Afternoon Snack

Hmmm nothing beats and afternoon snack of fresh strawberries and yoghurt. Especially when the strawberries have come from your own garden. :D

Over the summer (the next two weeks especially) I will be trying to diet. Just by trying to eat much more healthily and eat stuff with very little fat in it etc. So lots of salad in the future... 

One of my main tasks will be choosing the right things to eat in between meals when I get hungry. And this snack ticked all the right boxes:

Fruit: (with a small gating of chocolate for good measure)

A large dollop of Greek Yoghurt:

  

A good chance to use up some of my lavendar sugar from last year. Has a very nice sweet taste with out being too sugary - if it is possible for sugar to not be too sugary. Basically you need less of it than plain sugar in my opinion:

A good stir and sit back and enjoy:

Dont ask my why blogger decided to put that last photo upside down, as few are rotated too... humph

Graduation.

This week has been a busy week and has mostly been overshadowed by the fact that on Tuesday I graduated!!

Shocking to think that this day has finally come. I have been a student for so long that it is going to take me a long time to get used to not being one. And I am going to miss having all of my friends in Southampton, meeting up just got a lot more complicated :p

Actually graduating. Being asked what my future plans where by the Vice Chancellor.

Group photos were taken after much deliberation of where to take them :p :

Me with a few from our course, part of a larger photo but there are not that many on the course, only 16!

And a number of attempts were had to take the mandatory hat throwing photo:

(all photos have been taken by parents of my course mates, mine are still sat on the camera)

Divide and conquer

Yesterday I finally managed to get my claws into the garden after a forced absence caused by too much other stuff going on in my life. But now the kitchen has almost returned to normal, the parents have left and my sister has gone with them and I have finally left Uni. 

This is all combining to give me some free time.

I have been planting out some of the plants I have grown this year which was a very satisfying task. Once I had done those I decided that some of the other pots which either wern't ready to go in the ground or didn't have anywhere to go at the moment needed to be divided.

I divided the pulmonaria (possibly Trevi Fountain) into a number of pots. Recently I spotted that this has also managed to self sow itself into the edge of my herb garden which I am really happy about as this is a lovely plant with gorgeous long lasting flowers and really pretty foliage. 

On top of this I have divided one more of my parsley plants to see if I can grow this up a bit more.

In addition I have potted on the strawberry runners which I took from the purple flowered alpine strawberry and that my sister took from a white flowered one in my mothers garden. From these a few more runners had started growing so these are now secured into pots starting the process again. 

I am going to have to stop doing this soon as I currently do not have space for a strawberry bed which is what is going to be needed if they continue multiplying at this rate!

I am just going to show the progress of the chives which I divided In march (here) you can see the size of the two clumps of chives in the first picture in the original post.

Here is the size of the clump left in the window box (compared to my hand as a measure):

And this is the size of the clump which got divided into the bed (again using my hand as a guide):

Recent Randomness

The last few weeks have been manic. I have been out on the solent helping out a friend of mine to finish the filming for a set of instruction videos to help people with basic sailing techniques.
During this time my sister has been refurbishing the kitchen, painting walls and doing all the other stuff that has been put off since we moved in.
One of these large tasks required re sealing between the floor boards:

I was out helping Pip on Wednesday and Friday and had been asked to sail in the all girls team for the Womens Open Keelboat Championships on the Saturday and the Sunday. This is an unusual event but is good fun and after the brilliant result last weekend in the IRC Championships we were lent the boat to see if we could get the trophy for this championships too.
Unfortunately we had a slightly unpredictable day on the Saturday because the winds were very changeable but a good strong day on the Sunday enabled us to log a second in our class which also converted to a second overall in the event.

Pip was the skipper for this event and did a sterling job of keeping us all in our place and not letting any of the very necessary command structure break down. Her account of the weekend is on her blog here.

When I returned from three days of sailing there was some nice suprises in the garden, one of the courgettes was nearly ripe and the plums on the trees that over hang the back of our garden had started to ripen. Together with some of the ripe strawberries these made some nice pickings:

I hope you all have had a nice but slightly less hectic few weeks than I have had...

Busy weekends

For most of us the weekends are the times that we can get out into the garden and sort out all those things that have been put off from last weekend. 

For me this is not quite the story at the moment, the garden has been put slightly onto the back burner as we are trying to get the kitchen redecorated before my sister returns back to the parents house. 

On top of that I have been in Cowes for a sailing event from Thursday evening through to Sunday evening in some of the windiest weather I have ever sailing in.

I would like to take this chance to say well done and thank you to everyone who sails on Elaine for a wonderful weekend and a brilliant time sailing. Also well done for winning our first ever IRC nationals. 

Here is a photo taken by Paul Wyeth jsut after we crossed the finish line and knew that we had managed to win the event:

I am off to try and get the windows painted before this evening as the parents are turning up for dinner and I am off sailing again tomorrow to help a friend out with a training session she is doing. 

xxx

Back in the land of the living

Back in the land of the living... Well maybe not living but at least phone signal!

A lot of stuff has changed over the time I have been away. 

The squash has taken over the bed and another courgette has ripened :) very tasty last night :D

In addition there is now some colour in the garden...

The various colours of lavender have opened up and are attracting a number of bees and the like :D

And the Yellow Chard is really getting hold and kicking off a good display:

Finally the lilly bulbs that I got from T&M have opened out to produce some gorgeous red flowers:

And the most fluorescent coloured flowers I think I have ever seen

Its good to be home. But now I have the huge task of the hedge to tackle over the next few days !! Wish me luck...

Falmouth II

I have now been in Falmouth for nearly a week and still have yet to set foot in any shop other than tescos and the local bakery. Much to my dissapointment, there are so many shops I would love to spend so much money in. Im sure my bank account is happy about this turn of events.

I have been out on the water every day which might not seem like such a hardship, and it probably isnt but it does limit the shopping and pasty eating time. I have yet to be able to eat a pasty as I have to be out on the water before the bakery has them out yet. I am having to make do with a double dose of sausage roll to make up for it.

I also cannot moan about the weather, with the exception of Tuesday, when half the chem lab ended up in the sink after one much larger than expected swell wave, there has been very little in the way of disturbance on the water. Today for example was as flat as a mill pond! 

This was me trying to take a photo of the sunfish that we saw with my iPhone camera but it shows the stillness of the water.

Unfortunatly the dolphins made an appearance at the geophysics boat but have yet to make themselves known to the offshore boat when I have been on it. They had them out on Monday before I had arrive but not again since...

Here is another early morning scene, we had probably been out surveying for around a couple of hours. Soon after this I decided it was too hot on the deck and had to spend time inside...

More lovely weather just before returning home around 4pm

Hope to be able to get some more proper pictures to you soon, My camera is still being cruel and not letting me connect it to my laptop :(