Watch the Birdy!

Fieldfare - sighted on BGB Day minus five.

It's time for RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch.  I had a cheery email reminding me to participate a few days ago and duly printed off the handy identification guide, and as the sun starts to set it's time to send in my results.

Only there's nothing to report.  Unless I cheat.

I could, for instance, record seven pigeons, but they didn't land in the garden, they overflew it and I know for a fact that they aren't wild birds because they live in a neat, brightly-painted loft on our allotment site.  I could stretch it a bit and tick off a crow, but strictly speaking s/he wasn't in our garden either but perched in a silver birch which is actually two gardens away.

Our garden birds are thoroughly ungrateful little b*ggers where the BGB is concerned.  Almost every year something turns up either the day before or after that makes us go 'Ooh look!  It's a ..!'  Sometimes it'll be the fierce sparrowhawk.  On another occasion, the dandy bullfinch.  Or a flock of chattering, chiming long-tailed tits fluttering through the hawthorn tree.  A couple of years ago it was a pair of vivid green siskins, right up close to the house on the fat-ball feeder.  But are they here on BGB day - are they heck!

I wouldn't mind if even some of the usual suspects put in an appearance.  On previous BGB days we've at least counted three or four blackbirds getting all stroppy and territorial with each other or a handful of squawking starlings.  If we've timed our observations fortuitously we might catch the flock of goldfinches that raid the niger seed feeders.  There's usually a dunnock about, several chaffinches and the little wren if we're lucky.  Some once-common house sparrows generally put in an appearance too, along with blue, great and coal tits.

It's genuinely concerning not to have seen any of these little guys today, or for quite some time.  When I cleaned the seed feeders out earlier in the week, ahead of the very cold nights, I was alarmed to find germinating seeds where there should be enough of a fast turn-over of food for this not to happen, and mould starting to form on old fat-balls that would usually be pecked to disintegration long before this stage.  And the niger seed feeders don't seem to have been touched either. 

The usual cat patrols have been about from their prints in the snow, but I do wonder if the weird weather and lack of certain fruits has taken its toll.  For example, there were no miniature crab-apples for the blackbirds and fieldfares this year, though a record showing of berries from the various cotoneasters might have gone some way to compensate.  Another thought is that they've moved closer into town during the cold weather - walking across the car park in the centre of Stoke on Thursday night well after 8pm there was a surprising amount of birdsong. 

So that's the end of BGB day, and if I'm totally honest, I'll be reporting a 'duck' - in the cricketting sense of the expression, that is.

From the Slush Pile



Digs gardens, paints boaty stuff... and writes books?

 Bearing in mind how much of 2012 was wet, windy and unfit to garden in, perceptive readers might very well wonder what the heck I got up to for big chunks of the year.  After all, my own posts lamented my inauspicious timing in setting up as a gardener in such a climate, with work so scarce.  I also bewailed the way the rotten weather kept potential customers away from craft fairs at which I was attempting to sell my 'Roses and Castles' canalware, the other string to my bow, so clearly I wasn't painting furiously to keep up with demand.  And while the blog might have entertained you, it's scarcely great literature requiring hours of deep thought to compose.  The principle is essentially
i) think of a daft pun and
ii) add text vaguely related to i). 

Avid readers of the blog (that'll be my accidental pot-growing pal in Hampshire, then) may recall that in the depths of a very grey summer I was pondering using my writing skills for more profitable ends by jumping on the 'Mommy Porn' bandwagon.  Fear not, friends; I didn't.  'Fifty Spades of Clay', the Staffordshire-set horticulturally-themed bonkbuster remains, mercifully, unpenned. 

But I have been dabbling in creative fiction and, to recycle one of my dubious jokes regarding the above notorious novel, have written a work of 'leftie chick lit', a genre for those fed up with being screwed by sadistic multi-millionaires.  Following the trials and tribulations of a down-trodden middle-aged grandmother, her Sun-readerish husband and an unexpected allegation of benefit fraud, my tale (in two parts - trilogies are so last year!) is set in the deeply unfashionable, wildly unglamourous, tea-swilling world of an independent welfare rights advice project, complete with cast of quirky characters, gallows humour, peeling paintwork, second-hand office furniture and state-of-the-Ark technology.  Located 'somewhere in south Hampshire' and with the nicely misleading title Severe Discomfort (it's a clause from the Disability Living Allowance regulations), the first part has already proved to be utterly resistible to several literary agents.

Despite promising myself I was going to do this 'properly' with an editor and publisher and all that jazz, I've realised that as it's neither a celebrity memoir nor racy romance (not that it doesn't have romance - it does, but I do believe in leaving something to the reader's imagination!), it probably isn't going to get snapped up soon via the conventional channels.  So it's either self-publish or languish in the slush pile.  But I want this story out now because, if I'm being completely honest, with both the Social Security system and advice-giving organisations being decimated by current Government policies, it's a little piece of counter-propaganda.  If it had fewer pages and I had more funds, I'd hire a plane and drop copies across marginal constituencies the length and breadth of the UK.  But three hundred pages from 30,000 feet would make a right mess of your photovoltaic panels, so realistically, that's not an option!

You can be parted from very serious amounts of cash going down the self-publication (or as the sceptics might say 'vanity publishing') road, but I seem to have stumbled across a genuinely helpful, friendly web-based organisation called CompletelyNovel through which I've been able to do quite an effective DIY job.  For a cost that's barely into double figures I'm already staring at a proof copy of a book with my name on the cover; that's actually quite weird! 

And of course already I'm spotting typos I completely overlooked on screen, even reading it aloud, so it's just as well it's not on 'general release' yet.  But when it's been de-bugged and is finally available from the publishing company, or your local bookshop (or Amazon - but don't buy it from them until they're paying their taxes, good citizens), you'll be the first to know!

Spring 'on hold'

When I started gardening as work rather than relaxation I was fairly confident that I would have to be as busy as possible during the spring, summer and autumn, but could largely put my feet up over the winter and enjoy reading, writing, painting pretty pots and tins, and drinking copious cups of tea by a roaring fire.  Alternatively, if there hadn't been much work during the rest of the year and we were skint, I would go forth and seek agency employment for a few months, at least until the 'management' of wherever I was sent got fed up with me trying to unionise the rest of their crew and packed me off back to the employment agency.

So it's come as something of a surprise - albeit a pleasant one - to get some potentially labour-intensive and long-term gardening projects 'on site' after Christmas, and at the same time be asked to assist in delivering training for, and to, my old Citizens Advice Bureau. 

Gardening in the last couple of weeks has been a real pleasure, uncovering the tips of spring bulbs just starting to break through the soil as I clear the remains of summer perennials and fallen leaves, dividing and replanting the first flowering primroses of the year (in sheltered Sandbach, not up here) and listening to the chippering of a pair of robins shadowing my every move as I turn over the soil.

Even at home there are encouraging sights - the primroses might not be ready to flower yet, but the snowdrops are almost out and astonshingly there's a peachy-coloured geum in flower by the pond.  Most impressively, the hellebores have buds about to burst, despite being in a state of confusion during the non-summer this year and flowering profusely throughout August. 

But it looks as if we're about to be plunged back into winter for a while with a fall of snow last night and the threat of some very cold days for the rest of the week.  If the ground freezes, that'll be it for the gardening for the time being, although frosty still days are pleasant enough to work in as long as you've got enough pairs of socks on!  And it's seriously bad news for slugs, at last!

Fir better, fir worse...

It was a sobering thought as I started to dismantle the Christmas tree that, with all the fun of the Festive Season, I had quite forgotten that I'm supposed to be learning to identify and apply the correct botanical names to twelve different conifers ready for an 'ident' at college tomorrow.

The trouble with conifers is that close up, unless you're an aficionado of the things (in which case, get a life, dude!) they really do all look horribly similar, except the larch, Larix decidua, which does its best to pretend it isn't a conifer and dumps its leaves for the winter, only to give away its true nature by hanging on to some little cones.  Fooling no-one, Larix decidua!

Right, that's nailed one out of twelve.  Eleven to go...

Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' acts in a suitably Ronseal fashion in having yellowish foliage, while Juniperus x pfitzeriana 'Pzitzeriana Aurea' sounds like it should do, but doesn't and for something with such a convoluted name, it has unremarkable foliage in an uninspiring mid-green.  I'm going to struggle to differentiate between that and Thuja placata when they've got numbers not names beside them.

Yew (Taxus baccata) has nice deep-green foliage and little red berries and the main hazard with this one, apart from it being poisonous, is remembering if it's two 'Cs' or two 'Ts', if whoever is marking isn't taking prisoners on spelling this week.  There are a handful with distinctive cones: Pinus radiata is asymmetrical while paradoxically, Sequoiadendron giganteum actually has fairly small cones.  Cedrus deodara's cones look like they ought to be longer, but have been concertina-ed down on themselves - and they should smell cedary.  Abies koreana has tiny little green cones, more like little berries and Pinus sylvestris has typical 'pine cone' cones, 'cause it's the native Scots Pine. 

And I ought to recognise the Juniperus scopulorum 'Skyrocket' after taking dozens of cuttings of the perishing thing a few weeks ago.

Finally, there's x Cuprocyparis Leylandii, the one you accessorise with a chainsaw...

Sorted!

By the way, Blogger doesn't seem to be letting me put new photos on, so apologies for the lack of illustrations, though with conifers all looking so mind-bogglingly similar...!