Adding June flowers to Flickr

Finally uploading my June flowers to my Flickr plants album. Not necessarily great photo's but gives a good overview of the variety of life out the window. All the plant details are available on my Folia pages, which is what these photo's are intended for, so I can keep track of what's where when they retreat underground over winter.

I love how I say fill it out, as if there is any space left to fill!


Indoors my handy salad, growing has been a bit thin on the ground because all the space is taken up with plant cuttings. Mr P doesn't mind buying annuals for his garden but mine is on a very, very tight budget so I need to grow as much as possible now to fill it out next spring and summer for free. It's making me look differently at plants I didn't used to like. Suddenly, if something is easy to grow from cuttings and takes up very little space in winter I get interested. I've got a lot of varieties of Dianthus going on, it looks more like Granny Creates than Cally Creates. Another fave is the bright Oxalis which roots really quickly from cuttings. I don't know if I can keep it going indoors through winter but if I do I'll have masses for Spring. The little piles of leaves in the previous post were prunings from the Oxalis which has already been potted on and is growing happily...


Oxalis 'Sunset Velvet'

More June FLowers - spice tones

Bearded Iris, Oxalis, and Herb Robert leaves all brought some warm spicy tones to the garden this June. The irises have finished but the others continue on rampantly with the Herb Robert always a big hit with small bees. The Oxalis is an annual in Scotland but well worth it for all the vibrant colour it brings, really livening up gaps between other plants and always great next to purple toned foliage. See my garden in detail here

Is a Vitamix too noisy for a mobile home?

Question, does anyone know how loud a Vitamix sounds in a Mobile Home?

Update 18th July 2011: I bought it, and it is loud, but I don't need my things to be smooth so I mostly only have it on for 10-30 seconds. The violence of it still freaks me out a bit and my heart races with fear before I hit the button, I'm sure my face is a picture of scrunched up worry as if it's going to suck me in and mash me into a savoury dip. I certainly wouldn't dream of having it on long enough to make soup, but that's not why I wanted it anyway. Three days in it's already invaluable.

Deeba Rajpal - Passionate About Baking

I don't get about blogs much these days, as you know, so when I do it tends to be to get recipe conversions to UK measurements for things I have already or in search of Gluten and Lactose free alternatives to recipes I can't use anymore. I usually head straight for a few key GF/Vegan blogs as they tend to have tried most alternatives, but sometimes I stray into other territory and find new food blogs that I'd missed in my allergy free searches.

Such was the case today with the blog Passionate About Baking, written and photographed by Deeba Rajpal. I clicked on it and the most beautiful series of photographs of Black Sesame Macarons with Cherry Chocolate Ganache appeared and I had to share a few with you. And if you want to make them the recipe is here on Food Wanderings where she guest posted.





Macarons, not to be confused with Coconut Macaroons, you can see the differences in basic recipes here.

More June FLowers

More flowers because I said I show Liz the garden. See my garden in detail here. First up pink and grey/blue tones, more to follow in other colours.







1. Aquilegia 'Nora Barlow'. 2. Hebe in bud. 3. Dianthus 'Starry Eyes' uncurling it's petals which become white with wine red central markings. 4. An unknown Dianthus in bud, opens mid pink with darker pink markings. 5.The filigree leaves of Cineraria with the flowers of Calibrachoa. 6. Herb Robert in flower and bud.

Food and Flowers

Got a bit of a shock to realise that June will be over in 1 minute so in a rush to get something blogged I only have a few garden pictures fit for viewing. The best part of June has been fresh food and fresh flowers, and for the bees, the food is in the flowers, what could be better. In the face of a lot of freak weather the gardens have done pretty well and there has been a definite increase in wildlife. See my garden in detail here.



Bees on Cirsium Rivulare




Lunch


Tulips and Alliums

Fallen Tulip petals

Honesty Flowers

Chelsea Flower Show 2011

Yes it's that time of year again and as I batten down the hatches and staking my tall irises and alliums for the gale due tomorrow (on the back of 2 solid weeks of gusting winds) I don't mind being kept inside when Chelsea is on the TV (BBC Chelsea coverage times here red button coverage details here).



From the preview program I'm liking the look of The Times Eureka Garden in conjunction with Kew Gardens. Plant cells and capillaries (which always fascinate me) play a major part in the design by Marcus Barnett and this is especially reflected in The Times Eureka Pavillion. The initial sketches didn't show much colour but on the BBC coverage it seemed to have some lovely a lot of low purple spires (Salvias?) poking through what initially looks like quite a loose almost cottage style of planting, the plants intermingling to create the kind of patchwork that usually reveals more and more on closer inspection.

The Laurent Perrier Garden also looks to have some beautiful, softly bulging planting but I'm not at all keen on the wooden structure which looks like a copy of the moving panels in one of the smaller gardens last year (I liked the original version). I'll need to watch tomorrow and see what it looks like properly.

It was grounded by the wind but I'll be interested to see what this structure will look like in the air for Diarmuid Gavin’s Irish Sky Garden. Lots more to see and hopefully more ideas that are based on sustainability, bees and being green.

Cherry Blossom rain clouds

The impending rain shower only made the blossom more beautiful in the garden today. The tree is still tiny but it packs a lot of petal into it's dainty frame. On the other side of the garden teh flowering current came out last week...

Tiny Blog!

Oh my goodness, so I've just seen what my posts look like on a decent sized screen... hysterical, what a squished up little blog! But I suppose I should leave it that way otherwise it won't show up on small screens, and I know only too well the frustration of web pages that can't be seen without scrolling n both directions.

Update: I'm fiddling with it a little so it looks less like it's floating in a big empty space. When I have more time I'll maybe even get round to applying a blog banner, I must have made about 200 over the last 6 year but they never quite look right so I don't add them.

Bugs, Buds & Birthdays

So much life in the garden after some fine Spring weather last week. The ladybirds (ladybugs) are making hay while the sun shines! I've only pottered gently but already I can feel my joints and muscles getting a bit more movement in them. Feels like I'm stretching out in tandem with all the buds and shoot tips. Here are the first red leaves and buds on the Berberis...



Clusters of Spring flowers have emerged in the dappled light under the trees and I imagine most of the trees will come in to leaf in April. So much change. See my garden in detail here

It's been a weird month, lots of crappy things at the start so I had to postpone my own birthday but when I finally opened my presents it was amazing, beyond my wildest dreams type of amazing. My brother bought me a MacBook Pro and my parents got me Adobe CS5. I was utterly flabberghasted. I don't think anyone has ever seen me speechless before. I don't think I can ever thank them enough. The whole drive home I just kept saying 'I can't believe it, I can't believe it'.

I can finally make my books and edit years of archived photo's and designs without it being an archaic grind. Well, I will once I can afford to get all my peripherals to work with it, it's so whizzy and new it doesn't recognise my scanner, cables, camera, printer etc. That was one reason I could never get a new Mac, because if I spent any money on it I'd have nothing left to get it workable with all the extra bits. Now I can afford to do that over the next year or so - which is probably how long it will take me to learn all vastly updated software.

I've been fiddling with some old designs just to get a feel for what's new in Photoshop CS5 (I was using Photoshop 7 and I abandoned Illustrator about 9 years ago). They are so much faster though freakishly more complex. I can see there will be tears ahead trying to get to grips with Illustrators bazillion new options. I'm glad I don't have any deadlines.



And as for In Design, it didn't even exist when I got my last Mac, I've always been a Quark Xpress girl. I can tell it's going to take ages to learn since my brain struggles to remember my own phone number these days, but it will be so worth it. Learning curve here I come. Just think, no more compromises, no more workarounds, no more frustration as I wait an hour for a book page to save. These things are annoying at the best of time but when you have M.E. every little bit of wasted energy is like a huge chunk of wasted life. With my memory coming and going I really want to get things put into more books to keep it all from slipping away completely.

I'm so excited I can barely contain myself. And so grateful. With all the shit happening around the world I feel guilty about something so good happening to me, but then I think that I should just appreciate how lucky I am, when lives can be upturned in an instant it would be crazy for me to make the most of something so positive happening.