My garden in February

Last month I said the snowdrops were coming, well this month they arrived. These giant snowdrops are my absolute favourites and I can’t wait for them to take themselves for a wander around the border!

I can spot these from inside the house, and each time I do I’m reminded what a great idea it was to plant them there!

Once again there’s been very little actual gardening activity this month but as well as enjoying peeking on the snowdrops, there’s been some pretty sunsets too. Though isn’t it great that sunset is now past 5pm, and won’t be before 5pm until much later in the year.

The mahonia is doing its thing and looking glorious, I love how the berries have that pink tinge and think it’s a plant that looks very regal with its crown of berries.

Elsewhere in the garden I’ve seen evidence of daffodils, so I’m hoping that they will enjoy the warmer days we’ve had towards the end of the month, and will quite literally march into March. I know that I need to spend some time with all my bulbs in pots after this growing season, but I’m hoping that they’ll give a good show before I refresh their soil and get them ready for flowering next year.

Alongside the mahonia the other star in our garden right now is the creamy green hellebore, isn’t it gorgeous?

The elephants ears we brought with us from London are also in flower and while they could do with a general tidy, they’re doing pretty well contending with that huge weed on the right. I’ve plenty of weeding opportunities too, so as it looks like the weather is going to be good that’s at the top of my list, and to be honest I can’t wait to do some actual gardening, just as long as the weather’s fine!

Fingers crossed for a dry and uplifting spring!

This February...

There has at long last been a break in the rain! There’s also been glimpses of the sun, and for a couple of days I’d even go as far as saying it was sunny. Whether or not spring is really on its way or if the weather is fooling us, I’m not so sure but I am glad to see the cheerful snowdrops and even more cheery daffodils appear in the hedgerows.

Our heating is fixed, and it’s stayed working better than it ever has which is even better news. I’m not looking forward to the bill coming in though, as I suspect it will be more than it usually would be, but life, hey. We’ve spent afternoons and early evenings watching the Six Nations tournament, and have quite gotten into the Premier League darts matches each week too, and we’ve finally started on the second season of The Night Manager - though we had only just watched the first one!

There’s been more speedwatch sessions, and the traffic is still high, and faster than it should be. In one of our sessions the highest speed we recorded was 59 mph, and it isn’t the first time one of our volunteer group has recorded that level of speed, which is shocking for a 30 mph limit - or it is to me anyway.

Somewhere along the way this month I seem to have crocked my ankle, or more specifically my achilles, and I’m not sure how which is odd as I’d expect something dramatic for the amount of pain there’s been. But some rest, my trusty Italian ankle support and putting my foot up and a painkiller or two has taken the soreness down many notches, what really seemed to have fixed it though is one of my regular massages. To be honest I wasn’t sure if I would be able to bear anyone touch it at one point, so for this gentle, recuperating massage to have had the effect it has has been wonderful.

I had a day in London at the Garden Press Event speaking to suppliers and leading figures in the garden industry, learning lots and with plenty more to share from the day in the next few weeks. That same day my blog turned thirteen, a fully fledged teenager now which hardly seems possible. To celebrate I picked up some glorious cut flower hyacinths, which I’ve never seen as cut flowers before, little did I know that my challenges with drooping hyacinths were about to start!

To round off the day in London I visited the most fabulous haberdashery just off Oxford Street, all the time wondering why I didn’t know of MacCulloch & Wallis while I lived in London - and more amazingly, I left without a purchase too. Then we headed to The Barbary in Covent Garden for dinner, which was fabulous and a much smaller than we expected restaurant.

It’s been a busy month in our home too, with a couple of new blinds fitted on the small but long front windows and the blue chandelier was assembled and installed - and we love it.

I’m not sure our electrician loved putting it up quite so much, but he agrees it’s a good addition to our stairway. We gambled on the length, reducing the drop by 50 cms, gauging this just by him holding the wire in place, and we got it right first time, which he definitely was pleased about, but I know if it wasn’t right he would have insisted on changing it. But phew, from us all in this case!

We also took delivery of our new sofas, much earlier than expected. They were due towards the end of March, but the company are ahead of themselves at the moment and so they’re here already - and have only been here a day or two, but even on the day they were delivered they just felt right for our space.

We’d hoped to book a decorator in before they arrived, and decide on the colour scheme too - but we haven’t, and so we’ll sort that out another time. In some ways it’s good to have them so we can be as sure as we can be that the colour we finally go for works, but in the meantime our house is currently auditioning as a sofa showroom and a cushion mountain!

I’ve finished the last of my ‘stretch project’ quilts, which I’m glad about as they really have dictated my sewing time, and I really have so much more that I want to sew. I will still sew more charity quilts, but not on the scale and voracity that I have this past year.

Finishing the last of my one-a-month-charity quilts also means I’ve completed the last mystery block of the month, so now I have twelve blocks to assemble into a quilt top which has taken some maths to make sure I have enough material to carry out my plans. I’ll be sharing more soon on both of these year long projects, so watch out for those posts.

I’ve realised that over the past year I’ve not found as much time as I’d like to ‘play’ when crafting, and trying out things I’ve not done before, this month though I’ve had more time for that and have found myself tackling a series of sewn miniature items. They’re not perfect and I’ll find a use for them (and will most likely share more here at some point) but it’s been good to experiment and get things out of my head!

I’ve had a request for a rosette from my mum, so I need to make her one of those for an upcoming family wedding - which is also a good reminder that I need to sort myself out an outfit too, but it’s a tricky one as April weather could be literally anything - wish me luck!

When your heating's broken...

Thankfully our heating is back working and somehow working better than it ever has before. But receiving an email on Christmas Day from our monitoring service to say our heating system was ‘in alarm’ meant that we soon followed it into alarm mode too.

We weren’t at home, so like the monitoring service weren’t able to reboot the system. We didn’t know if it was on, or if we’d walk into a chilly house when we got back - as it turns out they were right it was in alarm, a bleeping alarm which I’m sure our neighbours were grateful that couldn’t be heard from outside.

But the house wasn’t cold, phew.

System reboot completed, and then another alarm. It wasn’t happy. We quickly learnt how to clear the alarm, which we soon discovered freed it up to alarm again.

Every 46 minutes.

After a full day and night of this and not a whole lot of sleep, we took another tack and just acknowledged the alarm which delayed its recurrence a bit. The monitoring team were able to tweak things a bit more and keep things (including the bleeping alarm) working. And then it stopped, and so did the heating.

Typically the engineer arrived when there was snow on the ground, and it was hard to know if it was warmer inside or out. He couldn’t resolve the issue that day, and needed to come back the next day, but the heating needed to stay off. It was clear at this point it was colder in the house, even with the fan heater we had, and the additional one we’d hastily bought. But they helped.

You know it’s cold when…

• wearing three layers, including a thermal base layer, became our norm.

• even I was wearing socks with my slippers (it’s not a feeling I enjoy, but needs must).

• getting dressed became a study in efficiency - everything laid out first and put on in minimal time!

• we planned our meals to be even more warming than usual, think soups and casseroles slow cooking in the oven.

• we ate more quickly than we usually would, no leisurely meals - partly to get back into the warmer rooms, but also to eat our meals while they were still hot.

• the same for cups of tea, it’s amazing how quickly a cuppa cools down.

• my crocheted throws came into their own as sofa blankets, and the smaller ones as covers over our dining chairs - and even MOH was pleased to have them.

• I found time to pull out my long-time ‘almost but not quite finished’ crochet project and got some more sewn together whilst snuggled underneath most of it. There’s still more to do though, some things don’t ever change.

• we planned time out of the house, as often even just walking to the pub was warmer than being indoors.

• everything in the house was cold, as well as warming the plates we were even warming our cutlery in the oven, and butter was a case of one slice, or two?

• our bed became a Princess and the Pea in reverse kind of vibe, every few nights we’d add another cover to the top of the bed, which of course made it even harder to get up in the morning!

Our heating is now fixed, and it’s working better than it ever has

It took four visits to fix it though over an elapsed period of a month, the delay was mostly waiting for a part to be delivered, which of course turned out not to be the cause of it anyway. We weren’t without heating for all of this time - at most it was gone for a week and we had offers of staying with family if it got too cold. Mostly it was working, though with a severely reduced capacity, and we didn’t want to push our luck and be left with none!

YOU KNOW YOU’VE GOT A GOOD HEATING ENGINEER WHEN HE BRINGS HIS OWN INDOOR SHOES!

You know you’ve got a good heating engineer when he brings his own indoor shoes

But, no offence, let’s hope we don’t need to see him, or his colleagues, until the the summer when the annual service is due.