Making my mystery block of the month: April

You’ll have seen that I plan to complete Sherri’s mystery block a month quilt and yesterday I shared the test blocks which I made into my sixth charity quilt, today I’m sharing the friendship star block I made for my own quilt.

I had a feeling that this month would be another star block, after all there’d been the cute houses, the vintage star and then the heart last month - and I wasn’t wrong, was I? So I suspect that the alternate months will also be stars, and so I formulated another plan, in that I’d use the navy materials for all the stars using these blocks to ‘punctuate’ my quilts.

I don’t know if I’m right, but I do know that next month’s block isn’t a star, so I’ve a fifty-fifty chance when the next block is released at the start of June, haven’t I?

Anyway, with navy chosen and with my test blocks completed more easily than I expected, I was ready to get going. In fact so much so, that I only stopped to take a picture once it was completely assembled.

I’m about to blow my own trumpet here, but I was really pleased with how the points lined up with the centre square of the star, and I was keeping most things crossed to see how the outer points worked out when I added the outer borders.

Back to the original border fabrics

Last month I spent some time pondering whether or not to introduce new green fabrics into the borders, even drawing myself a scribbled plan. And that helped, a lot. It meant that this month I knew that this block was the first block on my second row of the finished quilt, and so the borders needed to be the original greens.

Though I did need to lay them out and double check that before attaching them.

Happy with that, and they were soon attached.

And look, I kept all the points too. I’m super happy with how this one turned out, points and all - though I’m sure this is more by luck than judgement, but also because the more I sew I seem to gain in competence and confidence.

Join me next month to see how I get on with the next mystery block, and check out my previous posts for my mystery block quilt or the charity quilts made from the test blocks.

The Barbican's Community Garden

On a sunny day in April I was down in London with some time on my hands and so I had a wander, and found myself coming out of yet another undiscovered part of the Barbican. I’m sure every time I go I find another way in or out, and so I wasn’t disappointed!

This time though I stumbled across the Moor Lane Clean Air Pop-Up Community Garden created in 2017 as part of the Low Emission Neighbourhood, and completely new to me. The garden intended to raise awareness of air quality in the City and to encourage pedestrians to take low emission routes to the Barbican station, the Barbican Centre and towards Guildhall using the Podium walkways.

Designed by three young landscape designers known as Studio xmpl, they worked pro bono with Friends of City Gardeners a City-based community group of garden volunteers, who now jointly maintain the garden along with the City of London Corporation’s City Gardens team.

The garden has been constructed from 57 galvanised steel pipes and all plants were chosen for their ability to trap particulates and improve air quality, as well as provided cover and forage for birds and nectar-rich flowers for pollinators.

In 2020 poet Kit Finnie and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama worked with local community groups to create poems which reflected on this garden, the pandemic and what the city means to them.

you have the power
to break something.
a common truth but
still. it comes to you
like ice water gulped
at 3am. joy that
streams freely from
the tap and cupped
hands to catch it in.
the air around your
body. all the london
beyond. beyond
that. another truth.
home is the thing
that settles round
your most beloved
person when they’re
still.

It was a garden full of structure, texture and shape with lush greenery and luckily on the day I visited sunlight glinting off the City offices behind. No doubt a great spot for City workers to eat their lunch.

I loved the poetry too, and wished I’d known about this place before - though of course I stopped working in the City in 2014, so a few years before this was created. But it’s the kind of place I’d have loved to escape to with colleagues, or alone, for lunch.

a distant hush is
an opportunity for
abundance. so is
a pigeon. a seed.
a baby animal. a
stranger biking to
the office. the sound
of a drill. a city fox. a
decision to attend.
a steady beat. a
gentle nudge. a
pavement.
new shoes. the
future. therapy. a
crush. printer paper.
wandering. the
climate crisis. your
inhale. your exhale.
this.

Somehow it seemed fitting that one of the ever increasing e-bikes parked up in the garden was green and labelled forest, less so that the building behind was a car park - but as with everything - balance!

inhale. exhale.
resilience is a
circle. a thread that
never ends. later.
you’ll savour this
encounter with
delight as fresh as
aloe. its audacity.
beating green in the
grey heart of your
city. feral moment
in your familiar day.
it will remind you
of the parts of
yourself that are
also a garden. a
poem. a breath. a
single leaf among
many.

I love discovering places like this, isn’t it great?

My garden in April

Last month it was all about the bulbs in my garden, this month they’ve been and gone. The tulips were a bit of a let down really, and so I think they need some attention once they’ve died back. My plan is to repot them so they’ll have some fresh soil for next spring, and while I’m at it some of my daffodils would probably also benefit from the same treatment.

This month it’s been about the shrubs coming back to life, though not all of them are there yet disappointingly. There’s been a first visit to a garden show - more on what we saw there in a future post, but carry on reading to see what I left with and my plans for those.

With nice weather it’s surprising how quickly things - and specifically plants - change. At the start of the month this acer was only just coming into bud, a fortnight later it was in full leaf and looking really healthy. These past few hot days has seen it drop a few leaves, so plenty of water when it cools down in the evening has, I think, been helping.

Likewise our crab apple tree started to develop the red buds of blossom in the middle of month, so for our family barbecue, it glistened jewel-like in the background, and then boom - the blossom was out in all its gloriousness a week or so later. I’ve many more photos of it than I’m sharing here, but please indulge me a bit of home grown blossom love!

Yes, you can see how it’s quite addictive!

Elsewhere in the garden the dogwoods also started to flower, and yes they’re still in the pots we moved them in. Over the winter I’ve been trying them out in a new spot - one that we can see from the house, so when their stems are at their vibrant best we can enjoy them from inside. We’re happy with the spot they’re in now, so they are earmarked for planting out when the conditions are right.

The peach tree has shed all its blossom now, and there are a few tiny, tiny fruits starting to develop. It’s shot up too, so I think I’ll be able to train one, maybe two more horizontal branches - though I do need to get some more canes (or shackle enough together) to do this.

It’s also developed what I’m pretty sure is peach leaf curl, a fungal disease which causes red patches - and while they in themselves are quite stunning, they can’t be doing the plant any good. The advice is to remove the affected leaves as quickly as possible and before the fungus blooms, which I’ve done, and hopefully this will reduce the risk of reoccurrence.

I’ll be keeping my eye out for any more leaves, and removing those too. The solution is apparently to cover them with plastic over the winter months, which clearly is a bit late to know about now. Anyway, let’s hope it’s just a blip and it continues to grow and produce at least a couple of fruit.

Our longer term plan is to plant it at the base of the wall (which will make it easy to cover in plastic sheeting in future) but exactly where is still unknown. If planting it out is its next step then I could probably make a call, but if it’s happy to continue in a pot then I have one - and a much bigger one - on standby. We bought this at the Newark Garden Show, and while it looks like terracotta it’s actually plastic, and it’s one of the best I’ve seen. It’s much lighter than a terracotta pot (obviously) and a bit more resilient too, and if the peach tree is ready to move then it also gives me a bit more decision-making time!

We also bought a new, but aged and distressed, iron sculpture at the show - it’s currently still in its black plastic wrapping but has moved inside the garage for the time being. Getting it into the car was fun, but we managed it with the seats rearranged and MOH sitting in the back holding it in place.

Last year I only left the show with a couple of lupins, as our new garden was still very new to us and my plans were completely unknown. This year my appetite for plants has returned a little, and we did make some purchases including these Southern Globe Thistles which are perennials that like full/part sun and should flower in July/August with blue spherical flower heads.

This unusual Iris caught my eye - its flowers are a copper bronze and mahogany and it’d normally flower in May/June and once again it’s one that will return each year. Then there were a couple of dark flowered and purple leaved Penstemons, which along with those pictured will look great in a cottage garden type setting, which is lucky as that’s something I have in mind, but in the meantime I’ll continue to grow them in pots, potting them on as I need to.

I also succumbed to a fatsia, we had one in our previous garden which was huuuge but also very forgiving and very structural. This one is quite a bit smaller, and since seeing the white fatsia at last year’s Gardeners’ World Live it’s clearly been playing on my mind. I didn’t even know you could get white fatsias, but a variegated one seems like an even better option to me.

It has a bit of growing to do though, and I’ll be potting it on through a variety of ever increasing pots I’m sure.

Then I picked up a couple of tomato plants, this year opting for something a little more unusual than the Gardener’s Delight which I picked up from a garden centre late-on last year. There’s a red Honeycomb cherry tomato plant on the right, and a black skinned variety on the left.

It’s the tomatoes that have made me realise how much I miss having a greenhouse, and that not having a greenhouse makes seed growing quite hard work! That means it makes sense to stick to buying some plants for the time being, and that planning a greenhouse really should move up my priority list. And so it seemed right that my final purchase from the show was these tiny vintage terracotta pots, to add to my growing collection - and which will have pride of place in my new greenhouse one day!

Aren’t these just fab? And that one with PINK written on the rim, well I couldn’t leave that one there now could I?!