I’m suffering from a case of too many early mornings. I do tend to wake up earlier and earlier as the nights get shorter approaching the summer solstice (only 5 weeks away!), but actually getting up, as opposed to lying in bed listening to the dawn chorus, is somethiing I only do for the Breeding Bird Surveys. Not this year. Continue reading
When I came to Norfolk, over 5 years ago now, I looked around for somewhere to play golf, and joined a new club. It was much more serious than the place I’d played before, and quite intimidating for a newbie, although most of the players tried not to make it so. One of those who welcomed me and drew me in, played with me more often than not, was Daphne. Continue reading
As I said in previous posts this year, my new business interests are engrossing me, and I’m putting my energies into promoting them, developing new product lines, blogging about them (making use of the A to Z Blog Challenge for April) and tweeting them! I just looked at my Year of the Dragon post here which looks astonishingly accurate, but reminded me to pay attention to study. So it’s a good thing I read a book on marketing in my field at the weekend. Of course, that just gave me more ideas, but most importantly it made me think about it strategically. Continue reading
I’ve been watching Jupiter and Venus getting closer and closer together in the skies all winter. This week they had a conjunction – the closest apparent distance between them. I wasn’t sure when it was, and we’ve had a lot of cloud recently. But when I saw them last night I thought they looked pretty close. And tonight they seemed to have got further away again. Those in the know tell me the big event was on Tuesday. Ah well. I was fairly pleased with this picture though, taken on Wed 14th March at 19.27 GMT. Pretty much due west. Not bad for a little digital camera resting on the top of a post in the garden!
There have been lots of exciting things happening in the sky at night this winter. I havent been able to get many good views of them because either the weather wasn’t right or the moon was in the wrong place or I was just busy when the conditions were perfect. Continue reading
Well, February whizzed by. I was fully engaged with developing my new business interests and I hardly seemed to have any spare time at all. I got into the garden a couple of times, one to trim the raspberry canes and to sort out the bed in the corner, cutting back the old growth on the geraniums and Japanese anemones, the other to do compost heaps. Continue reading
I am a Dragon. In the Chinese horoscope that is. And what’s more I’m a Dragon in the Rain “the perfect embodiment of yin and yang” or so my Chinese Horoscope book says. It also says that in a Dragon year: Continue reading
The arrival of the new seeds prompted me to spend something like three hours trying to sort out what to grow where this year. It’s a complicated issue, trying to get all the things I want to grow into five beds, a patio full of pots, a couple of beds next to walls, and all with complications caused by shading during the day. Vegetables mostly like to have sun to grow well, and three out of five of my vegetable beds have shading through half the day. And with an element of crop rotation and companion planting, it gets to be quite a headache. In the end I just decided to fit them in where they could go. Continue reading
Yesterday was our bird society’s annual bird count, where teams of people from the club have an enjoyable day out noting all the bird species they see between dawn and dusk, and ending up at a pub to compare notes, see who saw most, and have a nice meal. Continue reading
My new season’s seeds arrived today – from the Real Seed Catalogue. This is a small business that grows veg to produce seed and so keep good stock for gardeners going strong. They have a limited number of varieties but a huge range of unusual ones. All are tested under regular growing conditions for enthusiasts who want to eat them, not as a commercial crop. They also encourage you to save your own seed – and give instructions!
