Sheepish or Horny?
It has been one of those fabulous days which start with a frosty morning and follow with a whole day of sunshine. It has been cold but thoroughly enjoyable when working outdoors. We seem to have had far too few of these days this winter. It is almost instinctive to go for the camera on mornings like this, you can't help but want to take pictures. It was my day at the
pottery today so here are some pottery themed pictures.
The sheep have been herded out onto pastures new since when they were put in the paddock only to find the real sheep took agin 'em and hoiked 'em over with their horns.
The terracotta sheep were made by pottery owner Jim Keeling at the pottery and fired in the
anagama kiln at Wytham Wood, Oxford. This is a wood fired kiln which gives variation of colour due to the different amounts of oxygen getting to the pieces and also the glaze caused by the wood ash passing through the kiln.
Mmm, very nice hairdo.
Did no one ever tell ewe, sticking two croissants on your head is not a cool look.
Alice looking a bit frosty but at least she has her football rattle to warm herself up with..
Here is the Cheshire cat grinning just like er, well.... a Cheshire cat but all the more demonic for the frost spiked face.
Yep, a daffodil
At first glance this is one of those tricky pictures where you are not sure whether the shadows are on the convex or the concave surfaces. The whole face is about three and a half inches across, that's about nine centimetres.
Those of you who have been to the pottery you will know that the courtyard floor is patterned with odd bits of paving and curious pieces of old pottery. I was cleaning between some bricks when this face started to emerge from the soil and stones. It was slightly sinister. Fortunately there was no one around to hear because I felt I had to say hello to him or her to break some sort of spell. .
One way to help reduce damage by snails and mice in the garden is to not offer them a perfectly snug home like this which was directly under a large plant pot.
A square of bricks has been used to raise the pot and inadvertently provide winter protection to group of some thirty snails. Another two pots revealed over a hundred snails hibernating and quietly waiting until things warmed up so that they could just nip out to snack on the fresh shoots of spring and start their seasonal ravaging.
If there are just one or two snails I have no qualms about squashing them underfoot but more than that and I start to get squeamish and I can't bring myself to kill them so these got carted off as far as I could take them.
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Rhipsalis pilocarpa
This plant is a real treat in the middle of winter. It flowered over Christmas in the greenhouse and it obviously knew what it was doing because it has a distinctly Christmas character with the flowers hanging down like stilled snowflakes
Take a look at Mark Preston's ( British Cactus and Succulent Society) piece on the Rhipsalis
here to find out more about this Brazilian cactus.
I grow it in glasshouse with the thermostat set at 12 C but that is only near the heater, further away the temperature drops off by a few degrees. I keep it quite dry during the winter.
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Win a shilling!
What do you think this is? It's not poorly jelly fish or a sci- fi book cover, it is not the Mississippi delta shining like a national guitar, its not running paint, its not modern art and it is not ceramic, hey, who said it's gorilla snot? Answer at the bottom of the page.
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Glazed over.
I could not resist a picture of this trolley load of brightly coloured, glazed pots fresh out of the kiln and still warm at the pottery. They started off as part of that muddy pile of clay behind them!
I did not click the 'Impressionist' button on photoshop for this.( but I did get my own reflection in it - very bad technique.)
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A pause for Santa Clause
We have strayed quite a way from the garden path in this issue but I felt sad for this little fellow. My mom, long since gone, gawd bless 'er, made this Santa some twenty five or more years ago for the kids and he finally bit the dust this year. Not only did he bite the dust he became it. His salty dough body finally gave out. It's sad, the other stuff in the loft will surely miss him.
( I wonder if he would have lasted longer if he had eaten less spaghetti?)
While we are on Christmas - when I went to put tree away I was startled to find a Cyberman lurking in the box. He'll definitely find it lonely in the loft.
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Soil prep and big planting project
Part of a large planting scheme I am involved with requires adding a large quantity of organic matter. Here the girls can be seen practising synchronised shovelling.
Shovelling took too long so here Barney delves into the fiery bowels of a huge heap of composted bark to load the barrows with a mini-digger.
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Meanwhile back in the greenhouse .....
Last year after the flowers of the Echeveria had faded I collected the dried stems with their shrivelled flower heads and they laid on a tray for several months until during a tidy up I thought I would just see if I could grow them from seed. Just after Christamas and with no great expectations I scattered the seeds of several varieties onto a seed tray of J.I compost covered with a layer of Perlite. Within a coup,e of weeks they had germinated like so much cress. I had sowed far too many so I pricked out the few you see below and threw away the remaining hundreds. I was very surprised how readily they germinated, I guess as they are plants from relatively arid regions if you give them some warmth and some water they are ready to race away and boy did they go.
Flowerts of an Echeveria species. ( The spotted leaves are not an Echeveria.)
I pricked out three seedlings per pot. ( Should have done just one) Each seedling was tiny with tiny leaves and it was barely possible to get hold of them. As soon as I started watering them they shot away You can tell the two rows I gave more water to by way of an experiment, they have grown much bigger.
A similar tale with this Aeonium tabuliforme
The plant usually grows for a few years, produces a tall head of yellow flowers and then dies (i.e. Monocarpic- having only one setting of seeds) . Mine produced no offsets so I thought I would try seeds and hey presto they germinated within ten days or so. This is in January, mid winter. They were in a greenhouse run at 12C.
There is some cultural information
here .
Aeonium tabuliforme before flowering. Because it is shot from directly above you can't tell but it is as flat as a pancake.
My dead Aeonium tabuliforme with cut down withered flower spike.
The compost is a soil based type with a layer of perlite on top. I sowed onto the perlite then watered the pot to wash the seeds into the perlite. I have blown away some of the perlite to better show the seedlings
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Persistent Melianthus.
This picture was taken in late February. The Melianthus major plant, grown in a large pot, has remained green and healthy due to the mild winter and has obviously had enough warmth to keep growing gradually and produce the beginnings of a flower head. In the last two or three days the cold nights have meant it has started to look very straggly so it is time to cut it back. The cold weather has darkened the stems with a deep red and also edged some of the leaves the same colour. If it kept those red tints in the summer it would be an even more dramatic plant.
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Answer to the mystery picture, It was some splashes along the side of my already dirty white van.
If you guessed correctly then exceptionaly hearty congratulations are due to you but, sorry, I was only kidding about the shilling
