you can lead a duck to water ...

Its good evening here, and good morning, afternoon or evening to you.

Ducks

What a busy day!  Up at six am to get some housework done, onto the rulewater website improvements - and boy wouldn't that be a whole lot quicker if it wasn't mostly one-handed left-handed typing when George gets up half an hour later!  

The day just disappears.  What with donning the wellie boots and the baby carrier harness whatsitcalled sling thing, George and I shouting "Chook Chook" chicken noises to ducks who don't know how to duck, to get them to follow us down to the river.  Joined by my husband.  Any passers by who happened to see us in the middle of the river making chook-chook noises at six ducks, are going to wonder what is going on.  We had partial success today, two ducks took a drink from the edge of the water then returned to the area round our back door.  Once we had successfully navigated out of the river we found the ducks gathered round a small puddle.  Country life!

(The video below is of the ducks splashing in their puddle)

Making lunch, doing a spot of furniture painting with the previously mentioned Annie Sloan chalk paint.  Will see tomorrow what the furniture looks like with a pair of fresh eyes.

Pot Plants

I think I just wanted to add a little something about my pots.  I'm not the best gardener in the world, I don't have a lot of time to spend gardening.  This year I laid broken slate along our back yard garden strip to stop the weeds coming through, and hopefully our plants will spread over them in time.

Here's my collection of plants in pots.

My best success has to be the pots in the courtyard.  I mail ordered seeds over winter last year and surprisingly a few turned out really well.  Not surprising for the seeds to succeed, but surprising for me.  As usual I lost the labels half way through growing them so hadn't a clue what was in the pots.

I also had a few returning plants from last year. Stargazer lilies are one of my absolute favourites, as well as the dwarf asters and marigolds.  They seem to just keep on flowering week after week.  When the lilies were in bloom, along with other flowers, the scent lingered in the air in the enclosed courtyard space.  Heavenly.

It might not look like much, but I've never settled anywhere long enough for the last ten years to be able to see the fruits of my efforts, and I'm really pleased and proud of them all.  Its been the case that I'd work on a garden then end up moving before the plants really amounted to anything, and it reached the point where I was putting things in pots so that they could move house with me rather than leave them behind.  Its been really lovely to watch the plants come back the following year.  Pots that I thought were empty suddenly sprouting plants again.

I learned that clustering the pots together makes them look prettier in the courtyard.  And also, over planting the pots seems to work too.  I used to put two or three seedlings in a pot, this year I put about twenty in, meaning to then plant them on when they got bigger, however Baby George happened and they just grew like that.  But it works, the pots are filled with flowers as a result.  I prefer seeing the flowers alive and in the pots, but occasionally I will bring some into the house.  I cut just beneath the flower heads, and place these in a large glass bowl filled with water.  The flowers float on the surface, and you can even place tea-lights on them.

The image below is part of my parents garden.  That's my dad's magic spinning table you can see.  And the potted plants I am rather envious of.  

My parents magical garden.

Each time I visit there is another layer of colour in their garden.  I've been asking my dad what the secrets are when I've been visiting with George.  Plant food.  Yep.  Effort.  Not just remembering to water the pots, that's not enough to get those magic blooms.  You need to feed them too.

Next year I shall grow more asters as they are just brilliant, and get those pots truly blooming!

My dads fantastic fuschias

And Finally

Just one more thing: I know most people get songs stuck in their head at some point, but do you ever get songs stuck in your head at different volumes? At the moment I have "Thats how you know" from Disney's Enchanted revolving round and round, and she is singing it Pretty Loudly. Thankfully George is sleeping as I fear anyone sitting near me could probably hear it too the volume she's singing at. Better than Moana's "Your Welcome" and you can thank me now that song's stuck in your head.  Your Welcome.