Strathardle Gathering

This weekend is the annual Strathardle Gathering over in Kirkmichael, we've gone for the last couple of years since moving up here and have always had a fantastic day. This year I am entering some of the competitions in the Indutrial Tent. Now, for those in the know this is very competitive, it's the ladies opportunity to fluff up their feathers and show who's Queen of the Kitchen, Garden and Crafts!!!

I am on the Ladies Committee for the Alyth Show, our local agricutural show, and was lucky enough to be able to accompany a judge this year, so picked up quite a few tips here and there.

So, for the next couple of evenings I shall be busy getting my list of entries together, a little bit of baking, some jam making, some flower arranging, picking my veggies and making some bits and pieces for the craft section. I'm not entering loads in each section as I simply don't have the time. It always amazes me how some folk have entries in nearly every section, I take my hat off to them. But then if you're serious about this (which clearly I'm not!) you have to enter loads in order to be in with a chance to win any of the cups as it's all based on points!

I'm really looking forward to entering my veggies, funnily enough, that's the section that I'm entering the most in! I know of a few people who are entering in this section so there's going to be lots of competition this year. One of our neighbours entered for the first time last year and won the cup so the pressure is really on for him this year, good luck Geordie!

In the flower aranging section I'm (hopefully) entering a jug of sweetpeas and a vase of garden flowers. Now, our garden isn't looking the greatest at the moment as I'm still battling with our very wet borders and the rain this year really hasn't helped. So, thanks to John (my gardening guru) I'm hopefully going to be able to get some flowers from his garden tomorrow. We do have some fabulous Dahlia and other bits and pieces so I'm thinking a nice warm coloured arrangement will look really good. One of our other neighbours is the champion of this section so Saturday is going to be an interesting day!

I'll post some pictures once it's all over and let you know how I get on, wish me luck!

L x

Buttercup meadow

From this.........

.......to this.............

I didn't have the heart to cut off all their little heads, and I like the idea of the garden being interesting rather than just a big slab of green grass. The little race track around the bottom of the garden draws you to wander all the way down and look at all the wild flowers.

The Studio has been busy with people popping in and me getting some sewing done, I'm loving having this new space to play in! For those that are local or on holiday in the area we are open:

Monday 12pm - 4pm

Wednesday, Friday & Saturday 10am - 4pm

Or call to come along at a more convenient time and we'll make sure we're here to welcome you.

Some lovely new goodies arrived in the shop today so I must give you a guided tour later on in the week.

Be back soon,

L x

The perfect working day

Today has been the perfect working day. The sun has shone, while out walking Chissie this morning I stopped to let the sun beat down on my face for five minutes, that always sets me up well for the day.

A bit of sewing was done this morning, then a friend popped round for a quick cuppa, some cake and some gardening chat. Photos were taken of said sewing done this morning and a wander round the garden to see what else was in need of some camera love.

Seeing as it was such a lovely afternoon, the wellies stayed on and some gardening was done.

A bed was cleared ready for planting and some seeds were sown, sweet peas and cornflowers. I've come in rosy cheeked and full of fresh air.

Here's a picture of Mr. Bud cat giving my wellies some love and the next one is of him watching the world go by.

A wintry Easter weekend

It was to be expected I suppose, given that Easter is so early this year, that we would have snow in between fleeting visits of the sunshine. We've just had the most horrendous blast of wind, hail and snow all mixed together, and now the sun is out in it's full glory, Spring showers in their truest form I think.

The above cherry blossom tree hasn't quite come out yet this year, when it does it puts on a beautiful show of tiny delicate pink flowers. I've brought some branches in and hung the Easter decorations from them, the stove is lit so hopefully the warmth will bring the buds out fairly soon.

The dining room also looks a bit like a florists shop at the moment, jugs and jugs of daffodils and masses of branches of flowering currant. Gregg will come home and complain that it smells of cat pee, but I quite like the smell, I think it's almost earthy, a real spring smell. I've volunteered to do the flowers in Church tomorrow for Sundays service, so hopefully the daffodils will come out in the warmth of the stove too. One of the joys of living in the sticks is that there is still a lot of "by the gatepost" selling. The daffodils came from a local farm, they leave a couple of crates with bunches made up and an honesty box, 25p a bunch and locally grown, so a dozen bunches were bought for the church.

Our little enterprise of selling by the gate is also doing well, we now have 20 chickens and a bunch of regular customers that either collect their eggs or I deliver them on a Friday when I'm down in the village. It was Easter last year that we put the sign up, it still amazes me that we get so many people popping in, especially walkers with a little room in their rucksack to squeeze in a half dozen eggs!

Some of you might remember that we hatched our first lots of chicks last year, 9 in total, 3 hens and 6 cockerels. The three hens are doing great, one of them is a real little madam, she jumps up and pecks me on the leg every morning, although I am getting wise to her now! I'm obviously not quick enough in giving them their grain! Anyway, your probably thinking, what did we do with the six cockerels? Well, one of them went to a small holding up the road and as far as I'm aware he's still doing well. We ate the other 5. They were delicious. I'm now thinking we should hatch some free ranging table birds and then start to breed them for ourselves to eat all year round. We shall see, we need a bit more land and I'm still working on that one, hence the reason we have no pigs as yet :(

We also had to despatch our much loved cockerel William, he was very ill with an infection that hadn't cleared up, so he's now buried in the garden. I cried when we had to do that but it didn't bother me at all when we had to kill the others that we ate. I quite happily plucked them and got them ready to roast for Sunday night supper. So, we now have William II, he's another Welsummer cockerel and is enjoying strutting his stuff in front of the ladies and crows away quite the thing on top of the fence post.

I also mentioned the other day that I had to try and catch one of our drakes, we currently have 2 drakes and 3 ducks, all Indian Runners, as our little call ducks got eaten by something when they decided to sit on eggs and we couldn't find them to bring them in at night. Anyway, as you can imagine, with it being Spring and all, the drakes are rather randy at the moment and have decided that three ladies is just not enough for them, so our two chinese white geese, Florence and Felicity, have been getting chased to the point where they dissappear down the burn and don't know how to find their way back! One of the drakes has to go, we could eat him, but I'm going to give him back to Diana (pottery friend!) as she's just lost her drake to the fox. He has been given a reprieve at the moment as I've not had time to go up to the pottery, maybe this weekend, then hopefully peace will be regained in the hen house!

So, I hope you all have a lovely Easter weekend, we'll be dodging the snow showers, hopefully getting some more studio building done and a bit of gardening. We might even go and roll some eggs!

Love,

L x

Loving this life

It's Friday, yet another week has flown in, and it's truely feeling like Autumn now.

I wasn't really prepared for the heart warming feeling you get when harvesting from the garden, it really is quite magical. We had our first carrots tonight, along with some peas (we've had a bumper crop of them this year) and some broccoli. It always amazes me how the simplest things in life can make you so happy.

I'm loving going for peaceful evening walks, enjoying the last of the sun low in the sky.

Lighting the fires, the smell of the wood.

It's our wedding anniversary this weekend, 7 years, where has that time gone? We're both happy and settled and enjoying the peace.

Have a good weekend.

L x

A gardening day

Inspired was how I felt yesterday, truly inspired. I came home and made a list of seeds and plants to buy for next year. Where did this inspiration come from I here you ask? Well, earlier this year I joined a gardening group and yesterday was a day out nosying at other folks gardens, bliss!

We visited two gardens, both close to home, so coffee and cake was provided here at Mill of Fyall in between visits. The fact that it was a gorgeous day helped too mind.

The first garden was large and terraced, the views across the valley were quite amazing. The borders were filled with stunning roses, an abundance of clematis, aswell as many other beauties. Every time you turned there was a different scent lingering in the air.

The second garden took my breath away, the owner, a garden designer, has a little piece of paradise on her door step, I could have stayed in that garden forever. Quite formal, but flowing effortlessly, your eye was constantly pulled on to the next episode of the story and your nose was tickled with the scents of sweet peas, lilies and more delectable roses.

So, a rather large list was made last night, Sarah Raven here I come!

L x

P.S. If you fancy a cosy country break, the second garden that we visited has holiday lets, have little peak here.

On a mission..............

Too much wild fun going on here at the moment and now a mad panic before a family gathering of around 40 in less than 2 weeks time.........

Spare room to be painted, the garden to be tamed (?) and a mink to be caught that ate two of our chooks last night, little bugger..............

The joys of country life, it's not all a bed of roses.

From the garden.....

All this great weather has brought the garden on in leaps and bounds, veg, flowers and most of all weeds! Except for the parsnips, all the veggies are now planted in the veggie boxes as the last of the frosts are now hopefully past. We've been eating salad nearly every night for the last week, it's fab!

We're having a big family get together next month as we have family over visiting from NZ, so I'm hoping we might have some new potatoes ready for eating and plenty of salads, fingers crossed we might even have some fresh peas..........

I just need to get those second sowings done now.........! What veggies are you all growing?

A rainy day

At last we've got a rainy day, drizzly and dreich.

So much time has been spent in the garden lately, yet there is still so much to be done, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. It's nice when people comment on how much we've changed the place, I met more friends of neighbours at the weekend and the first thing they commented on was how much we had improved our little corner and tidied it up, all the hard work is at last starting to pay off.

We at last relaxed for a bit on Sunday afternoon, a walk in the bluebell woods and then a pub tea in the Taybank in Dunkeld, my favourite (reasonably local) pub. Friends visited yesterday so the house got a quick tidy and much coffee, tea, scones and cake were eaten!

Here's a picture of my favourite tool at the moment, my riddle, I've been using it loads lately, great for getting nicely toned arms!

Sewing today, and then a visit up to Glenshee Pottery to collect some more stock this afternoon. If the rain stays on we'll hopefully get a bit more work done on the website, which desperately needs updating, when will there ever be enough hours in the day?!!

L xx

Busy, busy, busy............

Well, as you can probably tell from the lack of posts we've been a tad busy here at Primrose Hill. What with those cute little chicks to drool over daily, we've not been handling them much, but there has been the odd little cuddle! It's been a tad busy with the business and the garden has been keeping us both out of mischief in all of our spare minutes!

Do you remember this post? Well here's where we are with this little project, looking a lot smarter, wouldn't you agree? Still a bit of fencing to be done and the wild flower seeds to be sown, but I am rather loving my new gate!
Lots going on in the garden and the greenhouse, these arrived in the garden this weekend....

........what do you think? they'll make great sweetpea and cornflower supports. They were hay stooks in a previous life, nothing better than a bit of recycling in the garden.

In my last post I showed you some of our pruchases at the market, well one of the buckets is planted up at the front door with marguerites, very welcoming with all those friendly little daisy heads bobbing around! And yes, that is a little pot of violas hiding beside it from way back in March when I potted them up for the Country Living Fair, still flowering away, healthy as ever!

Well, I'm off to the post office with another order and I really must catch up on all those e-mails that I owe you all, especially this lady, your parcel will be in the post this week, I promise!

L x

The chicks!

As promised more photos of the chicks! They ventured outside for the first time yesterday and are getting quite confident on their feet, they seem to be able to fly from one end of the run to the other in a flash! I've been spending far too much time just watching them tottering around and jumping on their mums back, so very cute! Two of the chicks are black with little tufts of yellow, they are Maran cross Welsummers and the other seven are pure Welsummers. Hopefully not too many of them will be cockerels!

It's raining today so I'm getting on with work and watching them from my workroom window and the study window.I told a little fib the other day when I wrote I'd come back empty handed from the market, I didn't bring back anything of the feathered variety, but I did manage to spend some pennies in the "Bygone Era" auction. I was amazed at the amount of really interesting bits and bobs that were for sale, I could have spent a small fortune but I didn't! Everything from old glass butter churns to ploughs! Even a rusty old post box! There were a few things that I lost out on but I did manage to get some really nice galvanised buckets and baths for planting up in the garden and some old tattie baskets. I managed to get something in the sewing line too, a really special find at an absolute steal of a price, but I'll save that for another day!

I just have to decide whether I'm going to plant them up with flowers or veg now!

Feathered friends

This stretch of superb weather has brought the garden and local wildlife on in leaps and bounds, lets just hope that our summer hasn't arrived early and this is it for the next few weeks. Ever the optimist, I'm hopeful that we'll have a long, balmy summer, stretching through to September, how fabulous would that be.......

I'm always waiting in anticipation at this time of year for the arrival of the swallows. The house and sand martins have been here for a good few weeks, darting around in the sky. I checked the diary from last year, they had arrived on 2nd of May, a year ago today. We were getting ready to go to the local farmers market on Saturday when I spotted the arrival of the our first swallow, sat on the telephone line chattering away. Such a fantastic sight, and a feeling that summer is just around the corner. We have the remains of a few nests in the eves of the stables but since we've lived here none have ever nested there. Maybe this year we'll be lucky enough to have them as guests over the summer.

The warm weather has been kind to all the young birds that we have too, the feeders are constantly covered in tits and finches, we even get regular visits from the woodpecker. We have a couple of blackbirds and a thrush constantly bobbing around on the lawn hunting for worms so they must have nests close by in the hedgerows.

While in the workshop yesterday morning fishing out some screws to go with a pinboard order, I could hear the constant tweeting of what sounded like a young bird, I assumed it had maybe fallen out of it's nest, so I went to investigate. To my delight, I found a mother dipper flying back and forth to her young fledgling perched on a stone in the middle of our burn. It slowly followed her down the burn, carefully flying from one stone to the next. She kept returning with beakfulls of food for it. Our ducks were quite intrigued and followed them all the way down the burn! I heard it again in the afternoon and amazingly managed to get some really close up pictures of the baby, looking very fat and fluffy!

On the domestic fowl front we are getting very close to hatching day with our french cuckoo maran, hopefully this Sunday or Monday we'll be hearing little cheeps of chicks from underneath her, I'm so excited. A hen takes around 21 days to incubate fertile eggs, believe me it's been the longest 3 weeks ever!

After our disastrous attempt at moving our little duck and her nest, we managed to find the other nest with 11 eggs in it, tucked underneath a tuft of grass in our neighbours garden! I took advice and moved the eggs into a little coop and have sat one of our broody bantams on them. Duck eggs takes around 28 days to incubate, so we'll be at the halfway mark this Friday. Fingers and toes crossed that they hatch, I'm so looking forward to playing surrogate mummy this summer.

Spring showers

At last some rain has arrived in our neck of the woods, in the form of spring showers, little bursts of really heavy rain, on and off all morning. It always amazes me the weather and peoples reaction to it. We have a spell of beautiful Spring sunshine, perfectly timed with the Easter holidays, but we still manage to complain, everyone talking about how dry the ground is, having to water spring plants and the like, and how they wished it would rain! Why is it that sometimes we are never a happy nation?

Anyway, amidst the glorious sunshine of last weekend we managed to have our first BBQ's, both Saturday and Sunday night, sitting outside enjoying the last of the days rays, how fab is that for mid April?

I also got stuck into the seed planting in a big way, probably a little bit late, but still early enough not to be too worried that I'll be harvesting my peas in September! I got the pasting table set up and had a little production line going, while dancing away to a digital radio station we've just discovered, Life, they play lots of oldies mixed in with some new stuff. Gregg and I spent the whole weekend saying to each other "ooh listen to this one, I haven't heard that in ages......." boogy, boogy, boogy!

It was actually mostly flower seeds that I was planting, 17 varieties in all, so no excuses for empty beds this year! The last of the veggie seeds will be planted tomorrow hopefully, if I get my finger out of my (slightly bruised) bottom and get all my work finished today, nothing like a deadline to get you going and the thought of a day off spent in the garden!

Photos are of the quickly filling up greenhouse and some Rocket that has germinated already.

On the chicken front, the duck came off the nest yesterday so no ducklings from her I'm afraid. Bit of a shame but I had my doubts after we'd disturbed her, I'd rather she was safe than foxy loxys supper though. Plenty of time yet for little ducklings though, we have to live and learn from our mistakes!

The Easter Weekend

Easter has come and gone in a bit of a whirl wind in our house this weekend, but a very enjoyable one! From the first visitors arriving on Friday morning until yesterday afternoon, the kettle was working overtime! It was lovely to see all our friends and family over the weekend, so thank you all for taking the time to come and visit.

Hasn't the weather just been superb, I can't remember the last Spring we had that has been this glorious, and by all means it's to last for the rest of the week, fingers crossed! We've even had to start watering the pots!

We managed to get a few things done outside, Gregg and Allan felled a tree on Friday morning, don't boys just love playing with chain saws and making lots of noise!

In between visitors I managed to get this made.....

........I have been looking forward to this moment for sooooooooooooooo long! This time last year we started off with 5 chickens, a cockerel and 2 geese. We now have a bit of a menagerie, producing loads of eggs and hopefully some little chicks soon. We have a couple of broody chooks so we're planning on setting them on some eggs this weekend, very exciting, as our attempts last year were a bit late in the day and didn't produce anything. We also have more interesting news on the poultry front but I'll keep that for tomorrow.

At last I have passed the "planning" stage of the veggie garden and have progressed to the "just get on with it" stage! I got my first lot of potatoes in yesterday, early Duke of Yorks, and planted sweetpea seeds, varieties "Matucana" and "Painted Lady". I also got a tub of basil seeds planted so that'll be interesting to see how they come along. Only about another 20 packets of seeds to go now..............

Hope you all enjoyed your Easter break too.

L x

The wild flower garden

As you all know, when we moved up here to what we now refer to as "the shack", it was a bit of a tip. Certain parts of the house needed gutting as the smell of dogs and other nasties was pretty horrendous. The outside of the cottage was just as bad, if not worse. The garden had been left unattanded for probably 6 weeks or more in the height of the summer, this left us to tackle a rather rampant wilderness as well as getting the inside of the cottage livable - not a task for the feint hearted! Dealing with 7 ft high nettles and dockings meant that Gregg would go armed with strimmer into areas of the garden and not be seen for a few hours!

We battled on enjoying the fact that we were very clearly stamping our mark onto our little piece of the Perthshire countryside but soon realised that an acre of land is not something that you turn around in a few months (timescales have never been my strong point!)! I had a huge list of jobs to be done over that first summer, we're still knocking them off the list! Our neighbours continually comment on how we've imporved the place so much but we only feel as if we've scratched the surface!

I have always been a keen gardener, very much influenced by my grandmother, she had me weeding at a very early age! Both her and my grandfather were and still are great gardeners, but more about that in another post. It's only really now that I feel as if I'm getting to grips with the scale of our garden and that for once I seem to be organised in my seed planting! I sat last night and planned the veggie plot and read up on each vegetable that I'm intending to grow this year, at last I felt as if I was actually doing what I came here to do.

Gregg and I also got discussing another area of the garden last night, the wild flower garden. I shouted up to him to do a search for a company called Scotia Seeds. Diane at our local Organic Hut had recommended them to me last summer when I was talking to her about growing wild flowers. They are based not far from us and produce native wild flowers to Scotland. It has always been a dream of mine to grow a wild flower garden and at last we are ready to plant some seeds and see where it goes...........

We are planning on sowing the wet meadow mix along the burnside,

the woodland mix on the banking over the burn,

and the short mix around the edge of the paddock.

So we'll have hopefully have turned an area that looked like this......

into something a bit more eyecatching and appealing to nature.

I read this post today and felt truely heartened to see that there are others out there who understand exactly how I feel, sadly, there are so many people out there that just don't get it.........

A young twenty something......

Well, today is my last day of being a young twenty something, I got a bit down about it all a few weeks ago, but I think I'm over it now. So many people say "it's all down hill after you hit 30" and such like, but I'm beginning to realise that life is totally what you make of it and you're only as young as you feel.

I want to make some changes to my life this year, I've also realised that it is up to you to make your life a happy one as nobody else is going to do it for you. I need to learn to say no.

So, things are going to change with the business, no longer will I be sat all day making door stops as that's what I've done for the past 2 and a bit years! Yes, it's nice being known as the "door stop lady" but my sewing machine knows how to make lots of other beautiful things, as I've discovered over the past few weeks. Also, in a couple of weeks time my routine will be completely flung up in the air, I'm going to be a 6am - 5pm working girl, Monday to Friday, no more working weekends or going to sleep in an empty bed as Gregg is away on night shift. He starts a new job, a regular working hours job, so hopefully some sanity will be installed back into our lives instead of the sporadic way of life we have always known. I'm really looking forward to it.

This change will hopefully mean that we can start to live our life the way we have wanted to since moving to the sticks, we'll be able to spend a couple of hours in the evening in the garden tending our veggie plot, and, fingers crossed, we may even get those pigs that I've been hankering after for years. My next purchase from Amazon will be a book about keeping pigs me thinks, any recommendations?

It's funny how reaching a milestone birthday like this makes you sit back and re-evaluate your life, it does feel slightly grown up making these choices - something I have never ever really felt, I've always been a bit of a tearaway, mischief follows me and I still love a bit of a wild night out (as much as everyone thinks you live the quiet life out here in the sticks, I would beg to differ!)



I shall leave you with a picture from the garden last summer, my favourite season of the year. Fingers crossed my plans come to fruition, at the end of the day it's up to me to make sure that it does, as, unfortunately for me, the fairies around here won't do it!