August Barbecue

It's been such a cold year that I've only managed to have two barbecues in my garden this year - but the most recent coincided with Andy's trip to Norwich and it was a scorcher, just crying out for us to sit in the garden.  The garden was also looking particularly beautiful which was useful!

Love my little alpine garden!   (And, as I type this, they have grown so much and the sempervivums have produced so many little babies that I am aiming to put more pots around this little collection with their offspring in!  B&Q recently had a sale of lots of ceramic pots - 50 pence each - so I acquired a number of them and soon this little collection will be even more colourful than it is now.)

And I found this beautiful fish bottle in a local charity shop to where I work - a bargain at £3 - and I knew it was exactly the thing for my garden, although wasn't sure how I could make it work.   Andy set to with some wire and his construction skills and - hey presto - here it is hanging from my pergola.  Beautiful when the sun shines on it.

I had saved up all the branches I'd sawn down from my neighbour's buddleia which overhangs the end of my garden, so Andy sawed those up for the barbecue - waste not want not in my garden.  

Finn waiting patiently for us to drop some of our food!

Yum - barbecued trout and vegetables roasted in home made garlic oil - delicious.

Birdwatching

We've been told for years that sparrows are in decline.  On that basis, I think I must have the UK's entire population of them in my garden - so many of them visit us all the time.  (Perhaps that explains me spying a sparrowhawk on my pergola earlier this year - he'd come for his dinner!)

Love this photo - action shot of sparrow arriving!

Obviously, it's so much easier to photograph the birds now I have my new zoomy camera and I must admit to spending rather a lot of time gazing out at the garden waiting for the sparrows to arrive.  I get so easily distracted from housework!

These sparrows really are very entertaining.   I leave a few seed trays out in the garden to fill with rain water so they have some drinking/ bathing water.  And they love my flower pots too - they're forever in and out of those picking at flower heads.

They really are a perfect distraction from house and garden chores.

The Agapanthus Returns!

Apparently, agapanthus are notoriously shy of flowering - which is such a shame as they really are beautiful.   The agapanthus in my garden haven't flowered for two years now - this blog is so useful to monitor what flowers and when - if nothing else, it's a really useful catalogue.

A lot of plants in my garden are grown in pots, or in the massive bits of pipe that Andy pilfered from work and which I've disguised with bricks to make them look like walls.  But these beauties have been planted straight into the ground - Mum helped me with this job soon after I moved here - previously to that, they had been in pots.

It only occurred to me recently that not all the greenery surrounding these belonged to the agapanthus.  We had dug up a horrible old yukka from this spot in the garden to get the agapanthus in, but we obviously hadn't got all the roots out because the yukka is growing up again in the middle so I need to deal with that sooner rather than later.  (Similarly, another yukka which I thought we had got up is sending spiky shoots up through my spuds in the front garden.)

I've tried to raise seeds before but never had much luck.  However, I've saved some of the seed pods as these have gone over and I'm going to have another go.   I do think though that a garden centre visit might be in order, I have a hankering for a white version for next summer!

Finn's Haircut

Finn recently had only his second haircut in six years.   All the guide books tell you that border collies should not have a haircut, because it does not grow back.   However, while Finn clearly has some border collie in him, there's all sorts of other unknown breeds lurking in that body, so we decided to take the chance and get him cut.   And very handsome he looks too.

These are the before photos:

Hobbit feet!

And here are the after photos:

So handsome!

And such lovely neat feet.

(Since this haircut at the beginning of August, he has also had four baths due to rolling in unmentionables - why, oh why, will he NOT keep clean?!)