The Garden Year: September

For this year’s Garden Year linky I’m continuing to share advice from Songbird Survival about how we can make our gardens the best they can be for birds.

This summer has been one of very little rain, which has meant quite a lot of worry for my potted plants, and the increasingly urgent need to get them into the ground - but where?! That’s still the great unknown, but in the past month I’ve started to put pots in places where I think I want the plants, which is small steps but it is helping. It’s also meant we see our plants, though clearly I waited until most of the flowers had gone, ah well…

#ThinkBirds

This month, let’s look at the top survival tips for songbirds in our gardens:

• Forget pesticides and keep it natural. By providing lots of flowers and plants you’re helping wildlife, but your hard work goes out the window if you use a bug spray.

• Create a pond, I’ll admit this is one I struggle with, but a pond is great for the invertebrates in your garden. You never know you may even attract some frogs, toads and newts to your new space.

• No garden? No problem! However big, or small, your space is you can make it wildlife friendly. Consider putting up a nest box or grab yourself some potted plants, you’d be surprised at what wildlife you can attract.

• Make a space for compost - a compost heap is a great way to recycle your garden and kitchen (non-meat) waste, and it creates more habitats for insects, as well as great compost you can use in your garden.

• Don’t rush to cut back, wait until early spring to cut the garden back. Leaving seed heads and grasses over winter provides food and shelter for birds and it looks great too.

• Enjoy it! That’s the most important advice for your garden, make time to soak up your hard work and enjoy the wildlife your garden has to offer. The mental health benefits of being outside are good too, soo relax, breathe and listen to your dawn chorus.

Advice, inspiration and places to visit

• RHS advice: jobs to do this month

• Gardeners World advice and inspiration

• National Trust gardens and parks to visit

• English Heritage historic gardens to visit

Leave a link below to share what you’ve been up to in the last month, or add a comment sharing your plans for the upcoming month.

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This August...

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing last month’s update, and it’s hard to believe that it’s September tomorrow isn’t it?

August here has been a sunny, relaxing month with plenty going on in real life but not too much going on online, and that in itself has been good. We’ve had lunches out in the sunshine, including our favourite Newark cafe enjoying gyros in the market square’s sunshine while also spending some time people watching!

I’ve had a series of massages, and now I’m feeling so much more ‘less wonky’ and with a very slight tweak in my car seat I think (hope) I’ve identified and resolved what’s been causing me the problem.

We watched the Community Shield which featured both of our teams, with mine - Crystal Palace - winning out over his - Liverpool. There’s more cycling on the tv too, so just when you think you were safe from the Tour de France, along comes Spain’s La Vuelta.

Around the house, or more precisely the garage, we’ve made great strides in sorting out the space; passing on many of our moving boxes, and ordering four racks, with two of them assembled already. We’ve given away our old folding sun loungers, and are waiting on the delivery of some garden ‘arm chairs’ which hopefully will be here soon. This project is a bit like one of those games where you move everything round until it gets in the right place, and we’re still in that phase, but we’ll get there and we’ll have a much tidier and usable space at the end, if we do it right.

I don’t yet have the shelves in my craft room cupboard but I do have my weaving work in progress and some pictures on the wall, in what I’m dubbing ‘colourful corner’ so there is progress. I’ve even taken my Vogue pictures in for framing, as I was right when I suspected they weren’t a standard size.

I loved my first visit to the Festival of Quilts at Birmingham’s NEC - I’ve never seen so many quilts in one place, and I wish we had more time to admire them. It felt as if my SIL and I were strolling past them quite blasé, giving them the briefest of glances when their makers had most likely poured their hearts and soul into them. I have many, many photos which I’ve yet to even think about editing, but when I do I’ll be sharing my favourites here (and I already know there’s a lot of favourites!)

My purse also took a bit of a quilt-related bashing, and so I’ve one or two projects already lined up for the new year - I knew you wouldn’t be surprised, I wasn’t either! I’ve only started to do some high level planning for one of the projects, mainly to make sure I have enough of what I need, and I think I do - and I think I can make it work, so that’s now on the back burner while I get myself through some of the projects I already have on the go!

Our new sofa arrived, on the same day as the local ‘air show’ which was ideal as we knew we’d be in. It’s a velvet mustard sofa, so quite the change from the grey garden sofa that had been in its place previously. The garden sofa has moved outside, in fact just the other side of the wall, and now has plant pots around it as MOH pointed out one morning that it was looking quite sad, and if we’d just left it there before moving it someplace else!

It’s so different to what we had before that to start with it almost made me jump each time it caught my eye. As you can see I’ve spent some time testing out cushions - the chevrons are staying for now, but I also quite like the tropical outdoor cushions on it too.

In the garden I finally potted up the new olive tree in the new large pot, and it’s looking great - in fact our garden, with the addition of the sofa, is starting to take on its own identity and I’ve been moving some pots around to try the plants in potential longer term homes.

We’re ending the month with a visit to a new-to-us garden, and one that’s opening as part of the National Garden Scheme. It’s a tropical garden so that should be fun, and I’m hoping full of inspiration for another section of our garden here.

There’s been plenty of family time this month and a trip from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk, which was thankfully relatively traffic-free, but did result in us helping my dad to manoeuvre a three metre worktop out of their house through one of their windows. Had anyone spotted us, I’m sure they would have been most amused!

We also had a hot and sunny day out at the inaugural Rutland Flower Show, and I’m hoping it returns next year as there was plenty to see and a fair bit of inspiration too. I left with a couple of vintage pots, some metal storage containers, a few leads to follow up on and this fantastic sweet pepper plant, which is already ripening more of its tasty peppers.

So it’s been a busy month all in all, and I’m sure September will be no different.

If you want to read my previous monthly updates in my ‘This is’ series you’re very welcome.

Birthday bunting, a year on

Last summer we celebrated my dad’s 90th birthday and to mark the occasion I made some bunting. I’d printed the individual flags much earlier in the year at the Indian Block Printing course at our local library. Even then I was clear that a traditional ‘happy birthday’ banner was a lot of work - and would need a fair amount of space to hang, and I wanted something smaller.

In the end I settled on five flags, spelling I am 90 - and both the embroidery and assembly were finished way ahead of our family celebration, which was a relief - and almost felt like it was planned.

Which of course it was, but isn’t it great when a plan comes together?

Earlier this summer dad had another birthday, and so I thought I better provide an update, but without access to the same Indian blocks it would have to be different, so I decided to make it very different.

I’d picked up a large bag of buttons at my Sewing Group’s stash sale (along with the Vogue pictures, which are currently being framed) and more amazingly was able to remember where I put them and so lay my hands on them easily.

I’d drawn a 1 on a plain piece of fabric, and marked out the edges of the triangle which would form the bunting, and then played around with how the buttons would fit into the figure.

And once I was happy with that, I took a picture to remind myself of what I’d settled on, and set about sewing them on pretty much in the same position. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was very close.

The last button - the tiny white one at the bottom right - didn’t seem to fit where I’d had it, as no doubt other buttons had moved slightly, and I toyed with the idea of leaving it off altogether. But in the end I added it close to where it should have been in my plan.

To hem and finish off the bunting I used a navy thread with a fancy stitch on my sewing machine - they look like Christmas lights to me, or ice creams in cones if you look at them the other way up.

Anyway, job done.

And that odd little button, well - it seems it was supposed to be there. Dad, who was half expecting an update to his birthday banner asked if I’d included that number of buttons on purpose. I hadn’t, but it turns out the number of buttons I’d used was the same number as dad’s birth date. I almost wish I’d thought of doing that myself, but seems that fate managed that all by itself.

How fortuitously weird, huh?