Monster fuchsia work continues

The question was what to do with the remaining (still loads!)  of monster fuchsia stems now that space to stack them on the far side of the lane as dead hedging (fourth photo in this post; I live in hope that they will actually die!) is running out. I thought I could do a neat stacking between some of the stems I've left by the pond. Trouble is, if you lie cut fuchsia on the wet ground here (the ground is mostly wet) it will send down roots. Then I remembered two pieces of breeze block so I've placed them to hold the stems (trunks really) off the ground. This is what it looked like yesterday. I wonder how visible the stacked stems (there will be a lot more) will be when the still rooted, upright trunks are in full leaf?

This pile → that Toad cut out of the ridiculous rhododendron hedge back in December I stuffed into the back of the Rattletrap to take to the municipal dump, either just on a tarpaulin or, the smaller bits anyway, into an old coal sack that fell of the back of a lorry.

coal sack for garden waste

It really did fall off a lorry! And there were about half a dozen others stuffed into it. When we get our next delivery of coal I'll give them back to the coal merchant. The day they blew off was very windy and the lump in the road was making drivers nervous so I stopped, investigated and picked them up. They'd only have landed in the sea else. Might as well use them. I might hang them on a line to get rained on and cleaned up a bit. The others are all muckier than that one.

Working on the northwestern side of the pond (onto which I'd never got before because of the fuchsia-brambly undergrowth), making myself a path around it, hacking back fuchsia and yanking out trip wires of ivy, I came across the edge of what at first I thought was a stone. It turned out to be a lid of some kind about ten inches wide. It had clearly had a spongey lining so my guess was that it was the lid of a make-up box or something. The first word I found hard to make out but I think the whole thing is Amway La Collection Classique, Paris. According to that link, Amway made expensive perfumes and after shaves. So my guess wasn't far out.

What is baffling is how it got into the mud at the bottom of the Boggy Brae garden! Maybe it blew in; maybe someone threw it there in a hissy fit; maybe the lid was used by kids as a frisbee. 😀

So now, looking southeastwards from the boggy bottom north corner, this is what the pond triangle is looking like. Those fern stumps don't look much just now but they will explode into great cones over the spring and summer. You can see how raggy the Ridiculous Rhodo hedge is on this its lower side. I've managed to keep the upper side, that edges the drive, reasonably under control. My big project this year is to cut back some of this side. I'll need to hold back if I find nesting birds are using it, though this part isn't the thickest.
Further to the right, it's like a dark cave! If Rhododendron ponticum weren't such a savage invader, I'd leave the hedge messy, but at the very least I want to yank out the bridging, rooting shoots. There's also our oil supply pipe to get at, that Toad's going to scrub with a wire brush and paint sometime. Aye, right! 😉

cave of rhododendron, snowberry, unwanted ash seedlings, brambles, etc

Here's Scrawny (Scrawny has fans!), which is in the boggy bottom east corner, reflected yesterday in the pond:

The year's first scything

Tootling down our steep garden with my scythe over my shoulder and a rake in my other hand, I was pleased to see that crocuses are actually opening a bit. They had stayed shut until today's wee bit of sunshine. Primroses are getting under way. By early to mid April there should be well over a thousand in flower: on 12 April 2012 I counted 685, and on 11 April 2014, 1254.

I was going to scythe the patches of boggy front lawn where I had not mowed last year since spring because I was letting Wild Angelica and Black Knapweed set seed. There is another patch to do another day where the main group of Devil's-bit Scabious grows. Pignut leaves are showing up everywhere as usual and so are the leaves of Lesser Celandines.

Young Pignut leaves

The pond is full after some heavy rains and on its lower edge where it sometimes spills over there is a 'lawn' of Opposite-leaved Golden-saxifrage that is beginning to flower. The pond is about half full of frogspawn. I usually find frogs everwhere except near the pond but a heron comes to hunt there quite often so I guess they are there sometimes.

frogspawn

There were sheep in the field for a few weeks over mid-winter. They departed a couple of weeks ago and since then we have been having regular visits from roe deer. They have begun their chomping of monbretia leaves. I shall have to keep my tulips well-protected. Lovely big, colourful flowers like that are like cake to roe deer–a real treat after winter hard rations!

Penguin Cake

After the card and present opening, grandson 'DoubleAitch', whose fourth birthday it is today, tried on his new cowboy outfit while his big brother broke eggs into the cake mixture (DoubleAitch wants a penguin cake) and helped stir.

breaking eggs

DerbyshireDaughter has been reading the first Harry Potter book, The Philosopher's Stone, to BigBrother so when they'd all come back from a jaunt down to the loch beach for 'treasure', they settled down to watch the film on DVD while I embarked on my first attempt at cake decorating that needed to go a bit further than slapping some water icing on it. I'm more of a cake than a cake decorations person.

Once I finished playing with icing, melted chocolate, black candles for a penguin beak, and a few sweets the four film watchers (DoubleAitch, HisBigBrother, their mum, and their aunty Toadlet) paused the DVD for a few moments while they scraped out the icing and melted chocolate bowls.

sticky dips

Soapy water was provided for destickifying and then the penguin was (cough!) admired. It's a roaring success! It makes people laugh 😂 and it'll taste just fine.

Penguin cake extraordinaire!

Toadlet's pals say it's a demon. These are the same pals who've nicknamed me "Shady" 😀

The portrait and the mouse

For the portrait Toad is painting of me, I had to dig out an old kimono that I used, in the warmer climes of southern Britain, to use as a dressing-gown. It has lived in my old student trunk for quite a few years because it's rarely warm enough to wear it in the frozen north 🤣. Seriously though, living on the Boggy Brae requires roughs and scruffs most of the time.

The trunk's lock got smashed on its very first trip up to Dundee from Lancashire, sent up in advance as one did in those days. One of the student hall of residence sub-wardens helped me get it to a mender in Dundee and, 40+ years on the trunk and its replacement locking hasp live on in good health.

The photo shoot got a bit tedious so I started messing about. The Lastolite that Toadlet was commissioned to hold seems to have deteriorated and bits of its metallic side flew off and filled the air with specks of dust. They won't appear in the portrait.

Toad is doing the painting in the den 'studio'. This morning he thought his painting mediums had exploded out of the cling film cover. One had disappeared altogether. The one on the left (the white blob) is made of linseed oil and chalk. the other, which had been to the right of that but was all gone, was made of linseed oil and fused silica (it's called oleogel).

Then he noticed the well chewed squidgy ball...

...and that some of the paint had been eaten off the canvas. The mice must be hungry! The paint that was eaten was oleogel with ultramarine blue paint. Portrait progress below.

The mouse traps will be baited with peanut butter. Only if they turn their noses up at that will we resort to posh, artistic bait. Toad has just said he's glad the rest of oleogel was in a tin. "They might have chewed through a tube". (Try saying that fast).

Kitchen bookcase and The Useful Cupboard

A year or so ago I tidied the kitchen bookcase. This old shelf unit came with us from Oxfordshire. It had been built by the father of the previous owners of the house we lived in. Old but solid. None of your shelves bowing under the weight of books here! It actually stayed relatively tidy until I emptied it and moved it to another part of the kitchen so that I could paint the wall behind it. We had a sort out of cookery books. I say we because most of them, especially the glossy ones, are Toad's. He likes cooking in theory ;)

In the usual way of one thing leading to another, bookcase sorting and moving morphed into also sorting out The Useful Box that lives in one of the kitchen cupboards, which led to my emptying an old Yorkhire Tea tin of magazine recipe cutouts, chucking most of them out and putting them in a different tin so that I could use the Yorkshire Tea tin for all the glues. I've no idea how I got onto glues! Oh, wait! I know. I'd bought some wood glue for some loose chair joints. Anyway, the whole Useful Cupboard in which The Useful Box lives got a clean out. It's a when-in-doubt-shove-it-in-(or look for it in)-the-Useful-Cupboard-place. Every household has one of those places, right?

I found some stuff to put aside for the grandsons, who are coming on a visit later this month...

This is me making progress!

...and a Japanese lunch tin of Toad's:

Then I got on with cutting away some loose plaster board and my thumb with a Stanley knife. My very old and tiny pocket penknife, once resharpened, was a nuch more effective tool (well, it was less effective at slicing my thumb being easier to use in awkward spaces!)

there's a plaster under that bandage;
it was a tiny cut!

And then, wearing some leather gardening gloves, I ripped up an old pan scrub and stuffed it into some holes in the corner behind the bookcase before fixing it in with Polyfilla.

I discovered why the kitchen telephone port that we'd ignored for ten years wasn't working: it wasn't even connected. When I told Toad this he said he'd presumed as much. Hadn't presumed to fix it though (he would have if I'd asked him to but I didn't ask so... 🙄 😉). Anyway, we even have an orange telephone, one that doesn't need a power supply, that we acquired soon after coming here because of numerous power cuts. Local power lines have been put underground now so they aren't going to get blown down in every storm or pulled down by falling trees.