Blogging With ME, Big Scary Birthdays, Brief Gardening Snippets, And Black-Headed Birds

Primula denticulata alba

It was a shock to realise the other day that I haven't posted here for nearly four months. In fact, looking back, my previous couple of posts weren't about my garden at all: my last gardening post was around eight months ago.

This is partly due to my usual brain fog, and partly to my not having been able to do very much gardening lately. The latter was not so much because of the physical limitations of ME or the relentlessly wet weather, though neither have helped, but because we need to find a gardener to do some major clearance for us before we can do much more ourselves. And finding a gardener, when you have severe brain fog and need an unscented non-smoker who's willing to do the work in several short afternoon installments, completely organically, is not the easiest of tasks.

I also found garden blogging difficult last year. I made too much effort to keep up with a couple of regular memes, at the expense of having time and energy to blog about anything else. I won't make that mistake again. It was interesting to follow the memes for a while, but I couldn't manage to do it all the time, and I shouldn't have done it for as long as I did. It's meant I haven't finished (in fact I've barely started) posting my tour round my new garden, and I haven't blogged at all about the things we have managed to do here so far. Unfortunately blogging with ME, like gardening with ME, is an ongoing series of choices: you simply cannot do all of the things you want to do.


Assorted Narcissus

At the moment I'm also very conscious of my approaching birthday: I will be 50 tomorrow. I don't usually pay much attention to birthdays with zeros on the end, but this one is making me feel a bit daunted. When we moved here I was 47, and I had hoped that by now we'd have got a lot more done, both to the garden and to the house. But for various reasons last year was not a good year for me, everything seemed to move at a snail's pace, and I ended up feeling quite dispirited.

So what have we managed to get done over the last eight months? In no particular order, here are a few snippets:

* R dug up clumps of Achillea, Eryngium, Lillium, Narcissus, and Galanthus and I put them into pots to keep them safe out of the way of the coming clearance.


Eryngium seedheads

* We had a much-needed week's holiday on Exmoor in the autumn, staying in a cottage on an organic farm.  It was the highlight of our year:  the sun shone every day and we were able to visit gardens and go for walks on moorland, through woodland, and along the beach.

* I washed out a couple of dozen pots and three bird baths.

* I bought a pot of pansies, curry plant, and ivy from a garden centre sale, reduced from £20 to £2. I don't normally impluse buy, or buy ready-planted pots, but this was worth it just for the pot, and the pansies brightened our winter.


Assorted pansies

* I acquired some "free" (pay postage) Agapanthus (3 white and 3 blue) and Lavenders (a mix of purple, blue, and white).

* R dug out huge quantities of Japanese anemone roots from the corner bed which is eventually going to be my herb bed.

* I consulted with gardening friends about which shrubs would make a good mixed evergreen hedge for the bare side of our garden, and made a list, and we started going round garden centres looking at some of these shrubs (and also looking for them online).

* We bought an Ilex crenata shiro-fukurin which will eventually be part of the hedge, and I put it into a bigger pot for now.


Ilex crenata shiro-fukurin foliage

* We put a tarpaulin over the shed roof, secured with ropes, to keep the rain out. It's an old shed which we'll eventually replace, so we just wanted a temporary solution to the leaking roof.

* R cut back the Solanum which collapsed all over the lawn during a storm, bringing a large section of trellis with it.

* We bought a baby Amelanchier - it's 3' tall so it's going to take several years to get as big as the mature one in our previous garden, but it cost all of £4.99 so we think it was a bargain!


Amelanchier blossom in our previous garden

* We measured the whole garden in detail, so that I can do a proper design instead of relying on my original quick sketch plan.

* We visited an organic fruit tree nursery to ask for information and advice about growing fruit trees, and made a list of possibilities.

* I was given an Aloe Vera, much to my delight - I was intending to buy one! I've never had a houseplant before so this is a new departure for me, but I use a lot of aloe vera gel so I think it will be very useful.

* I weeded all my pots, and repotted a few things which were looking cramped or low in compost.


Anemone blanda

* I planted tomato, basil, parsley, and bean seeds.

* R made a start on digging out the front lawn, which is thin, weedy, and awkward to mow. In the long term we're going to remove the whole of the front garden and start again, but he was keen to get rid of the lawn sooner rather than later, so he is digging it out and I'm going to plant annual wildflower seeds there for the time being. Suggestions please, for what we can do with the turf - he's already filled a dustbin to rot down to make compost, and we don't have any other spare containers.

We also kept the bird feeders topped up, and did quite a lot of watching birds in the garden over the last few months. As well as all the usual suspects, this year we've been pleased to see some new visitors. We have a pair of blackcaps which are here most days now, we've also seen siskins a few times, and we've had one visit from another black-headed bird which was either a marsh tit or a willow tit (apparently it's very difficult to tell the difference, and baffles even experienced birders, which we certainly are not).


Black-headed birds

Now we are making plans for our other garden visitors, in the form of insect houses and bee tubes, among other things, but we need to wait until we've found a gardener and had the clearance done before we can put them up.

And at the moment, to deal with my feelings about turning 50 and struggling with the very long and daunting list of necessary tasks which we haven't yet done, I'm making a different sort of list - one of 50 things to do while I'm 50. On it are small things which I will enjoy doing and which I think I have a good chance of being able to do, such as visit a special garden, eat a summer pudding, walk round a wildflower meadow, and enlarge a favourite photo to put on the wall. That way, even if we continue to be unable to get the bigger things done, at least I can make this more of a "feel-good" year.

It's not on my list, because I don't know if I will be able to do it, but I will certainly try to keep this blog updated a bit more often over the coming months, and to get back to that garden tour I'd intended to finish posting by now ... .

Edit 18/05/16: It's crazy, given how much I struggle to blog at all, but I've started a 50 Things To Do While I Am 50 blog, so I can record all the things I manage to do. Click the title if you'd like to know what I've done so far.