High Rise Flowers

A little while ago (only a few blog entries back), I told you about the three tier planter that I had chosen lots of plants for and promised a photo of it planted up. Well here it is... I shall take progress pictures throughout the summer.

Seeing this image makes me realise just how many weeds there are in the front garden, so I am off to clear the gravel of greenery... chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.

Poppies, peonies and visitors

Summer is definitely on it's way in our corner of the world, the garden is full of flowers (amongst the weeds), their little jewel colours twinkling away all over the place.

Yesterday I listened to the weather forecast for the rest of the weekend, wet and windy and just the kind of elemental assault that would destroy the delicate petals of some of my favourite blooms. So in an attempt to ensure that summer stills gets to shine in our home over the weekend, I picked a handful of flowers and brought them inside.

Because I wanted to show you how gorgeous these flowers are, I took a few pictures and then realised that I might just get a couple of them printed onto canvas to use as wall art.

On Friday evening, I was sitting out on our back steps and a spotted one our regular garden visitors. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing...


7.30pm, it was still light and Philomena (yes, we name the hedgehogs!) came trundling up the path and headed straight for the cat food bowl. We see our spikey friends from early spring to early winter on a nightly basis, at least 5 of them that come each night (there may be more, but the most we have seen together is 5), but they do at least usually wait for the cover of darkness before they devour the contents of the cat's bowls.

They are amazingly good at clearing up the back yard, we often put out a chicken carcass for the cat's to pick the last of the meat from and guaranteed that by the morning, not a bone is left in the yard. The hedgehogs will wander off with half a carcass if they can. Some nights it is too dark to see the brown hedgehog, but we can see the white chicken bones moving off down the garden path (it's almost a ghostly vision of the bones seemingly floating above the ground!). Dave realised that somewhere in our garden there must my a great pile of bits of bone, I wonder what the archeologists will make of it in years to come.

Well, the weather forecasters were right, today it is pouring with rain and very blustery out there, I had hoped to spend a couple of hours in the garden today, but that's looks unlikely. So I have settled down on the sofa with laptop to hand and will enjoy my garden via my photos instead.

Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.

Family, friends and food

Just arrived, 2 angels figurine at Pretty Practicals

It's been a busy few days, but full of fun and laughter.
On Tuesday evening I went out for a meal with my mum and my sister, her partner and a couple of friends. We went to the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston on the Wiltshire Gloucestershire border. The food was superb and we had a lovely evening. My sister was celebrating one of those significant birthdays that I won't reach for a little while longer yet and I just want to say for the record, that if I look as good as she does when I reach her age, I will be delighted. I certainly didn't look too lovely when I got into the car at ten past six the next morning to make the two and a half hour journey home, so that I could be back in the office before 9.

Dave and I have continued to make in-roads into the garden and I can see that it won't take too long to get it back into shape. I am already starting to look at some lovely ironwork for the garden, I would like a gazebo or summerhouse out there but haven't decided on which one yet. The wonderful weather of the last few days has really spurred us on to make it a beautiful place for us to relax and enjoy this summer.

Work has been really busy. I love it when things are buzzing at work, the day just flies by and I get a real sense of acheivement from seeing people's orders leaving us with the couriers. I have been selecting a range of summer garden items for Pretty Practicals and am looking forward to leisurely picnics by the lakes with the Green Rose Picnic Blanket and the Deluxe Picnic Basket Set.

I've added new items to the website and new stocks of some old favourites and Dave is still busying himself in the background creating a project I have asked him to work on... I will reveal all soon. The response to our postcard on the front of Period Living magazine has been amazing and I am methodically working my way through the hundreds (and hundreds!) of requests for more information about Pretty Practicals. So if you have requested more info, please bear with us, your catalogue on disk (for the computer) will be with you very soon.

Well, it's time for a fresh cuppa, chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Taming the wilderness

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A few years ago we had an enormous cedar removed from our garden. Planted as it was only 18 feet away from the back door, it must have looked very pretty when it was younger; when we moved to our home in late 1999 it had grown higher than the chimney pots on top of our four storey house! It had to go, the shadow it cast kept the rear of the house in almost darkness for much of the day and I dread to think where the roots of the beast had spread to. So John (an amazingly brave tree surgeon) did his magic and during the course of a single day, not only took the evergreen down to ground level but also used the chipping machine to produce a mamoth size pile of fir tree chippings for us to use in the garden. The wood has been stacked around the garden and is slowly being used on our open fire in the dining room ~ I suspect we will still be using it by the time we retire!

All down one side of the garden there is a flower bed which is about 5 feet wide (from front to back) and about 90 feet long. The day after the tree came down I weeded the flower bed, laid down a weedproof membrane and laid a 8 - 10 inch layer of the wood chippings over it. ' Job done!' I thought to myself, 'it will never need to be tackled again.' Now call me naive or optimistic (or both), but I truely imagined that I would never have to deal with an onslaught of bindweed again in that flower border ~ wrong!

Today I wandered out into the garden and thought I would tidy up the long flower bed a bit. Having been laid up in my bed for most of last summer (with this stupid recurring back injury), nothing was touched in the garden and it now resembles a truely wild place.

The local wildlife can't believe their luck and I know that the garden is home to at least 5 hedgehogs, too many frogs for it to be polite, at least one stoat (there may be more but we've only seen one) and today we think that a mole has moved in too. The local birds have feasted on seeds on the plants all winter, used dried seed heads and dried weeds to line their nests and now the summer visiting house martins have arrived too ~ at least they live under the eaves of the house for the summer, but they love all the midges and flying insects that also reside here. No doubt the bats are out and about, but I haven't spotted them yet this year.

My cats on the other hand have requested that I clear a space amongst the weeds so that they can dig a hole or two when they need to 'go'. Doing the necessary on tufty grass and stinging nettles can't be very nice, so I have listened to their pleas and will be tackling a small space at a time this year (being mindful of the aforementioned back issues).

Anyway, back to the long flower bed... clearing the few annual weeds that are starting to pop up all over the place, I pulled gently on a teeny weeny piece of bindweed that had managed to settle in the chippings. To my horror this teeny weeny stem was attached to a massive network of horrible white roots that resembled a plate full of spaghetti. How did that happen so quickly? The entire bed is covered in bindweed ~ above my weed suppressing membrane in the 'easy to push your roots through' chippings. Oh blow, I am back to square one!

So tomorrow, weather permitting, I will tackle a little more of the spaghetti problem and clear a few weeds. Once the garden is in a fit state to be seen I will post a few pictures.

Chat soon, Liz
All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2007 and 2008 except where stated.

Shrinking Violets

Sorry it's been a while since I put fingers to keyboard (it doesn't have the same ring as pen to paper, does it?), but I have been incredibly busy both at work and at home.

The short burst of sunshine that arrived in Rhayader this week urged me to get to grips with the post-winter chaos that has been residing in my front garden. So armed with bags and boxes, I spent a gentle early evening on Wednesday pulling out all the dead leaves that had gathered over the winter and removing as many weeds as I could from the small gravelled area in the centre of the garden. Our is a typical late Victorian front garden, with straight path from the wrought iron gate to the front door and a little square of garden to the side of the path. Around two sides of the square are small borders that I have filled mostly with evergreen plants and with grasses and other easy care plants.

All over the front (and back) garden there are tiny pockets of colour, sweet violets are blooming all over the place... in lots of places that not terribly convenient and some that I wonder how they are managing to grow at all, let alone thrive and bloom. These are not pansies or cultivated garden violets, but the tiny weeny flowered sweet violet that was sold by flower sellers of Victorian times in little posies.

They are in the path and in the wall, in the gravel and under the bench, in the crack of the front door step and behind the giant pots to each side of my front door... yup they are everywhere and I just love them.

The tidy up at the front of the house made me do a double take inside. I have started to tackle Cecily's room in earnest, so that it is finished before she comes home from university for the summer. Yesterday in a moment of 'if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well', I carefully peeled all the polystyrene tiles off her ceiling and stripped off as much of the adhesive and old paint that I could. Actually this was a relatively quick task and accompanied by Coldplay (on CD), I was ready to start wallpapering her ceiling in no time.

As regular readers will know, I have a decidedly dodgy back which is made worse by any tasks that involved me having both hands above my head at any one time. As I haven't yet mastered wallpapering the ceiling without two hands above my head, it is going to take a while to finish this part of the job. I can comfortably do one complete length of paper (her room is over 15 wide in each direction), but then I need to give my back a rest for a day before doing more. I think the ceiling is going to take me a week to complete.

So in the meantime, I have been preparing our catalogue on disk to send out to everyone who has asked for one. The first batch of 300 catalogues will leave us tomorrow morning and should arrive with the recipients before the end of the week. I will continue to prepare more catalogues each evening until they have all been sent out.

So here's what the first batch looks like (names and addresses have been hidden to preserve privacy). Dave has been busying himself with printing the inserts for the catalogue disk covers for me to put into the covers before they go into the envelope. He is also printing out the catalogue on paper ready for binding with my new thermal binding machine (a very cool piece of kit!).

Well that brings me up to date and it's late, so I'm off to bed, chat soon, Liz

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.