Ta Daaah!

We have a new house. The outside, anyway. We love it. Here's the tour. A fairly traditional front:

Then round the corner to the gable end:

The somewhat ecclesiastical window has our bedroom behind it. A friend of ours visiting from Wales, who's training to be a Baptist minister, said it made him feel very at home.

The drainpipe is not an unusual feature but was a temporary measure.

The one below was taken a few weeks ago when the plaster was still wet and the edging to the flat roof had yet to be finished. Joe's doing a bit of guttering fixing up there. 

This is one of the views from the roof terrace - posh name for the flat roof, but it will have decking and a glass surround. Not sure if it's my eyes or if this is a bit out of focus.

And here's the south-facing side. All that glass for the solar gain. The upstairs glass has a sitting room behind it. The downstairs will be the kitchen. And there's a rainbow growing out of the roof! Only just noticed that.

And last week the insulation went in. It's cellulose, another name for shredded newspapers, and it gets everywhere. This is Adrian with the last bag of the stuff. You have to wear face masks when going inside as there are tiny bits of newspaper floating through the air. I like the idea of my walls being filled with all those newspaper stories.

Inside it's tricky to get a clear view of some of the rooms - there's piles of plasterboard obstructing everything. But here's an idea. Downstairs sitting room:

Upstairs sitting room:

All we have to do now is sell our present house. We've had two sales not go through as the buyers haven't been able to sell their own houses.

In the meantime I have two lovely gardens to work on. Lots of black polythene down now. I'm going to plant potatoes in there next spring. I've already put in overwintering onions and garlic.

Yuppie shed

I don't know if there are any yuppies any more - very eighties - but this is how our new shed was described by a neighbour. Yuppie means young urban professional. I suppose the shed is young, so that fits. Urban - definitely not. Professional. Mmm. Depends on what goes on inside. Joe's workshop? My gardening stuff?

Anyway, we're very pleased with the shed, yuppie or not.

There's a drain that runs along the north of the property next to the road. Between the drain and the road is a stone wall. This lad seems to be living in the wall. I was delighted to see him/her.

 

It's a common Irish lizard, but the only place I've seen one before was in the Burren. This one was sizable - several inches long.

There are also ladybirds.

These are a rare sighting in our present garden. I love ladybirds. However, to have ladybirds, there must be aphids, and aphids are not good news for your garden plants. Even so, I think I'd go for the delight of the ladybirds.

I've started transplanting from here to there. I peeled back the polythene and dug over a patch. The soil is so very different. It was thick and black and like cutting through butter. Some big fat worms, which is a good sign. We'll have to see how things do. Here's the start:

The deer fence experiment is up too:

This is fishing line stretched between six-foot posts. Joe found all sorts of ideas online, particularly as used in Canada and the US where deer are a major problem. Apparently the deer don't see it, so when they touch it they get spooked and don't go near it again. This wouldn't work on their usual routes - they'd simply plough through - but in a new area it should do the trick.

The trees are just coming into leaf, so this will be the test time. No incursions as yet!

In the fenced area we planted spindle, crab apple, walnut, cob nut, guelder rose and hornbeam bought from the Celt tree nursery, and hazel saplings transplanted from the present garden. I've also put in two oak and a beech alongside the birch at the other end of the site. Two crab apple are not thriving, however. Not sure why. Enquiries are under way.

Wild flowers too. Primroses, cowslips, water avens, flag, meadow sweet, bluebells, wood anemone, purple loosestrife. Some of these are along the drain - I have an idea of making it a linear bog garden. Here's some primroses:

The only thing is the name. Drain. If this was another part of Ireland we could call it a ditch, which would be altogether less sewerage sounding, but in Clare the ditch is the bank around the field. Someone came up with 'cut' as in canal, and a canal is a type of drain too, so we'll see if that sticks. If any of my readers have other suggestions, do please say.

I put in 100 whitethorn (aka quickthorn, aka hawthorn) too along the bank (ditch) that borders the south of the site, dividing us from a drive to a house / the East Clare Way. It doesn't show up terribly well here, but you'll get the gist. They're all growing splendidly, but I'll have to keep the bracken under control until they're established.

 

It's tricky to know when to move plants to the new place. Our original sale on Gortavrulla fell through, the lovely people who were going to buy being unable to sell their house. We've had a couple of viewers since, and property here is definitely moving, but the more plants I shift, the more I'll have to keep two gardens on the go.

We have someone coming to look tomorrow, arriving from England on the night ferry. Uncertainty rules.

Willow weaves and light metal.

Top-of-the-stone-wall makeover time. Or, in normal, old-fashioned english, remaking the willow-weave fence that sits on top of the stone-faced wall we can see from our conservatory. Here's what it looked like before (you see, it could be on a makeover TV programme):

I did the willow topping several years ago, and here you can see it's all rotting away. Joe stuck in a couple of upright supports to stop it disintegrating altogether.

First gather your willow. The yellow stuff on the ground is a type of basket willow got from friends years ago. There's a red version too which looks really pretty where it's growing alongside the drive. Not long enough, though, for this job. The yellow is just about, and its colour is glorious.

The mainstay of the weave, though, is the mile-a-minute stuff that has provided quick and excellent growth in hedges around the place. Cut it to the ground and back it comes every year filled with early pussy willows appreciated by the first bumble bees out of hibernation. It came from the same friends with the label bio-mass. You can make structures out of it too - arbours and the like.

So willows cut and trimmed. Then remove the old stuff.

A few extra willow branches cut and trimmed, then the fun bit. New posts to wind the willows between and here's the result:

It looks so pretty when freshly done! The yellow will fade with time, but the structure should be good now for another several years.

Good to get outside and work on a satisfying project. Great weather for it - absolutely still. So still it seems somehow unreal, like being in a giant bowl some massive creature has made into a toy garden.

A side-effect of the willow weaving was willow cuttings. They work well stuck straight into the ground but I put these in pots in the greenhouse alongside the pretty little yellow flowers, whose name I should know, which seeded themselves liberally in the gravel at the edge of the courtyard. A common summer planting for tubs, I'll have plenty for next year.

There's flowering currant here too. And lavender. I'll have to watch it though as the winter progresses. Mice got into last year's lavender cuttings looking, I suppose, for roots when there was little else to eat.

Finally here's a green dock leaf beetle (Gastrophysa viridula don't ya know) that's settled in shiny accommodation that makes it feel at home. These beetles wear metallic-looking jackets that shimmer in sunlight and can appear anything from bronze to violet to green.

More dry weather please - I still have weeds to pull.

Not the end of the world after all - probably

I wondered was this how it began. Imperceptible, a slow realisation that it will never rain again and that, even though the sun shines, there is no warmth because a relentless wind blows from the icy north and dry east. Weeks it had been. Everything bleached and dry. Even the new nettles were going yellow. The fields were - still are - almost colourless.

Last year I planted the potatoes and onions just after St Patrick's Day, but this year there was no point - putting them into the cold cold ground would be a heartbreaking exercise. They would very likely fester providing food for the slugs. Except even the slugs were lying low in the bitter weather (an upside?).

But last weekend, even though the end of the world was nigh, I chanced it.

Potatoes on the right, onions on the left.

And here they are after the big coverup - the potatoes can fend for themselves being a foot under, but deer-trampled onions don't do well (four of the buggers charged across the track in front of me this afternoon as I was on my way out to do the shopping in Scarriff - heading in the direction of the Hollow. I'd better go and check...).

Finally the rain came on Wednesday. Still it looks almost like winter as I glance out of the sitting room window. It's disorientating having the evenings stretching so, but the branches still bare. The crab apple and spirea leaves in the Grove are, however, sneaking out of their buds. Brave souls!

Periwinkles and caviar

Here's the spring posting. Bumble bees! Big buzzing in the Grove, a queen taking an early drink from yellow crocuses and white hellebore.

Two weeks of dry weather meant I could finally do some weeding. Just in time - it's been impossible in the garden since god knows when - this time last year probably. The veg garden isn't too bad as I cover that with black polythene, but the ornamental garden fills up with creeping buttercup and creeping grass creeping creeping everywhere.

It was cold though! Weather from the east. Breezes on which I swear I could smell the mountains of Greece and Turkey. Full thermals and woolly hat weather. But dry. Oh joy.

Rained again this week though. The up side of that is warmth, and at least the ground is no longer saturated. A bucket a day keeps the weeds at bay.

The lesser celandine is another creeper, but so pretty and one of the earliest flowers in spring. You mustn't mind thinking hemorrhoids of course when digging them out. All those little roots giving it the name pilewort. I rather think I wrote about that at length last year, so won't go into it again. 

There are many hazel trees in and around my garden, very useful when coppiced, the tall straight branches shooting skywards from the base. I cut them for bean poles, trying, but generally failing, to remember to cut them before the sap rises as they last longer.

I also have a Corylus avellana Contorta. It has two common names: contorted hazel or the less uncomfortable corkscrew hazel. It could make a good measure of personality - contorted or corkscrew, glass half full or glass half empty.

These hazels, unlike their straight cousins, are very slow growers. They send out sports at regular intervals, trying to catch up with the other family members, but they don't succeed. Snip snip with the secateurs (or chop chop with the loppers), otherwise the head of branches will corkscrew no longer, an Irish dancer without her ringlet wig.











 



A couple more photos to complete the early spring picture - primroses and variegated periwinkle.

 


And finally where would we be without these sparkling jewels, this caviar of the garden pond:

The period of amphibian bacchanalia seems to have been shorter this year, with frogspawn after about a week. The frogs started singing later than last year too. Less time for romance. 


Looks like we're in for a good batch of froglets anyway.

Winter vigil

A sign of winter. This is Common Bistort, a native perennial that is the first to collapse when the frost hits. This relative of the Dock was also known in Ireland as Snakeroot or Snakeweed, presumably because the rhizomatous roots resemble snakes, although I can't say I've noticed it myself. Thinking about it, though, perhaps this is what people imagined snakes looked like, having never seen them, the good St Patrick having done such a good job of getting rid of them.

Bistort was traditionally plucked when going on a journey, while saying a charm that described it as 'the first herb the Virgin Mary took into her hand.' This does seem a little unlikely, it growing (according to my Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe) in European countries north of the Mediterranean, but perhaps someone had imported it.

Here's how the bistort looked in the summer when it was full of buzzy things:

I found the bit about Bistort and Mary in a wonderful book I have called Irish Wild Plants, Myths, Legends and Folklore. There's a big section on Ragwort too, a plant with jagged leaves and pretty yellow daisy-flowers that is poisonous to livestock. It's also the home to a gorgeous little stripey caterpillar that turns into the exotic Cinnabar moth. And also, according to Irish Wild Plants, the alternative form of transport for witches and warlocks who can't lay their hands on a broomstick. Here's a bit of a Robbie Burns poem describing the goings on:

Let warlocks grim, an' wither'd hags,
Tell how wi' you on ragweed nags,
They skim the muirs an' dizzy crags,
Wi' wicked speed.

I'd never realised ragwort was the speedster of the witchy world.


I put out bird nuts yesterday. Another sign of winter. This morning there was one great tit and one chaffinch, but word got out. Just before lunch there were four great tits, three chaffinches and a robin.

I put all the terracotta tubs into the greenhouse too. All those that haven't already half disintegrated in previous frosts, held together by roots and good luck.


In Galway on Thursday. A lovely day, mild and bright. Coffee and gluten-free chocolate brownie upstairs in McCambridge's, then a hair cut, a spot of lingerie shopping (Marks and Spencer for knickers ha ha), pop the M & S bag onto the back seat of the car which was parked on the Long Walk. Just to right in the picture below, outside the cream building.

Off to my poetry workshop, cup of tea afterwards, back to the car in time to catch the 4.45 limit on the ticket. And I'm clamped! I couldn't believe it. Clamped. I've never been clamped before. I'm the sort of person who frets about being late for my ticket, and having everything paid up. Turns out the ticket had flipped over - must have been when I put the shopping bag into the car, because I checked it when I first left the car. But I still had to pay €80 to get unclamped. Put the price of the knickers up a bit.

I've appealed, of course. Sent off a letter and all that. We'll see if they give me my money back.

We were in Galway again last night for the Savita Halappanavar vigil. A moving event watched by a sliver of new moon.