Life must be filled up

This morning at the market I bought one of those useful folders with plastic sleeves for keeping your knitting patterns in. There are quite a lot of patterns in it already, most of them pretty horrible. I think this is the worst.



The shoot director must have thought the jumpers looked a little dull but she didn't do the models any favours. That belt around the orange tum!

First I have to show off my new icon, courtesy of redscharlach. Miranda Richardson squeaking from the cupboard under the stairs is IMO the funniest moment in the entire Blackadder series.




My confession is that I used to be a snob who wouldn't have dreamt of reading anything that looked like chicklit. Completely ridiculous in someone who enjoyed Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham and many other writers of older (and therefore more acceptable?) light fiction. Now I revel in Katie Fforde and I bought three more of her books on a successful trawl of local charity shops this morning. She picks subjects that interest me: garden design in Wild Designs, market gardening in Thyme Out, antiques in Flora's Lot, which I'm reading now. What I really love is the Englishness of the books. The cups of tea, the hot water bottles, the listening to the World Service when you can't sleep. She manages to tick all the boxes and it's such fun to have a reliably 'nice book' to hand. Middlebrow, moi?

Toiling away amongst the builders' weeds yesterday, I decided to leave this poppy until it had flowered. Glad I did.

white_hart that is, with her heads up about the Get Knitted sale. My new sock yarn arrived yesterday and looks like this.



It's the first time I've bought from them and thought the service was very good. Plus free sock pattern (won't be using), pattern for 'gift pouch', pen and sweeties. Some of this yarn is earmarked for knitting socks as presents. Meanwhile it's spurred me on to start the pair to this



which is knitted in Lana Grossa Cotton Fun. I knitted as I mean to go on: furiously all evening.

I've just finished reading The Shop on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber. A good idea, this, cashing in on the knitting boom by setting the story of four women in a yarn store. Not enough detail about the knitting for my taste but I see that the next book in the series, The Yarn Store, has a lot about sock knitting so I might persevere.

This is a foxglove called 'Primrose Carousel', named because the flowers grow all round the stem. I prefer the traditional 'all the flowers on one side' type but this is such a pretty colour. Thompson & Morgan started selling seed of it a few years ago, very expensively, and it was a big success. I grew some plants, was pleased with them and carefully saved seed to sow again. I have other foxgloves in the garden and none of the new plants I raised came true. Every now and then though, one pops up, as seen above. Here's some more ( free plants )

Happy birthday land_girl! Have a lovely day.

‘It was just as well I had slipped off my ear correcting bandages…(or)…I would never have heard my mother’s screams.’ This book starts as it goes on: funny, strange, riveting. Poppy Minkel, the mustard heiress, is discontented with her lot and determined to escape from her mother, aunt and the rest of the family as soon as she can. They are a Jewish family, a family which somehow mislaid its Jewishness on the way from Duluth, Minnesota to New York in a search for better Society. So who are the Unfortunates? The huddled masses arriving in America before the First World War, the Irish, people who have to live without ‘help’ in the home. Poppy mixes with all these, with Parisian bohemians and the English landed gentry. She is so self centred, so ignorant of anything that happens in the world that doesn’t pertain to her that in 1939, her ‘pansy’ English friend has to force her out of France and she still doesn’t see what she has to escape from. By the end of the book we’ve been through two world wars and any number of births, marriages and deaths. Has Poppy escaped? In a way, she’s come home. I wanted to read this because I enjoyed The Future Homemakers of America so much. This is even better; in fact it’s dazzling.

Then Listen Again to Saturday Live, R4 with Fi Glover. I got in from the market, sat down with a cup of coffee and a large slice of carrot cake, switched on the radio and heard the pleasant tones of Jane Badger, who has a blog (see left) and also a lovely site where she sells pony books. The strange thing is that although I've never spoken to Jane except by email I guessed at once that it was her speaking. (Jane, if you read this, I would sometimes like to comment on your blog but time and again Google tells me my password is wrong (!) and I can't.)

My marketing was very successful this morning. I fell in love with and bought a beautiful pelargonium with almost black flowers, called 'Black Butterfly'. Also picked up some herb and lettuce plants. For the small amount I need, it's just not worth raising them myself from seed.

Books were also plentiful today. A chap I mentally call Geordie because of his lovely accent had boxes and boxes of 'em, a pound each and he kindly called out to me 'children's books in this one!'. Much rummaging went on and an old chap said, 'we're like pigs in muck here'. True! I spent a tenner with him then did a little deal with a regular stallholder there which got me my money back. I'm thinking of starting a second blog, called maybe churchmouse or secondhandrose, all about how to live on very little money.

Alan. Sack Shula.

This beauty is Geranium phaeum var. lividum 'Joan Baker'. When you grow geraniums in the mass they can have a rather weedy, fuzzy look (see below) but individually the flowers are lovely.



These plants are so useful when you have a lot of shade.

Today I have been planting sweet peas. They were sown in February and haven't much of a root system, so I would always prefer an autumn sowing. I don't grow them properly, just up what is called an obelisk and of course isn't an obelisk at all. I wanted them placed for ease of tying in and cutting so they haven't got the best soil. Good luck, little plants, hope the slugs don't get you!

What a difference a few sunny days make to a garden. One day you notice that the borders have filled out with green mounds; the next, geraniums and aquilegias are flowering. I also note that the sun has started to dry out the soil so if I don't get rid of those builders' weeds soonish, I won't be able to get a fork in the ground. It was too windy today to photograph anything tall so here are some smaller plants in flower now.



A white form of the common Bugle, Ajuga reptans



Pink Lily of the Valley. This is very vigorous and is springing up in the grass.



This is Geranium pyrenaicum. The flowers are small but there are plenty of them and in quite a strong mauve. Next to this plant is a white form. They are rather weedy as they seed around a lot but they're so pretty I don't mind.

Today's job was pulling up all the forget-me-nots and cutting down the pulmonarias.

Happy birthday to white_hart today!

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)



Not that these flowers are at Kew but on a terrible leggy ancient old bush in my garden. The flowers are waving in the sky; I couldn't even cut any for the house without a stepladder. Still it wouldn't be May without lilacs. Continuing the theme, I was given this book as a Sunday School prize.



Not my favourite LMA (that's An Old Fashoned Girl) but nice to have.

...not just for life, as Bubble once famously remarked in Absolutely Fabulous. This morning I went car booting. No luck, rain threatening, rather miserable really. I spotted a crowd around a van and let out an involuntary Aaaaw! A bucketful of adorable puppies, with their Mum looking glumly on. Now you see a lot of dogs at boot sales but not often for sale: yes FOR SALE. I couldn't believe it. People are always telling me I ought to get a dog for company, but I feel a dog is a bigger reponsibility than I could take on right now. Yet I could have bought one this morning, on impulse, for £24.00. The pups all looked lively and healthy but this is no way to buy a dog, or sell one. This is wrong.

Let's hope none of these puppies needs help from our local Waggy Tails Rescue