What have you done in the garden today? Part 3

[ThreeRingCircus]

The old thread was filling up so I've created a new one!

Link to old thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/gardening/4823202-what-have-you-done-in-the-garden-today-part-2?reply=128367673

I think smiths, Ryman's etc probably still do it ... and if not no doubt Amazon.

It's newspaper that's the endangered useful substance nowadays - what else can you stuff sodden footwear with? - I sometimes remember to save the 'windows direct' type of junk mail for the purpose.

There's lots available online. Treat yourself!

I would, but I use my fountain pen so rarely that the need doesn’t really arise. It was just an idle musing about changing times. We have a plentiful supply of newspaper, however, because we buy one every weekend (even if we don’t necessarily read it).

Art suppliers, apparently. But aside from that, the main use appears to be mopping excess oil from the face.

Really? Is that the latest make-up Thing? Instagram keeps showing me reels of young women painting their faces in shades of brown, beige and yellow and then wiping most of it off again. I am Officially Old.

Oil blotting sheets have been around forever. OK, maybe not quite that long, but my grandmother had them. Little packs of 10 sheets in a catd cover slightly larger than a matchbook. Thinner than writing-type blotting paper, and with a tiny bit of powder on.

If you were properly old, Instagram wouldn't be showing you anything!

I did an Amazon search for blotting paper out of curiousity, the 3 featured hits were one for face blotting rice paper but the other two were for thick paper used to press flowers. Does anyone do that? Years ago I pressed and mounted some pansies, they were quite nice (and about the limit of my artistic ambitions)

I'm so old I don't even look at Instagram.

I am properly ancient but got sucked into social meeja for our gardening club. It’s a slippery slope!

I remember the blotting/face powder sheets. Also, similar books of soap slivers, which were invaluable in the grimmer sort of public (in)convenience.

Pressing is still the standard method of preserving specimens for a herbarium.

Yes, pressing is crucial to herbaria, but it’s a long time since I heard of anyone doing it as a hobby. (I was reminded of this last week, when reading a novel set in the 30s, where girls were pressing flowers).

I can assure you small children still press flowers! It was a bit of a craze in the year group above DD's at school.

Oh, that’s lovely to know!

Isn't it?! I loved pressing flowers so it's very nice to see it continue.

Exactly. I was struck, reading the book, by how many things the various children actually did, as there were no screens and very little for them on the wireless, so they relied on other forms of entertainment (and were from privileged backgrounds which meant a tennis court in the garden, and so on).

Just had a landscaper round to look at re-laying the patio, turfing the grass, building raised beds and a new shed base. Not looking forward to his quote but it needs doing.

It’s a long time since making art from pressed flowers has been a thing. So then it moved to pressed collections of wildflowers, then came the clampdown on picking wild flowers. Now Plantlife has become concerned about the complete lack of knowledge of wildflowers, and has suggested it’s ok to pick common ones.

A lot of things went into my current interest in gardening and botany, but a big part was the annual cycle of picking wild daffodils (for an access fee to the farmer), picking violets and admiring wood anemones, picking primroses, picking blubells. Letting people interact with things is a good step to getting them to care about them.

Just planted out a peony so let’s see if it is true that slugs don’t eat them. Also put in a bit of Echinops someone kindly gave me, hoping they will survive.

Although in the age of everyone having a camera in their pocket and plant guides available online, that can often be a good alternative for most people. Though wild plant identification can still be harder than I feel it should be, for those without the HI (human intelligence) resources of this board

Right... that's my post-walk teas and sit down done, I need to get out and finish off my vine eyes and wiring at least.
(Walk featured emerging wild garlic and lovely wild daffodils)

Piled up a load of rubbish for man with van to take on Monday. Cleared put the wee pond. No sign of our resident froggies yet. Sowed some seeds in the greenhouse. Calendula seeds just starting to germinate. Planted overwintering Dahlia tubers.

I planted about 25 chestnuts that I've had in the fridge. They were handed to me by my main client and came from his brother's trees, so fingers crossed they germinate. As for what happens to them if they do all germinate, I'm not sure about that.

All this rain we've had. Where I am in west Oxfordshire the annual average rainfall is 660mm. The batteries in the weather station had to be changed around last October and the previous data was lost, but the total since then is just shy of 590mm. That's a LOT of rain!

Though wild plant identification can still be harder than I feel it should be It sometimes feels it gets harder the more you learn, as you discover things you thought you’d got sussed, eg violet, forget-me-not, turn out to have about a dozen different species and dandelions have dozens of species.

No sign of our resident froggies yet No sign of frogs here, but we had spawn two days ago, and more today.

Glorious day today! I drastically cut back a huge Hebe, precursor to pruning the rambling rose behind it, and cleared the upper terrace, pruning lavender and winter savoury, cutting and clearing up all the dead stems, putting unhappy looking pots out of site, and pruning back a large hardy Fuchsia. Put all the cuttings into “habitat piles” in the “woodland” (the informal area down the end with a couple of flowering cherries, a couple of hollies, a whitebeam and a couple of other things).

Put in my remaining vine eyes and wired them up. Tied in the 2 climbing roses (a Zephirin Drouhin which needs some TLC and a big Blush Noisette) and twined the jasmine along the wires. That and a bit of tidying kept me outside till 5:30 - I do like this time of year when you can really notice the increasing day length week on week.

I'm an odd mother, in that my DD has quite a bit of screen time (I am not especially bothered by it, though I much prefer when we can snuggle up and watch something together - we are on Pottery Thrown Down at the moment, and we always watch Gardeners' World together). But I also do an awful lot of benign neglect, partly because I think it's good for children and partly because in both of my careers I have worked with her underfoot for a substantial proportion of my time, and it's always been easier to get her doing something in the garden than to do formal 'parenting' activities. These days she comes into the nursery with me a lot, and unless I am doing something dangerous with machinery, she usually mucks in. I'm a big fan of children getting to do things, rather than just watching them.

I so agree! You can't be excited about things with which you have no contact.

My mum taught me about wildflowers when I was little, and it's just stuck, because we were always going for walks and looking at them. Lots of children don't get to do that, especially these days. There's a lovely thing you can do with little children now, which is a flower scavenger hunt. You equip them all with an accompanying adult, a phone with a camera, and a list of wild flowers, and you send them off on a walk to find them. They take a photo, and bring that back. Great fun!