Kindle garden

Well the weather has been fine all week, and so I have been cracking on with getting the garden ready for planting. But first of all I got my little Kindle garden sorted.

New posts and wire netting, the table and chairs Brendan got me last year, and my Christmas pressie - the Kindle.

It may seem a little wasteful to partition off a bit of the veggie plot just for my Kindle, but it seems highly appropriate to use the bit of shade under the apple tree to shelter under in the summer - it is not as though anything can grow there.

And the netting is for growing my peas and beans up, a living hedge in order to create a private space away from everyone to sit and read - aperos and drinks to be served at 6pm. Not so much Cider with Rosie, but G&Ts with Kindle. (And yes those are carrots - and no they are not for the chickens - I am trying to develop a taste for crudites but without the mayo).

home made poly tunnels from water pipe and plastic

Lots has been done this week, the whole plot has been rotovated, poly tunnels and cold frames are up, and first seeds have been started in the greenhouse. 

Come on Spring - we are ready for you.

The chickens have really been entering into the spirit too and feeding us well, from left to right - normal chicken egg, double yolker Orpington egg, Goose egg - omlette anyone?

First day of sun screen

Amazingly enough I had to use some sun screen today while out rotovating the garden.

I was doing my best Barbara Good impersonation today - or rather Tom because he got to play with all the good toys.  But my garden is now fully rotovated ready for planting.  And picked clean by the chickens, I had a full complement in tow around the garden but hopefully as I ploughed through several ant nests and they got all excited picking them clean that should mean less to worry about later.

 

In the background you can just see my new bit of fencing.  

This is for my Kindle garden.  

Yes that's right, I have devoted a part of my garden to the hedonistic pleasures of my Kindle.

I intend to grow beans and peas along the mesh fencing and create a private space where I can relax in the shade of the apple trees in summer to read my Kindle, hopefully out of sight of the neighbours and therefore unlikely to be disturbed.

Happy New Year everyone

It has been a bit of an odd start to the new year so far for me.

For one thing, now that the 2010 projects are over, I find that I am scouting around to do something every day and then realising that I don't have to, but missing the hive of activity that the projects created around me.

So the dog has been out for a couple of very long walks.  And I have mastered reading books on my Kindle.

But there is more to life than this, so crochet is once again taking up my evenings, as well as a new tapestry that I have just started.

Added to two new jobs and a stinking head cold.


I have decided on the format for my 2011 project blog (even if I could not master wordpress to load it onto!).

The Three Cs project will work like this.

Every month I will post a complete how to with photos for the first C - Cook something new
Every month I will post a complete how to with photos for the second C - Create something new

Finally, through flickr and to ensure that I actually get around to using all that storage space on there, I have joined a 52 images to a theme group and will be attempting to keep up with this throughout the year.  I intend to post my best Captures here - and so build up a wider portfolio than I currently have.

I had considered a 365 images group - but as I have a tendancy to forget where I plugged the camera battery in for a couple of days at a time, it would not be long before I fell behind on that one.

I intend to try to keep up the momentum started last year through the daily projects and set myself daily goals to motivate me, you just won't have to read about them everyday now though.

And so with no more shilly shallying around this morning, I am off into the sunshine to clean out the animals and start my spring compost heap.

All over for another year

Christmas is over for another 12 months. Everything drops back to normal instantly.

There is an anticlimactical air to this post Christmas period. Never really having been one for big New Year celebrations, Christmas is my personal big event, and once gone it all feels like a bit of a wind down before gearing back up towards spring and the first bits of gardening.

Especially so in France, as here bank holidays do not carry over into the working week, therefore today is just another Monday work wise, and Boxing Day is not a celebration at all.

In that spirit of Monday bleurgh and back to work, Thea and I set to a bit of cleaning up around the chicken house, sorting out some fresh hay and straw for the rabbits, attacking the piles of washing lying around, tackling the mounds of leftovers and a general air of putting away and tidying up around the house.

We finally found the stash of eggs hidden in the upper barn, from one of our meat birds who has decided to be a house chicken and is laying like mad in an endeavor to endear herself to us and preserve her life. Unfortunately the -18°C the other night froze the eggs solid and they have all cracked. Eggy popsicles for the dog though who was quite happy with them. Dread to think what effect that is going to have on his guts later this afternoon.

With my freezer now refilled with left over turkey pie and a left over lamb pie and a lamb curry bubbling away ready for tonight now, I have a sense of achievement. The sun is out and the snow is glistening so may even get to take the dog out for a post Christmas 10km stroll.

Or perhaps I may just relax with my new Kindle.

Very impressed with the screen on it, (even if it did take me an hour on Christmas day to pair with the internet modem and get it to perform its WiFi functions), so impressed in fact that I have even bitten the proverbial bullet and bought some books for it.

From the BBC 100 greatest books - I am going to try to work my way through the unread books on the list, but I was quite surprised how many of these I have not only read but stand well thumbed on my bookshelves.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie