Category: Gardens and landscaping

Avatar The best home owner job

We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.

But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.

I will open the bidding with pressure washing.

Pressure washing is brilliant.

I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.

The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.

Avatar Midlife Crisis

I’m not sure if a building built in the 1500’s can be said to be having a mid life crisis in 2024, but if it can, then this one is. Like a post-divorce Michael Gove popping up in an Aberdeen nightclub, Temple Newsham is entering it’s “rave stage”.

We visited on Sunday and it was off it’s tits on something. The whole garden had been filled with mysterious lights (and hairy balls) and it had put it’s loudest attire on to have a good old boogie.

Fair play I say. Happy New Year all!

Avatar Dear Beans… troubling transformations

Dear Beans,

I am currently undergoing a transformation and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am not the same person anymore; I am slowly morphing into something else and how it will end I do not know.

It all started earlier on this year when I bought a house. It was my first time, a life-changing event, one that was met with equal parts joy and exhaustion (I’ve got the plug!). We moves in no problems and set about doing the usual shuffling items of furniture about and redecorating.

It was slow to begin with, almost crimsonly even. Rambling about a garden centre, I noticed the garden tools and took one off the shelf. Normally I’d make a beeline for the chainsaws and start swishing one around like a child only this time I removed a reasonably-priced garden strimmer and thought to myself, “hmmm, this would make work in the back garden next summer a lot easier.” I immediately noticed what I was doing, put the strimmer back and quickly made off in the opposite direction.

Last weekend I was out with the dog for a morning walk. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet although there was enough light to make out the specific details of each house as we passes them. I saw one on the other side of the road with what seemed to be a brand-new roof that seemed to sparked in the almost dawn. “That is a fine-looking roof,” and I almost spoke out loud, the words dancing on my tongue, the thought hanging in the air with the morning frost.

What is happening to me? Why am I behaving this way? Should I seek help or am I a lost cause?

Yours vexingly

Shoutpad O’Plaxingdale

Avatar Seeds

Kate has been very much getting into gardening lately, and in particular, growing vegetables. Our back garden is on its way to becoming a vegetable garden. Last year we had home grown tomatoes, potatoes, rocket and carrots, and this year we’re being even more adventurous.

Since all this stuff is being grown from seeds, I am enjoying discovering that mundane vegetables have impossibly exciting names for their varieties.

Some tell you where it’s from, like our spring onions, which are White Lisbon, or the Brussels sprouts which are Evesham Special. Others tell you what the cultivator was hoping for, like Elegance salad leaves or Sparkler radishes or our yellow courgettes, which are called Gold Rush. I see what you did there.

We’ve got some flowers with descriptive names too; our sunflowers have been set up for greatness with the name Titan while the dahlias are Showpiece. We have high hopes for them both.

I don’t know what to expect from our aubergines now I know they are called Jewel Jet F1. But I am a big fan of the classical names. Our spinach is Apollo, and we have two varieties of parsnips, one called Palace and the other called Gladiator. I have checked the packet and Gladiator parsnips are a “vigorous hybrid” with “large, canker-resistant roots”. Just like real gladiators were.

Thrilled and exhilerated by all these names, I then turn to the packet of beetroot seeds, and see that they are Mixed. It had to end somewhere.

Avatar Mysterious debris

A few years ago I moved to a new location and reported to you on the mysterious lumps in a park not far from where I lived. Well, I now live fairly close to France, where the mysterious objects in local parks are of a different nature.

Until about 2015, if you happened to join the army and they decided you looked like the right sort of person to drive a tank, they would take you to a place called Hogmoor which was some woods with lots of muddy tracks and water traps to drive tanks around. Presumably you then did a tank driving test or something to prove you’d learned all their was to know about piloting big metal boxes around Hampshire woodland.

Anyway, after that the army decided they didn’t want to be involved in this part of Hampshire any more, so they went away, leaving behind large areas of a town that are being redeveloped into housing estates. They also left behind Hogmoor, which has been turned into the town’s equivalent of a park – except it doesn’t have big grassy lawns and flowerbeds, it’s just a big woodland with park-type things in it like an adventure playground and a cafe and stuff. I’m very happy with that because walking around in the woods is far nicer than walking around a manicured park.

The other thing Hogmoor has are all the bits of rusty debris the army didn’t take away when they left. I now walk the dog around here more or less every day, so I thought I’d share with you some of the mysterious military debris I keep finding lying around the place.

A concrete hidey hole for soldier people to hide in while pretending to shoot at other people
Mysterious corrugated iron protecting a tree or something, for military purposes
An entire engine half-buried in the ground
A radio antenna, which is not abandoned and still belongs to the military, who have posted many warning signs around it and who will probably now arrest me for sedition because I put a picture of it online
Some sort of very knackered collection of vehicle parts, one of which used to have a ladder to an upstairs bit so it must have been big

Avatar The second horror of Christmas

Round here people like to put lights on their house for Christmas. You know there’s that house near you, where the people go a bit mad, and cover the whole thing in garish flashing multicoloured lights? Every year, because it’s their “thing”? Well, we more or less live in a whole town of people like that.

On our street, the people next door and the people over the road compete for the most Christmas lights every year. As a result we are trapped in the middle of the fairy light equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Here is the view out of our bedroom window this year.

And then, if you want a bit of a break from the light shining through the blinds, you can go round to the back, where this is the view.