Green Spaces

Today on my way to NOCS I stopped in town to get breakfast and by lunch before heading on for a heavy day of dissertation work.
After buying breakfast and a much needed Latte (I didn't have any milk in the house this morning due to a very forgetfull moment last night and leaving it in my friends fridge when popping by for a catch up) I decided to have my breakfast in the park in the middle of town.
I have to say a very grateful thank you to southampton council for keeping up the park in such a nice state. It was wonderfull to sit in such a green and luschous area in the middle of a busy town. You coudl still hear the busses and cars driving past but they were shut off from view and cancelled out by the sounds of birds in the park.

Since starting writing this post a lot has happened. Today I have spent more time updating the BBC news site than ever before. My uni building is inside the dock and there has been an incident upon the nuclear submarine that is docked down here at the moment and a sailor was killed. This makes me even more apreciative of the time I took to reflect this morning. I will make sure I tell M I love him this evening remembering that life is short...
I hope that everyone else remembers this too but doesnt have reason to be reminded of it often...

Up the Garden Path

Ok so this might be alight exaggeration... But the herb bed now has the beginnings of a path in it...

I know it probably doesn't look like much but it is using some of the stones which have been taken away from the "rockery" which is now being removed.
I was never that keen on it but had just recently decided to plant it up this year to hide away the unsightly concrete. But now this gives me room to plan a new much lighter structure *giggles* 

Anyway back to the Herb Bed, I have started to move herbs out of the window boxes they have been living in for the last year and set them into the bed. 

From this herb box I have extracted one plant each of the chives and parsley and have split them and replanted. The parsley was simple to split as it almost did this itself when it was lifted out. But the chives required slightly more brute force as they had a nicely 'woven' root ball.

This just required finding a suitable place to split the bunch at soil level and working that split down through the roots. Don't worry about ripping some of the roots but try to tease apart the majority of them, if this is particularly difficult you could try soaking the root ball as this is supposed to help although I have never had to do it yet.

With the new path and plants the herb bed is starting to take on more of a gardeny feel to it. I cant wait for the day when it is all complete and there are a wide range of herbs for me to choose from just outside my door... Heaven...

First Garden Upcycle Challenge...

This week I seemed to have managed to shift the weekend to the beginning of the week! I have taken today off uni and am probably going to be off tomorrow which will mean that I am going to have to be in uni next weekend to make up for it... Oh well, C'est La Vie...

I have taken today off to enable me to do some stuff in the garden and raid all the charity shops :D (Actually came away with some good finds this time) and clean my room (Sulk).

I think the sun had a lot to do with having such a productive day today and the fact that the garden smells gorgeous due to all the spring blossom...

I have finally cracked out the power tools and turned the drawer that I salvaged from the back of my dads work into a container...

This

 Plus This:
 

 Equalled this lovely easy draining container:

 Which when filled with soil was half filled with seeds. Mixed salad, Parsley and Basil. I will wait to see how well they germinate before celebrating, but fingers crossed.

I only half filled the drawer with soil so that I can have another sowing later on to give me continuous salad leaves through the summer (Well at least three crops worth, as my other container is nearly ready to eat :D )

Recent Photos

Recently I have been trying to work hard on my dissertation but keep getting distracted by things. Todays distractions consists of using the decent photoshop software on the uni machines and editing a few of my recently taken photos.
So I thought I would share a few of them with you.

More crocuses from Chateau Morfee with one of their native (and increasingly rare) polinators.



Taking a well earned break with a cup of tea and the garden chair :D
I do Love this photo from some reason



A very nice looking seed head. I love the texture this photo gives

My bedroom Orchid. One of my many purchases from Ikea this summer and it is on its second round of flowers... Makes me feel very lucky :D

Planted (at last)

Yesterday was a wonderful day :D
I planted my first plant into the soil. This has been a long time coming since I first moved into the house noit quite two years ago. You might be asking what too me so long if there is sooo much to do in the garden.
Well I stripped back a lot of the excess growth and then waited for a year to see what came up (There is no point in putting extra plants into the garden when you could have some gems there already). During this time everything was grown in pots. Additionally I have been waiting because I was not really sure how I wanted the garden to look.
Well now is the time! The first plant has been put into the garden :D.
Three small clumps of Thyme Doon Valley have been planted at the front of the herb bed...

 

and here is the beauty. Ok so its not much to look at at the moment...

  Here you can see all three clumps, though I do have to say that the other two are looking much more sorry for themselves... Hopefully this trick I picked of from Rad Megan from 'In Words and Pictures' blog will help to keep the nasties away from my lovely herbs and is a good way to use up excess egg shells from the kitchen.

Belated Blogger Bloom Day...

Well apparently yesterday was Blogger Bloom Day!

So a little late perhaps here are a few snaps from my garden recently (and one that is from my bf's mothers garden but I have only just got round to processing it):

Crocus's from Bf's Mothers garden

Beautiful Bells.

Potentially Pulmonaria 'Trevi Fountain'

Iris Seeds Showing of their Colours

Shiny Ivy

Lucky Ladybird

Spring is on its Way

This is a small selection of the photos I have taken recently and more should be going up soon, when I have finished editing them (must not let it take up too much of the dissertation time). 

But at the moment more can be seen on my Flickr (either on the side panel of the page there is a gadget or click here)

Love to all...

Home Made Plant Labels

planning to grown a lot of plants from seed this year I needed a way to identify which plants were which and really didn't feel like shelling out money for those little plastic labels that all garden centers seem to have these days.
So I decided to try making my own and if I may say so myself, they seem to be working very nicely.

Here is my first How To:

I have made my labels out of an old milk bottle but you could use any of a similar type of plastic.
I cut into the bottle to remove the top and bottom, leaving a ring of plastic which was cut down one corner and opened up.

From this ring I cut out the individual tags but cutting it into strips vertically. Then cutting one end to a point. 
The lines drawn on the plastic are to show you how it was cut but i normally don't bother when cutting it myself.

After these were cut out I wrote the names of the seedlings I have onto the 'inside' of the plastic, because I didn't manage to remove all of the label on this bottle. Also the inside it generally smoother as a lot of companies make the outside textured.
Finished labels waiting to go into my pots :D

I hope you enjoy using this method, as it is much cheaper and environmentally friendly.