Spring birthday!

Good birthday morning. Today I am going to be a connected gardener, from the vegetation in my hair and earth in my fingernails to the splodges of horse manure (rotted, thankfully) caught in the tread of my garden boots. Yeay! A totally connected gardener.

 Yeay!
Spring Birthday Flowers!

And a birthday gardener, no less! First the dogs and I will go for a walk around the gardens and orchard, check the sheep, and return via the Hen House Garden, my designated birthday gardening area. At least it will be this afternoon when the sun is shining thereon.

What I could do...

After I've cleaned the mess out, I could spread horse manure over the fallen oak leaves, with more leaves on top to hopefully suppress the weeds. Lots of organic layers - nice! This garden needs more plants, too. But not any old green thing - plants that won't suffer in the dry shade of summer. In other words, no roses.

 Up the driveway...
On Our Dog Walk

Oops. We poked around, we sniffed smells - it took ages, but we did our sheep and garden check. But oh dear.

 Mad eyes!
Winnie the Dog

The garden is shouting out - not wild felicitations for this auspicious day, but rather more demanding requests. Clean me! Weed me! Feed me! Don't forget me! Oiy, you! Over here! Horse manure for meeeeeeee!

Overwhelming...

All a bit overwhelming for a birthday stroll, so I texted my friend to meet me for lunch. Then I wandered around with the dogs looking for my hand tools, bent over to pull a few weeds out - well, I couldn't possibly get my knees muddy, could I? Remembered my promise to the butterflies, and collected some Buddleia cuttings - also some more shrubby Lavateras and Paris Daisies.

Clean me!

N.B. The glass-house MUST BE CLEANED UP ASAP. This should have been done over winter. What was I thinking?

 Clean me! Clean me!
Glass-House in the Shade

Am going to walk the dogs once more to calm self down. I promise that when I get back from lunch I WILL BE GOOD. That's quite enough upper case stuff for one journal page!

Much Later...

Well, it wasn't an earth-shattering (hee hee) gardening effort, but I did make a reasonable start in the Hen House Garden. And it was my birthday! Oh - I might have mentioned that before?

Please clean me!

I also cleaned out the inside of the glass-house - three sackfuls of rubbish, mainly plastic - yuck! My seeds are germinating very nicely. Now I need to remove large spots of lichen from the outside of the glass. No wonder the glass-house is so dark! I potted up some spare Cordylines and red-brown tussocks, too.

Finished the day burning mess on the bonfire. About six barrowloads of gum leaves etc. A great excuse to wash my hair, hee hee. Clean birthday hair! And I've redone my lucky plait (it's a little one down the side, don't care how silly it looks).