. Over the years I have tried to convince the family of the joys of pignuts and gorse buds. Over the years I have failed. There is a lot of digging and picking involved for very little and to be honest, if we were trying to live on it we would be dead.

However - nettles are a different story. We have a lot of nettles, we have an awful lot of nettles, and ten minutes picking gives us enough in the basket to make cream of nettle (mint and parsley) soup. A soup the children will actually eat. Mind you it is hardly self sufficient as it involves a deal of cream and a good chicken stock (and we don't kill our chickens).

As I took my lunch outside to photograph yesterday everyone was (quite justifiably) laughing hysterically. Euan thinks this blogging thing has got out of hand if I, a very greedy person, is putting aesthetics before eating.

A busy day

2007-05-13T09:53:00.000Z

First a photo of some lavender sellers - Rebecca, Katherine and Sally - also helping were Zoe, Jan, Hannah and Esther. They made over £70 which is fabulous - and as it is ring - fenced money for the school grounds the children get to keep that feeling of achievement and ownership rather than it being part of the PTA pot. We shall be planting out the remaining plants as a lavender hedge - hopefully on Monday.

The plants all looked small in comparison to the artificially souped up plants of a garden centre - I'm sure that many plants bought because they were the school's plants - but I am also sure that they will find the plants outperform the larger garden centre plants in the end as they are used to the cold and haven't been fed a diet of junk food.

Yesterday was a packed day as I was also making up table flowers for a party - here they are crammed into a wooden trug, ready to be transported to Killearn.

Then in the evening it was a Guatemalan night in the village hall - hosted by Maria Casteel in aid of a nursery she is trying to set up in her native Guatemala. The company was great - many of the same faces as the fun day, but this time glammed up and without cake icing or chocolate fountain goo in their hair - the food was fantastic and our attempts at salsa dancing were very very sorry indeed.

Drymen Primary School Fair

2007-05-11T07:43:00.000Z

I am very, very keen on getting children gardening, or at least getting their hands into the soil. I have a C19th belief that growing things is good for the soul and to this end I am working with Drymen Primary School's Eco board to raise funds for growing things in the school grounds.

Tomorrow there is a school fun day with lots of stalls, activities and a football tournament and the eco board shall be selling lavender plants - see above - which have been growing away in my polytunnel. The plants are still small but they are good sturdy wee plants and the ideal size for planting out as a hedge or patch as they will grow away quickly with minimal root disturbance.

Everyone is welcome at the funday - there will be homebaking and teas - it is not just a school thing.

So far the school's new raised beds have been planted with strawberries, peas and carrots. They still have one bed to plant and they still have to decide what to put in it. I love going down to help plant - the enthusiasm, particularly from the Primary 2s and 3s is fantastic.

Closed Friday 11th May

2007-05-10T08:00:00.000Z

All the roads surrounding us are closed to non residents as part of Sirling Council's long overdue frenzy of road repairs. We have therefore decided to close on Friday.

If anyone needs flowers desperately give us a call - 01360 660 903.

Subscription deliveries and anything pre-ordered continues as usual.

A tunnel with a view . . .

2007-05-09T13:39:00.000Z

The polythene has been on our tunnel for nearly four years and over the winter it began to show signs of wear and tear, which we duly patched with tape.

Last week however the gusty winds took the small holes and made them larger and larger.

On Monday I was potting up tomatoes anxiously watching a rip snake its way across the roof, unable to do anything about it, as even on ladders I can't physically reach.

Euan was out running errands but, as soon as he got back and saw my anguished face, he got up on the ladders and did a drastic cut and paste job, leaving the end bay completely poly-free but the rest of the tunnel intact.

So now we have a tunnel with a view - I can pot on seedlings and watch lambs gambolling in the fields across the glen. It is beautiful. We could repair the tunnel, but my feeling is that we should leave it for the summer - it always gets too hot in there in the sun anyway - a sort of open topped tunnel - I can move the plants gradually along the bench to harden off.

The first sweet - pea

2007-05-08T10:07:00.000Z

I suspect that this flower is a bit of a fluke - I wouldn't expect the plants to flower until the end of May - but nevertheless, there it is, the first sweet pea of the year - a 3 flowered bloom on a Matucana plant.

This year Euan has built me 2 sweet pea supports out of alder branches he chopped in the wood (guess who got a chainsaw for his Christmas???). The supports are very beautiful - even without the sweet peas growing on them and give a height to the garden which is otherwise lacking at the moment.
They are much, much better than the cane structures I usually make which have a tendency to fall down in the September winds. I am hoping that these will stay for a good long while.

And then they were gone . . .

2007-05-06T16:05:00.000Z

Because I plant such a wide range of tulips with differing flowering times I usually have flowers for 5-6 weeks.

Last year I did a school fair the equivalent of next weekend and had 12 different varieties blooming and some still to flower in the cutting garden.

This year with the warm sunny weather they have all flowered in one spectacular whoosh! and are now sold out.

The flower in the photograph is Blue parrot, misnamed really as it is much more purple than blue. It is an unusual colour, a bit like that bruised colour that you get in bearded irises (now that doesn't sound attractive at all and it is in reality gorgeous)

The alliums are beginning to flower to take over from the tulips - I just hope that there isn't too much of a gap.

Voting after all.

2007-05-05T17:14:00.000Z

On Thursday it was the election for the members of the Scottish Parliament and local councillors. At the moment there doesn't seem to be a party that represents my views and I seriously thought about not voting at all.

Then I thought back to all those history lessons about the long hard fight for the right to vote and headed off to the polling station at the library.

As soon as I got there I knew that I had done the right thing - though there was no-one I would say I truly supported there were quite a few parties on the form - such at the UK Independence party - that I definitely do not want anything to do with so I could at least use the opportunity to vote against them.

I was doubly glad that I had voted on Friday evening when I came across a Scottish blog entry of shocking xenophobia - it read very like the canvassing letter from UKIP that arrived on my doormat last week. It complained about those hordes of foreigners arriving in our Scottish towns, taking our jobs and leering at our women.

Drymen, where I live, and the surrounding area is an area of fantastic beauty - tourists flock to see Loch Lomond, to climb the hills and to walk the West Highland Way. The area is very reliant on tourism in all its forms and the tourism industry is very reliant on workers from other countries, who are chosing to spend some time working and travelling in Scotland. Just as every other waiter in Sydney seems to be a Scot working their way round Australia, there are a lovely stream of foreign nationals working in our hotels, on our farms, and so on. They add to the area, some come back year on year, some return with their families on holiday.

My constituency now has a Scottish Nationalist Party member of Scottish Parliament. The SNP now have the most MSPs (by 1) but no obvious prospect of forming a coalition government with another party, so no prospect of real power. Their policies, I hasten to add, have no xenophobia in them at all and if it was not for their yen for an independent Scotland many of their left wing policies would probably appeal to me. However I do hope, as an English neighbour said this morning, that they weren't voted in by insular Scots wanting to keep all sasenachs and foreigners out.

In my opinion Scotland's problem is that it isn't diverse enough - it is only because of the recent bolstering of Glasgow's Polish community that we can now get decent rye bread at Partick farmers market!

The lie of the land

2007-05-04T15:13:00.000Z

With the light evenings and the weeding I am not watching much t.v. at the moment but last night I made a point of watching Molly Dineen's programme The Lie of the Land that I had heard previewed on Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

It was a film that evolved from Dineen accompanying a flesh run for a pack of hounds - where dead, dying and valueless animals were picked up to become cheap meat for the hounds. It then went on to explore the lives of several other failing farmers whose existence is being threatened by the way that today's consumers chose to buy their meat.

Dineen's style is non-interventionist, matter-of-fact and direct. She is not afraid of filming past the point that the majority of viewers will feel queasy. Her straightforwardness, without sentimentalisation or sensationalism made it, for me, compelling and uncomfortable viewing. My worry is that many will have switched off when the first calf was shot, and many more when it was skinned using the landrover.

The thing that I found most telling was one farmer talking about how it is only in the last 35 years that people's eating habits have moved away from buying seperate ingredients and cooking in the home to todays reliance on ready meals. In 1973 average households spent 1/3 of their income on food. What do you suppose it is now? I turn 38 in two weeks time - it is my lifetime.

I think that this should ideally be a series - moving away from the connection with hunting which clouds issues and looking at all food production, not just meat-. It could look more at the way that people's consumer choices impact on farmers' and animals' lives. As consumers our power is in the way we spend our money - Is it on British goods or imported? Do we care about whether our pigs live indoors or out? Are we bothered about whether rural economies work properly or do we just want manicured farms to look good in our holiday snaps? Are we ready to panic about whether Britain is self sufficient in food? I think as a nation we need to be much more aware.

Do we even know how farming works? One of my best friends is a farmer, she farms sheep, cows and hens, I have had illuminating conversations with her husband about the black grouse he want to conserve on his land, I know whether lambing is going well or badly, but I have no idea about the economics of it all.

Dineen's style could confront people with the reality of how our spending makes a difference - she might have to strap some of the audience into their seats though.

And if you saw the programme remember it was filmed in 2005. Two whole years ago.

What is it about yellow . . .

2007-05-03T18:28:00.000Z

I don't really like yellow flowers . . .I don't really plant them . . . so how come, when I went to select flowers for a gift bouquet, I came back with this?

Is it the odes to yellow I have been reading on various blogs? Is it the fabulous sunshiney days? Is it because I am making an effort to become a mellowy yellowy person?

Or can we just claim that this bouquet is orange?

The tulips are - for those who are interested - Texas Gold, a yellow parrot; Dordogne, an apricot with good long stems, Ballerina, orange lily tulip that smells of freesias but has weedy stems which need to be supported in an arrangement like this, and Gavota rust/burgundy with a yellow edge.

They made me feel happy - I hope the person who got the bouquet feels happy too.

Just what I always wanted . . .

2007-05-02T13:55:00.000Z

We do not live on a smallholding and we do not have any pretensions to be self-sufficient. We are not living "The Good Life" but we do grow (some of) our own vegetables and we do keep chickens and ducks. At some point in the future we shall have pigs and a proper coppice. It is very much the lifestyle that I envisaged when we were living in a Glasgow tenement about a decade ago.

In my mid 20s I found that a fibroid was growing attached to my womb and I had to have an operation to have the fibroid removed. Before the operation I was given a consent form to sign should a hysterectomy prove necessary.

Thanks to good luck and the skill of my consultant (who saw me through 2 subsequent pregnancies) the operation went fine but it meant that Euan and I, not long married, had to have a serious "what if we can't have children?" conversation.

The one thing that stood out was that, if we couldn't have children of our own, then I wanted to move to the country and keep chickens and pigs and foster. Everything was fine in the end but it was a vision which stuck. By the time I was pregnant with Zoe we had moved out to the Kilpatrick Braes and as soon as I was no longer working in Glasagow we moved further out to Stirlingshire. We got the chickens and ducks.

The bit that I enjoy best is breeding from the chickens - Peblo, our fantastic freeranger, is broody at the moment so we have acquired some fertile eggs for her to sit on. 6 are a mixed lot from Jane and Craig at Craigievern and 6 are bantam eggs I bid for on ebay (Craig is very dubious). The lower photo is of Peblo with "her" chick Windixie born last year.

16 days to go.

Everyone's talking about it. . .

2007-05-01T14:48:00.000Z

Cherry Menlove from Tales from Pixie Wood has done a post about the PR fiasco that is the Sainsbury's Anya Hindmarsh "This is not a Plastic Bag". Read about it here.

I had held back from commenting on this as it could be interpreted as an attack on a competitor but Cherry's post has given me courage!

The bag seems to me to be a failure on all counts - it was given the kind of gimmicky pre-launch hype that turned it from being a useful object into a fashiony "must have" object that will be discarded as soon as it ceases to be fashionable. It seems to be a really bad design in terms of a carry it in your handbag as it is too big to scrunch up - see Jane Perrone's verdict on this aspect of it here and then here. So as soon as the "see me with my Hindmarsh bag" moment is over it will be discarded. Finally and most importantly it is manufactured in factories where there are severe doubts about working conditions (and here
and here).

It is all such a travesty - something that should have been positive - encouraging people not to take a plastic bag at the supermarket - has just been done so badly because people have been blinded by fashiony types and celebrity pre-launches. Am I the only one that actually thinks it is a very unattractive bag anyway? - I like a lot of Hindmarsh's designs but not this

However all is not lost - there are a lot of great bags out there - as well as my bag that folds up into its pocket there are lovely totes at Cherry's and Samanthas which would scrunch up nicely into a handbag. They may be a bit more expensive than the Hindmarsh bag but they are made with love and care in Britain, won't date, are actually designed to work and will last for years and years. Unlike the latest "must have" they are proper "limited editions" and will get people asking you where you got them. Cheapest is usually not best (or cheapest) in the long run.

Black stemmed cow parsley

2007-04-30T17:51:00.000Z

It is glorious weather so this post will be short as there is a lot of weeding still to do and, now that we are almost into May, a lot of daylight to do it by.

This photo is of Anthriscus sylvestris "ravenswing", a black stemmed cow parsley recommended by Sarah Raven in her book The Bold and Brilliant Garden. It is a big improvement on the general cow parsley which covers the verges here. Now I love cow parsley - there is no finer sight than verges of cow parsley fluff with the last of the pink campion and a few bluebells - but it is not a garden plant.

Ravenswing has daintier flowers which seem to almost sparkle against the dark red leaves and stems. It does self sow but does it very gently (not something you could say of the wild cow parsley) and is a couple of weeks earlier into flower.

It also doesn't seem to have the rank smell of cow parsley when cut and looks beautiful in a vase mixed with black and white columbines like "Magpie" and "Guinness".

I am looking at wild flowers a lot this week - one of the things that we want to do is create a couple of meadow patches here - one in front of the house will be flagrantly based on the entrance to Great Dixter and I will use all sorts of things there to try and create that million flowers type tapestry effect. The other will be in the sloping field and I want to be much more careful there.

I read a lot of books about wildflower meadows over the winter and found that I should really be trying to get very, very local seed to create my patch - the general seed mixes are seemingly not ideal as they bring in slightly different genetic pools into the area. This is seemingly the case even if they are British or even Scottish mixes.

I want to do this properly so I am now collecting seed from an area of 5 miles around the house - we grew some hawksbit last year and I have some baby primroses in plugs. I have my eye on campion and water avens in the lane which should have seed next month.

It will be slow - no quick fix of buying a bag of damp meadow mix - but I think we can take our time. (Euan will laugh at this as I am the most ridiculously impatient person)

Warning - this post contains a photo of a dead mole.

2007-04-29T18:11:00.000Z

Our approach to wildlife is very simple - if it was here before we were then we have to learn to live with it.

Hence we put up with hares (that nibble hedges), voles (that tunnel under growing plants), pheasants (that eat bulbs) and yes, moles (that turn the grass paths and beds into ripples). While most farmers I know are keen on wildlife and do a lot to nurture it, this latter foible is regarded with hilarity (and I suspect a little annoyance) by our farming neighbours who enthusiastically annihilate all moles with a variety of horrible methods. It is of course for a reason, while a mole to me means an unsightly hump and some nice friable soil to steal as potting compost, to our neighbours it means ruined silage as the soil mixes with the harvested grass.

Minou obviously feels the same. The photo above shows Minou the foreman instructing Jasmine to "keep digging" for a mole that he could obviously hear under the ground. The photo was taken at the beginning of a week of frenzied activity - cat issuing instructions, Jasmine digging until her claws hurt and the mole cheekily coming up behind them with 8 fresh hills. This took up most of their waking hours from last Monday.

This morning this is what we found on the lawn - a beautiful sheeny black mole with 2 telltale puncture marks on his neck. Mr Mole is no more. Minou is a great hunter (he usually catches 2 of everything, one for himself, one for Jasmine the sidekick) but is scrupulous about hunting when hungry and then eating his catch. This was something quite different - he just knew that mole was laughing at him.

I am very sad - it is very easy to be sentimental about such a stunningly beautiful animal. Katie had to be persuaded that a dead mole is not a suitable soft toy.

Shop - 27th April

2007-04-27T14:12:00.000Z

We are very tulipy today - a medly of orange tulips, including the lily tulip Ballerina which smells like fresias, tall apricot "dordogne", deep purple "recreado", yellow parrot "texas gold" and the giganitically tall cream "purissima".

There are also baby moon narcissi and some anenomes, late hyacinths and love lies bleeding.

Here is Jasmine sunbathing and waiting for customers to pay her attention.

Tomorrow I shall be at Baldernock Garden Club's annual plant sale in Baldernock Church Hall, Balmore Road 11-1. There is usually a very good plant stall so I am taking my money. here are details of the garden club.

Sweetpeas

2007-04-26T13:28:00.000Z

There are certain things that I like cooking - mayonnaise, sour dough bread, handmade pasta - that I think appeal to me simply because few other people do them from scratch. At the moment I have a pig's head simmering on the stove to make brawn. All these things are straightforward and easy, and only time consuming if you are not already at home.

I am a bit like that about the things I grow as well - I like the straightforward things that no-one else bothers with doing. The flowers that I get the most pleasure from growing are sweet peas - and I suspect that a lot of that is because I sow the seeds in the autumn, overwinter them and am then planting out great plants in 2 litre pots in April, rather than the rather weedy plants available in the garden centre.

By popular demand (Claire) I have a limited number of pots for sale tomorrow at the van- they are 2 plants to a 2 litre pot, £3.50 or 3 pots for £9.

First come first served.

My ideal May meal - fresh eggs from our chickens, home made mayonnaise, salad from the garden and (perhaps) some asparagus from my patch with a bunch of the first sweet peas on the table.

Rain. . . .

2007-04-25T18:38:00.000Z

We have been having the very best kind of rain - gentle even warm rain that smells sweet and sinks right down to the roots of the plants. The garden is growing at a fantastic rate - both plants that should be there and weeds that shouldn't - I swear you can see the leaves extending by the hour.

I love working outside in this kind of rain - you can't feel yourself getting wet and the earth smells wonderful.

We don't water plants here - well they get watered in when they are first planted and again after 5 days if there has been no rain, but after that, not a drop. My theory is that they get better root systems if they have to make an effort to get water and that they encounter more nutrients in the soil.

Having said that, it is not that hard a test as we are a wet part of the country - but we had the same heatwave as everyone else last summer and the flowers didn't droop or mildew.

Euan is busy designing a system of siphons and water barrels to take rainwater from the house and greenhouse roofs to various points in the garden, tunnel and field. Soon I hope to not need the hose at all.

The photo is of a self seeded Cerinthe major.

Planting dahlias

2007-04-24T14:25:00.000Z

I meant to do this post earlier in the year to encourage people to buy dahlia tubers - but then we sold out of them at the CL fair and I forgot until today when I planted up my own tubers.

Dahlia tubers look like mis-shaped potatoes grouped by strings around a central stalk. Every tuber must have a piece of stalk or it will not grow.

The shoots will develop at the join between the hangy down bits and the stem.

Plant the tuber with the stem uppermost into a large pot of ordinary potting compost.

Fill up the pot but leave the top of the stem above the surface of the compost.

Water well and put somewhere warm. I have put mine on a heated mat in the tunnel but on a smaller scale anywhere warm will work. If you put them into the dark make sure you check for sprouts every day or they will become weak and lanky.

Within a couple of weeks shoots will begin to develop. Only when this happens should you begin to water. Keep the plants inside until the frosts have passed and then gradually get them used to outside temperatures by letting them be outside for increasing periods of time

Tulips - how to stop them going bendy

2007-04-23T13:20:00.000Z

One of the questions I get asked again and again is how to stop tulips going bendy in the vase. So here we go!

The bendiness is caused by 2 different things. A bendy stem is usually caused by an airlock in the stem, preventing the water from going right the way up. A bending over head is usually due to the tulip continuing to grow after it has been cut which along with the increasing weight of the head, leads it to bend over.

To cure the air lock - take your tulips, make sure the stems are bendy and lay them side by side, all heads level, on a piece of brown paper - them roll it into a tight straight parcel and bind it well with string - see photo.

Put the kettle on and pour an inch of boiling water into a mug, cut 1/2 and inch off the bottom of the stems and put them at a slight angle into the mug. You should see an air bubble come out of the bottom of the stem. Put them immediately into a vase of tepid water and wait 2 hours before unwrapping - they should be set in a straight position. This can be done both with tulips just bought and ones that have done that croquet hoop thing in the vase.

If you want to cure the twisting stem of the growing tulip (and I must say I like the elegant writhing of the parrot tulips) you can destroy the growing plate of the flower by repeatedly inserting a needle in and out of the stem, just below the flower. Seemingly people used to be employed just to do this in stately homes. The tendency of tulips to continue growing means that they didn't work well in the very ordered symmetrical arrangements of the C19th as within a couple of days they would be poking out an inch above the rest of the flowers.

Green Gallery Opening

2007-04-22T17:13:00.000Z

Sally and I set up our stall outside the new Green Gallery this lunchtime - the sun was shining, the birds were singing, you could feel heat bouncing of the pale pink of the outbuilding wall.

By the time the Gallery opened at 2 our basky wee corner had somehow turned into an arctic wind tunneland we were laughingly innappropriate in our dress.

That aside, the afternoon was a good one. It was certainly very busy - for a half hour it was like that episode in Jimmy's Farm where they have to have stewards helping people reverse miles down single track roads and comandeer fields to park in.

The photographs are of Carneval de Nice tulips, a spring window box with muscari 'fascination', narcissi 'baby moon' and tulip 'gavota', and a cow in the sculpture garden - look at those eyelashes!

Green Gallery Opening and a temporary addition to our family.

2007-04-21T16:10:00.000Z

Today was a day of rest - I just haven't got down to anything - just drifted from one half completed task to another.

I began potting on lavender cuttings which will be for sale at Drymen School's Fun day on May 12. The lavender stall will be manned and managed by the school's eco board and all proceeds will be going to pay for improvements to the school playground. I have agreed to nurture the cuttings until the sale. What a responsibility!

Tomorrow afternoon I shall have a stall at the opening of the Green Gallery- this is quite exciting. The Green Gallery used to be in Aberfoyle and always had a good mix of art and crafts. Its owner, Becky Walker has a keen eye for the kind of paintings, sculptures and ceramics that actually work in a home. I have never been in the position to buy a painting (though I have coveted a few) but over the years I have bought some lovely pottery and ceramics. Just before Christmas the Gallery moved to Becky's home in Buchlyvie - the Christmas Exhibition was in her actual home, a beautiful Victorian sandstone house with wonderful views to the hills. Now the gallery has moved to its proper place, a converted coach house in the grounds. I saw the space yesterday and it looks lovely - calm, clear yet domestic. There is also a sculpture garden I am keen to explore as getting pleasing sculpture for outside can be difficult. The opening is tomorrow 2-5 and all are welcome. More details of the exhibition are on the Green Gallery website.

This is Tim - a 12 year old Jack Russell. Tim's owner died last night so he has come to stay with us until he can be found a new owner. So far he seems to be a lovely dog - he and Jasmine are rubbing along fine and the cats are ignoring him.

He is used to being the only dog in the house with a single owner so I was a bit concerned about how he would take to us. So far, so good though he is still at the compulsive wandering around stage. His owner was not in great health for a while I am told so he didn't get many walks - his wandering sounds like someone drumming their long fingernails in impatience.

If anyone knows of someone with space in their home and heart for what seems to be a great wee dog - call me on 01360 660 903.

Best Day Ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-04-20T16:41:00.000Z

We opened for the season this morning at 10.30. We had customers arriving from 9.30, calling in on their way back from vegetable shopping at France Farm. From then until 4 it just didn't stop. I am overwhelmed with people's support. One lovely woman travelled all the way from Broxburn having seen us at the CL Fair.

I was worried as the hot weather (see never satisfied) brought on some of the tulips and all of the fritillaries too fast so the garden looks beautiful but they are too far out to sell. Also deer got in while I was at the Country Living Fair (who did leave that gate open?) and ate over 800 tulip bulbs in one fantastic feast.

From Wednesday I have been prowling the garden. Would there be any flowers to pick? Would there be any customers? Would anyone want what I have.

But Sally and I found that when we looked, there were rather a lot of flowers out there. We filled the buckets with them and then was a rush of making up and wrapping all day. We have NO FLOWERS left and the stall is a mess of snipped stems and stripped leaves.

I am exhausted but very, very happy. Tonight we drink gin!

The photo is of Carneval de Nice - a double tulip, masses of raspberry ripple leaves forming a ball of a flower. It looks great in pots but is very bad at reblooming the next year.

Talk, talk . . .

2007-04-19T21:22:00.000Z

Tonight I have been at Buchlyvie Garden Club talking about growing cut flowers. It was good fun. I was actually a bit nervous - I was using a borrowed power point projector and worried that something would go wrong with the connections. I can use it if it works, I am lost if something goes wrong.

In the end it was something more mundane that caused problems with the visuals. The screen, usually stored in the gents loos, was missing and we were faced with the prospect of having to project the images onto a mustard coloured woodchip papered wall. Lovely.

With 2 minutes to go before the start the missing screen was discovered . . . locked in the WRI (Women's Rural Institute) cupboard. Is this inter-club rural rivalry?

The flowers in the blue bucket are Narcissus "geranium", one of the longest lasting and most fragrant narcissi- a Sarah Raven recommendation . I picked a few buckets full to take along and sell to raise funds for The Tullochan Trust.

A post about post . . .

2007-04-18T11:57:00.000Z

As a couple of people responded to my comment yesterday about the cost of postage I thought that I would open out the topic a bit and ask for some feedback both from other small mail order businesses and from people who buy mail order.

What can small businesses do about the cost of posting things?

I do a mailing two or three times a year - at the start of the season, sometimes at the end of the season and before Christmas. Ideally I would like to cut this down to one mailing a year but I do feel that, from a business point of view, a clutch of pretty postcards in the hand is better than any number of e-mails. They can be stuck to a fridge, handed on to friends etc. etc. . . .I hope. Am I right? Do people relish getting a bright hand addressed envelope (Or might they be disappointed that it isn't a birthday card with a fat cheque inside?)

There is also the issue of paper. I use recycled paper for all letters and print-outs but I do not use recycled envelopes as I couldn't source them in bright colours and I could not afford the cost of recycled postcards. This is not as good as it should be. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Then there is the issue of mailing out orders. We thought long and hard about this with the website and decided on a flat fee as, when I am buying things, I like to be able to do a transaction in one go without faffing about with e-mails (spot the stressed mother). We pitched this at £4.95, sort of on a par with Cath Kidston, Plumo or the White Company which are the type of catalogues my customers tend to read.

The average actual cost of the mailings I have done so far has been £7.50 (and that is postage, not boxes or tape) so really I can't afford to bring it down any lower. None has been under the £4.95.

What is other people's experience of this - do you look at the postage and think mmmmm, maybe I'll pop into the shops in town? Are people more au fait with postage costs in our post e-bay world? Should I be conning couriers into thinking I am a big company?

That aside - I am on a high today - the first batch of letters went out yesterday, would have arrived with people today, and already I have had phonecalls from a high percentage of last year's subscription customers re-ordering for this year. If I could work out how to insert one of those smily face icons, I would.

Prize Draw

2007-04-17T11:26:00.000Z

We had a small prize draw at the Country Living Fair - The prize was this basket of gardening goodies - kneeler, soap, giant fork and trowel and a set of aluminium labels.

It was won by Wendy Waller of Edzell and (due to holidays) will be dispatched to her today.

Today I am stuffing envelopes with my new postcards and an announcement that we are open from Friday. Surrounded by bright green envelopes, it makes me realise how much paper, time and money is spent on mailings. This was partly the reason for the prize draw. To enter we had to be given an e-mail address - not so that we can spam people - just to make it easier to let them know when the season begins and ends and what we are doing for Christmas.

Time shortage being what it is, I haven't put the names onto the computer yet . . . . so much for efficiency.

And then they were back on the bus

2007-04-16T11:15:00.000Z

Well the Easter school holidays are over - and goodness they went quickly. The children were picked up this morning at 8.30 by Alan on the school bus and we are back into routine.

Judging from most of the mothers I meet, I am unusual in actually enjoying the school holidays. I am definitely not a morning person (another reason why I am not a conventional florist - who knows what I would come back with from a 5am flower market) and, though I tend to be up and about quite early, I am not quite all there until 9.30 at the earliest. The morning routine of "get your shoes on . . .get your shoes on . . .GET YOUR SHOES ON !! !" is not my finest hour.

So when all that can be abandoned in favour of free ranging scruffy, layabout kids I am happy. And the fine weather this year has made it a breeze - the children were happy playing outside doing Blytonish things. They produced a local newspaper, they did some elaborate dog training with jumps, they made a veg patch, they just lay for hours on the trampoline reading. We even managed to wean our younger daughter away from the television.

I felt like a really good Mum. For once it all worked - I could keep a benign eye on them from my weeding, we ate when we were hungry and there was no running about from piano to swimming to Brownies. Mind you, you should have seen the colour of the bathwater last night.

And we are all beginning to get back some colour after the peely wally milk bottle colour of a Scottish winter.

Drymen Primary School garden

2007-04-15T07:17:00.000Z

Yesterday we were at Drymen primary School as part of a parents task force to sort out the beds in the playground.

When the school was built flower beds were incorporated into the playground. Unfortunately they were filled with concrete and rubble under a thin layer of soil (Why do they do this?????). They were also flush with the tarmac surface - encouraging children to run straight over them in pursuit of a ball.

As places for the children to grow anything they were a disaster - puddles lay on the surface in the rain, and they baked solid in the sun. Apart from daffodils and weeds nothing ever grew.
Last year's planting efforts were even more dismal than usual as someone came along with a spade and stole most of the plants. The CCTV which was installed after other vandalism will hopefully stop this happening again.

The children at the school are all keen on the idea of planting things and particularly in making their playground a haven for wildlife. It has been a shame that their efforts have been doomed to failure, through no fault of their own.

So over the Easter holidays a group of parents got busy, Colin Campbell created wooden raised beds from wood supplied by Gilmour and Aitken timber yard, and yesterday we had a grand weeding session, finally filling up the new raised beds with very fine top soil.

One of the beds was planted up with salvaged plants with some additions from here. Hopefully the children will have lots of ideas as to what they would like to see in the other 4.

Really wild . . .

2007-04-13T16:30:00.000Z

Sometimes I think that I give the wrong impression of our land. I concentrate in posts about the flat bit near the house, the bit that forms the cutting garden, the bit which takes up most of my time. I rarely mention the rest.

In reality we have about 4 acres here - around about 1 acre is flat - the house is built on this bit and we have put up a polytunnel and lots and lots of raised beds.

The rest of the land slopes behind this down across a small tussocky field then a swampy field and finally through a bluebell wood down to the Altquhir burn.

This whole area is completely untouched and has been for at least 20 years - it is where I go to be quiet and is why we bought the house. Today Zoe and her friend Jan went down to the woods to play on the tree swing - sitting on the river bank they watched 2 herons fishing in the river. It is a very special place.

It is at this time of year that the fields begin to come alive with flowers - dog violets under the hawthorn trees, cowslips in the grass banking between the deer fences, kingcups in the swamp. Soon there will be cow parsley and scabious, meadowsweet and elderflowers and bluebells, bluebells everywhere. Nothing I grow really matches up to these.

My favourite thing at the moment is to lie in the grass under a hawthorn tree looking up through the old twisted branches with their new fresh green shoots.

This is my 300th post - doesn't time fly.

Thinking blogger awards

2007-04-12T16:24:00.000Z

A pink bee tagged me as one of her thinking blogger awards and now I have to pass on 5 recommendations for blogs which make me think.

Normally I try to avoid any of these tagging things - they are a bit chain lettery and I won't pass them on even though I am very aware that it makes me sound very pompous. This is slightly different as it is a chance to mention blogs that make me think and change my life in some way.

Fairly recently someone told me that they saw their blogging as a way of finding friends. To be frank my (internal) reaction was that she needed to get out more and find some friends where she could see the whites of their eyes. However, thinking today about who to chose for a mention here has been a bit like the way I chose my friends so there you go.

I am notoriously picky about chosing friends and I have ended up with an eclectic mix, but the thing that binds them together is that they all have opinions (often completely opposite to mine) and an ability to articulate them well. So that is how I have selected these blogs.

First the two blogs that I check out every day for a bit of what I would call the domestic political - intelligent women with distinctive voices and few hostages - Heather at Eie Flud and Lynn at Gigi Bird.

Next El who is doing the same in rural America with her brilliantly titled Fast Grow the Weeds. I read a lot of American blogs to try to counteract the anti-Americanism of our media that equates all Americans with George Bush. El writes like all the cultured, caring, aware Americans that I have been fortunate enough to meet and work with over the years. Not a Hummer or a Big Mac in sight.

Then there is a blog I came across by accident a few days ago while googling for fair trade cut flowers Crap at the Environment - I don't know how much they post - the strapline is "Saving the environment despite not being very good at it" and there were a number of postings that were both very funny and made me think.

Finally the posts at Garden Rant are all very opinionated and bump you out of complacency- I particularly enjoy Michelle's posts - she also posts at Sign of the Shovel but that is a bit erratic at the mo.

There are lots of others but these are my top 5.

The season is about to start - van open from next Friday, bouquets from now. The photo is of a bouquet that went out yesterday evening.

Asparagus

2007-04-11T10:51:00.000Z

My Dad is a very good gardener. He learned from his father and he grows excellent fruit and vegetables on what really amounts to a sand dune in East Lothian.

He remains slightly amazed that I have ended up gardening for a living as I showed neither aptitude nor interest as a child.

I am putting this photograph in for him as he is an occasional reader of this blog.

My Dad grows exceptional asparagus, one of my favourite foods. My birthday is in May, at the height of the asparagus season and I have always associated my father's asparagus bed with my birthday - I have always felt that he grows it especially for me in the way that he plants masses of strawberries for my Mum.

Of course this birthday treat has become more of a problem since I left home and insisted on living outside East Lothian, so a couple of years ago Dad grew me some asparagus plants, and then, when they were ready to plant out, he came over for the day and made me an asparagus bed.

I chose to site the bed near to the house so that I can see when it needs weeding - and here is a picture of it - look Dad, weed free and there is an asparagus shoot!

Family weddings

2007-04-10T09:57:00.000Z

Yesterday was a family day - we headed over to my parents in East Lothian for a day of catching up and bracing walks along Gullane beach.

We also fitted in a visit to see the church and hotel where my brother Stephen and his fiancee Helen will be getting married in August.

I shall be arranging the flowers so it was a relief that they are both lovely venues - full of light and air. I always dread wedding receptions in those dead corporate type venues where the flowers have to fight against the polystyrene tiles on the roof and the rails left over from audio visual presentations.

At the moment I am trying to build up a visual portfolio of month by month ideas for weddings and events - on actual wedding days there never seems to be enough time for taking anything other than record shots.

The photo shows Zoe modelling a bridesmaid headdress, a half band of individually wired hyacinth florets, each with a couple of amber glass beads in the centre. She looked very, very pretty in it practicing to be a bridesmaid!

Seed sowing

2007-04-08T14:03:00.000Z

Today has seen the beginning of our seed sowing. I used to sow seeds far too early - champing at the bit in February - forcing seeds to germinate and then having to nurse the seedlings through frosty March and April.

Now I sow only 6 weeks before the last frost (here that is Mid May) so that the seedlings will fill a 9 cm pot just at the right time to go straight out into the garden.

I sow most of my hardy and half hardy annuals into coir jiffy pellets - they are low in nutrients so ideal for seed germination. I line up the pellets in old wooden seedtrays (I bought a load of 1950s seed trays that came from an old nursery - I use most of them but some are available for sale) - 35 to a tray and then put them into a poly bag in the boiler cupboard until they germinate. After germination they go into the tunnel so that they can get a lot of light. If it is going to be frosty I cover them with fleece, but otherwise they get no coddling.

The main problem with the coir is that they dry out quickly - one of the reasons that I squeeze them into the seed trays rather than using wider spaced plastic trays they come with - so you have to be on hand with water a lot. This is also why I pot on - into 9cm pots - as soon as I can see roots.

Euan and the girls are in charge of the vegetable plots this year - so yesterday they got weeding.

Presents for my girls

2007-04-07T07:15:00.000Z

One of the important reasons that I began my business was that I wanted to be around for my girls. Zoe was 3 and Katie newborn when it all began and the business has grown with them - finally getting more serious when Katie hopped on to the bus to school last year.

I wanted to be able to go to all the school shows and to help with the school garden. I wanted to have them wandering about aimlessly in the sunshine during holidays.

It all sounds idyllic doesn't it? The down side for them is that I may work from home, but I do work. Running a small business is all consuming and at busy times they don't get enough attention.

It got particularly bad around the Country Living Fair - I missed a parents' evening, the house was hemmed in with boxes of stock and they were farmed out to a series of friends after school - so I decided to get them something as a thank you for their tolerance.

I have long admired Manda at Treefall design's sock puppies so I decided to get a couple of them - as you can see from the photos the girls are delighted.

The pups came beautifully wrapped with the most gorgeous gift tags so thank you very much Manda, beautiful!

Peblo v. Jasmine - an update

2007-04-05T19:19:00.000Z

This photo is of Peblo, survivor of the fox attack, frequent flier, and determined free ranger.

Up until Tuesday, Peblo would shriek and squawk when she met Jasmine - running around like a particularly interesting feathery ball - with dog in pursuit until I rescued her.

On Tuesday I was on the telephone and didn't get out there as quickly as usual. Peblo, fed up with the chase, stopped, turned on Jasmine and pecked her sharply on the nose. Now Jasmine is largely ignoring her- chicken, what chicken? - she is obviously not used to being attacked by her toys.

I suspect it will not last so I have bought a copy of The Practical Dog Whisperer as suggested and so far I am very impressed by the simplicity and humanity of the approach. I will report back