Archive | June, 2012

Baby Badger Board Book

25 Jun

Wanted to blog about this last week but ran out of time and couldn’t find the connecting cable for the camera/pc in the ongoing chaos that is our house redecoration.

There was much excitement in our household on Monday when the first copies of Baby Badger’s Wonderful Night in board book format arrived in the post. It looks GORGEOUS (even if I do say so myself). Plus it’s a bargain, at only £3.99. If you did, perhaps, want to buy a copy *bashful*,  it’s available on Amazon already here, although the official pub date isn’t until the end of July, otherwise it would be even better if you fancied buying/ordering it from your local independent bookshop or branch of Waterstones.

Thanks to the lovely folk at Gullane, who publish it.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

11 Jun

Tomatoes from a previous year. Plants of 2012, this is what we’re aiming for, just so you know.

There are things that I’m good at. Things like, stockpiling books. Eating chocolate. Cooking (most of the time). Multi-tasking. List making and organisational stuff. But gardening? Gardening I am not good at. Plants, generally, are not my friends. Rather than green fingers, I have black ones. Black fingers of death.  Yet, despite this, every year I have one weekend where I go a bit nuts and decide I want to grow lots of stuff, so I plant it over-excitedly and hope for the best. And this annual event happened last weekend. I started with tomatoes. I usually grow tomatoes, and they generally work out okay. I’m quite forgetful, so I’m better with outdoor plants than indoor ones, because if it rains, it doesn’t matter if I’ve forgotten about them, as they still get watered.

We don’t have a vegetable patch, just the world’s longest lawn, so everything’s grown in containers. I stuck my tomatoes in pots and gazed at them proudly from my kitchen window. But then I decided some mange tout would also be nice. And some lettuce. And carrots. French beans, radishes, a pepper, courgettes and a cucumber also followed. And then a friend gave me some spinach seeds. Then I found a cheaper-than-cheap raspberry cane in Wilkinsons, of all places. Plus I’d also decided a tub of sweet peas would be nice, and that Tornado Toddler should have some sunflowers. So now we have a patio that resembles a garden centre. Will these things actually grow? I have no idea. The things I bought as plants I’m more hopeful about, as long as the slugs and snails don’t eat them. The stuff I’m growing from seed…who knows. I don’t know if I sowed them properly, or in the right kind of soil. Tornado Toddler didn’t help, as his idea of gardening is pulling everything up again and running off with the bamboo canes. But fingers crossed something works out and that by the end of the summer I’ll be able to make a salad entirely from stuff I’ve grown all by myself. And it’s raining loads at the moment. So at least it’s getting watered.