The Busy Gardener aka The Lazy Blogger

Hello.. I am still here in case you were wondering. I must apologise for being an absent blogger for quite some months. There is a reason though. When I started this blog I always said I wouldn't write the same things over and over again. A garden though does exactly that, each spring, it comes to life and gives months of pleasure, and then come the winter, it goes back to sleep. I found myself last august with nothing new to write, or so I thought. Life in the garden carried on and I was so busy helping it along and enjoying it, I didn't get around to sharing. 

So its time to catch up. The most obvious piece of news to share is about the hens, Babs, Gerry and Margot. In the early summer all 3 started to look a little under the weather. I tried every potion and cure I could find, but sadly they all succumbed to something, I don't know what. They were happy hens and gave us lot of pleasure and loads and loads of eggs. I decided that I wouldn't have hens again, just because we were finding it difficult to get them minded when we wanted to go away. So it was time to do something with the now empty hen run. 

I decided that with my new love of growing flowers, the space would be better used as a new raised bed, so this time, I splashed out and bought a ready made kit from Harrod Horticultural  . We put the run and all the stuff associated with it, on Freecycle and off it went to a nice family in the New Forest. 

The new bed arrived and I set about building it and planting with biennial plants such as sweet William and Hesperis .

I also planted a couple of hundred various bulbs under the whole bed so it should look wonderful in the spring. 

The summer rolled on and the garden was proceeding wonderful veg and flowers.

 Late summer was probably may favourite because thats when the Sunflowers and dahlias began to look the best. I grew a variety called Mongolian Giant just to see how big it would get. I was delighted with the result.. I am 5ft 4 so judge for yourself how big it actually got. 

They looked even better cut and made into Jam Jar Posies

Altogether it was a wonderful summer and I am hoping for the same again this year. In other news Freda enjoyed her summer immensly, I think the highlight was when our car club was allowed to park the cars on the grass street at Bucklers Hard in the Forest. 

and finally Gibson is doing really welll, we went away for a bit and he stayed with a relative who works for the RNLI . He was lucky enough to go to London and spend the day at Tower Lifeboat station. The crew loved him and made him an honorary lifeboat dog.

In 2015 I shall try and keep you a bit more up to date.