Leaving London and downshifting to become a full-time parent and rural homemaker
About a year or so ago I discovered the FlyLady website and signed up for her daily emails proscribing what household chores were to be done each day (moving through a series of weekly ‘zones’ covering the main areas of the house). I really liked them not only because I was brand new to housewiffery [...]
My son really disliked peas. The way to get him to finally after years of cajoling him try some and announce ‘Yum!’ was staightforward but long winded in the extreme. I had to sow peas, grow peas, stake the peas, have the children pick the peas, shell the peas and only then did he feel [...]
Loads of visitors have wondered what we have growing over our willow den to make it look so leafy so I thought I’d post an update to the original post ‘How to make a willow den for under £40′ so that anyone interested in making one next year will see that it GETS LEAFY [...]
Last month my daughter and I decided to create a mini pond in our rented garden with the hope of finding some frogspawn to come and live in it.
We built the pond from an inexpensive ‘tub trug’ and placed loads of rocks in it and around it so the small creatures could get in and [...]
While at the Malvern Spring Show I saw a ’swimming pond’ show garden. My friend Tissy reminded me how we used to go swimming in Hampstead Lido which was an enormous swimming pond.
I really love ponds and would love one day to have a big pond to attract lots of frogs and other watery creatures [...]
My friend Tissy and I had a great day out at the Malvern Spring Garden show last week & amazingly the rain held off for us.
We both love gardening and knew that there would be plenty of opportunity to see lovely planting ideas with the show gardens and chance to spend a day looking at [...]
http://www.wrap.org.uk/caw/index.html
The seventh annual Compost Awareness Week (CAW) will be celebrated nationwide from Sunday 6th to Saturday 12th May 2007.
Compost Awareness Week aims to encourage more people to recognise the benefits of home composting and the great results that can be achieved by using peat-free composts containing recycled materials in the garden. The week [...]
At the beginning of April I planted my ‘early’ potatoes (a variety of spud which is ready to eat early in the season) and ‘main crop’ potatoes (a different sort which is ready later in the season - and bigger? I’m not entirely sure yet) in a couple of trenches (about 20-30cm deep) next to [...]
One of my kids really enjoys planting things, learning the names of flowers, watering, digging, weeding and generally being out in the fresh air helping me in the garden. Her brother is more interested in books and films but now we live here in the countryside with a large garden, he is becoming interested in [...]
You’d think that having watched Gardener’s World every friday night for the past decade from various London dwellings I’d know exactly how to seperate the little baby plants from each other in their small pots and transplant to larger individual pots where they will have space and nourishment to grow bigger BUT I was really [...]