Small garden solutions: Milk carton to watering can in under five minutes

Since we only have one planter, a small flower bed, and three hanging baskets to keep watered, I didn't really want to have to get a watering can. (Read: I forgot to buy a watering can when we got the hanging baskets and am not arsed to traipse to Homebase for one. Also, I really don't want to have to lug a watering can home on the bus.)

Last night I wondered if I could repurpose an empty milk carton as a makeshift watering can, and since my planter was looking a bit dry this morning I decided to test my theory.

I punched some holes in the lid of the carton using a safety pin, filled it up with collected rainwater, put the lid back on, and took it for a spin.

BOOM: one DIYed upcycled milk carton watering can.

Have a great weekend!

Who needs Chelsea Flower Show?

Since the weather has turned all summery, my thoughts have turned to beautifying our garden. Well, "garden" is a bit of a stretch; it's really a long side return that's been gussied up with some cobblelock and the sort of masses of evergreen planting last seen in Jurassic Park.

Now, I know that private outdoor space in rented accommodation is something of a luxury in London, but I think it's fair to say that ours is looking far from luxurious at the moment. My primary concern is introducing a bit of colour. The planting area that runs almost the full length of the garden would be the perfect spot to plant up if it wasn't where the Jurassic shrubs live, and I'm not sure there's much point trying to do anything in the shaded zone underneath them.

I might chuck in a few shade-tolerant Busy Lizzies, Begonias, or hardy Geraniums and see how they fare, but my master plan is to use containers and hanging baskets to break up the sometimes monotonous sea of green. By the front door, I envision a standard bay tree underplanted with hot pink and coral Busy Lizzies and maybe some trailing lobelia in a black Versailles planter for a shot of glorious summer colour everytime we leave or arrive home.

I'm rock 'n' roll, me.

{image sources: 1. Crocus; 2. GardenForum; 3. Classic Garden Elements}

The hanging baskets will be a trickier proposition, since there isn't really anywhere to put up a bracket. However, I have a cheeky solution: I think I'll just try to hang them from the holes in the girders of our upstairs neighbour's veranda. It overhangs part of our outdoor space and could definitely use some cheering up.

Anyone else planning to spruce up their outdoor space for the summer?

Jam jars + doilies + tea lights = AMAZEBALLS outdoor lighting idea

{image source: Crafts By Amanda}

Sticking tea light in jam jars is a dead easy way to get some al fresco lighting on, but I've always felt it to be a bit of a bachelor pad/utilitarian looking solution. And then I saw these prettified doily-embellished versions and had an honest-to-goodness "now why didn't I think of that!" moment, complete with mucho forehead slapping.

This is one of the nicest little DIY projects I've seen in a while, and I fully intend to follow Amanda's instructions and make several myself. Just as soon as I've amassed enough jars to do so on a grand(ish) scale - I currently have a grand total of one, which wouldn't exactly look spectacular.

I only wish that I'd come across this "how to" while I was waiting on Camden to send me recycling bins, when I had about six weeks' worth of recycling piled up and a veritable army of glass jars that would have been perfect for the job.

In other news: must really try and get Himself to polish off the last of that honey and jam this weekend. The jars they're in are taking up valuable cupboard space.

Ehem.

Talon-tastic Thursday: Spot the difference

I was going to hold off on showing you this paint job until next week so that I wouldn't have two green nail posts back to back, but it's so damn pretty and spring-appropriate that I just had to share.

The base colour is Topshop Gone Fishing, and I did the spots with my white Sally Hansen Nail Art Pen, which is rapidly becoming my favourite implement ever. It's more like a regular pen than any other I've used and as a result is far easier to control. Oh, and the polish it dispenses is water soluble, so although you must use a topcoat to prevent your design disappearing the next time you wash your hands, correcting any mistakes you make while creating that design is an absolute cinch.

In other news, spring has sprung good and proper in our new-to-us, didn't-have-to-do-any-work-in-it garden! It seemed to happen overnight; I just walked out one morning to find this:

Nice one.

Totes amaze: Sky gardens

I strongly feel that if you actually need the monthly Financial Times magazine to tell you How To Spend It, your money is completely wasted on you and you should be forced to hand it all over to someone with a little more imagination. 

Sometimes, though, when I'm not busy rolling my eyes at the extreme excesses between its pages, I'll espy an article so jaw-droppingly awesome, I'll get completely distracted from thinking that it's rather vulgar to have a publication dedicated so exclusively and unabashedly to high-end buy-it-all consumerism. 

Take these photos by way of example. They accompanied a recent feature entitled Taking The High Ground about the seriously lush gardens and outdoor spaces created on the rooftops of some London city homes. Forget mismatched planters and windowboxes: I'm talking about grass and hedging and even mature trees.

Now that is city living I could totally get down with.


All pix via How To Spend It

Butterflies and bees and Verbena, oh my!

Very, very busy today. So of course it makes perfect sense to be arsing about the garden taking pictures of small tortoiseshell butterflies and furry bees, yes?

The plant they're loving there is Verbena bonariensis, or "the weed" as Himself likes to call it. It's a babe butterfly magnet, and one of the few perennials in our garden that survived last winter's seriously bad frosts. It has even gone forth and multiplied impressively by self-seeding through a layer of gravel and weed membrane. 

Methinks it should be reclassified from borderline hardy to bloody amazeballs.

New Addition.

We came home from a trip to Wexford on Sunday with this gorgeous purple hydrangea in tow. (Thanks, Aunt Liz!)

Although I usually veer towards architectural, fairly modern planting for our garden, there are a couple of old fashioned plants that I'm a real sucker for, and hydrangeas are definitely on that list.

This one reminds me of my granny's garden so I'm really, really hoping that it can survive my black thumb.

A long post about the long weekend.

Since my subtle like a brick wall wrapped in barbed wire browsing of the Aer Lingus website and talk about Going Somewhere last week was trumped by the arrival of Himself's shiny new bicycle on Friday, I was all set for multiple "we never do anything" whinges over the long weekend.

I didn't get to utter the phrase once. (Hmph.)

Courtesy of some inspired spontaneity from Himself, we ended up in Kilkenny on Saturday evening and got in some comedy gigs at the Cat Laughs festival after a gorgeous dinner in Zuni. It was such a good night that we actually went back down for a couple more shows on Sunday.

Yesterday morning, we headed for a cycle. Now, I haven't been on a moving non-gym bike in about 18 months, and while it's true that you never forget how to ride a bike, you can be very bloody wobbly while pedalling and staying upright and wondering if you'll be able to take your hands off the handlebars for hand signals (polite "I-intend-to-turn-right" ones, of course) and only remembering that you should be using the gears when you can't get the pedals to feckin' move as you attempt to ascend a humpback bridge.

Yesterday afternoon, we took ourselves and Dad off to Bloom for the final couple of hours of the show. It was really, really, really wet, which I hadn't been anticipating or I'd totally have broken out the (pink) festival wellies rather than these lads...

Low vamp + canvas + rain = wet feets

As usual, my favourite show garden was from Doylescapes...

More details on Doylescapes' gold medal winning G&T garden here.

The duck garden that won RTÉ's Super Garden show was there too...

 ... complete with a few ducks who looked like they were plotting their escape.

I also liked Anne Hamilton's Islands, large raised undulating beds surrounded by narrow channels of water so that they seemed to float, which were connected by a curving wooden walkway...

... and Niall Maxwell's Victus Ortus, although I'm not entirely sure what the cream slatted concrete/render yoke on the ground (bottom right in this photo) was about...

Hostas seem to be back in fashion in a big way and featured in loads of the show gardens, and once again there were lots of ferns about this year.

Hostas are lovely plants alright. Well, until slugs and snails discover you've planted them, call up all their mates, and descend en masse to gorge themselves on the leaves. (I overheard one woman at Bloom tell another that she'd heard hostas were great for keeping slugs and snails away. Er, not unless your garden's in opposite land, missus.)

Water feature in Dawn Crawford's Urban Oasis

 I think these are peony roses..? Lovely anyways.

The quality of the photos is a bit hit and miss because even though I remembered to charge the camera battery I forgot the memory card - genius - so had to rely on the iPhone.

(True story. I am not just trying to slip a reference to it into every post.)

The garden in thumbnails: oooh, pretty.

The pair of Japanese crab apples in our garden are just starting to burst into bloom, and some of the plants that I thought were dead were actually just taking their sweet time about waking up.

Oh hai, fuchsia, good to see you!

I've been meaning to collate all the care info about what's in our garden so that I'd know when to expect them to wake up from winter or when to prune them, rather than just going on instinct and the few plant info cards that are floating around the house. I've been meaning to do it for about a year - so far, I have mostly just collected nice pictures of our plants. Ehem. Anyway, might as well put those photees to work, so here's a thumbnail collage of all the lovely things in our garden (that I know the names of and could therefore source a picture of) which survived the winter!

All photos are from BBC Gardening, I think,with the 

exception of the white lavender which is via Gardening Express.

I can haz summer now, yes?

I know, I know. One swallow doesn't make a summer. Cast ne'er a clout til May be out. But the weather has been so incredibly gorgeous for the last couple of days that I can't help but get a bit giddy about it and, er, eyeball nice outdoors-y things.

I have a couple of these cream Moroccan-stylee lanterns dotted around the gravel border that cast fab intricate shadows across the back garden when lit at night, and since my solar powered LEDs for the trees have given up the ghost I'm thinking a few lads like these would look fairly sweet strung up in the branches:

Pix via Not On The High Street & Clayton Gray Home

Pix via Not On The High Street & Crocus

Later on in the summer when the flowers have gone off the trees, they could do double duty as mini hanging vases like these during the day:

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Wouldn't this mirrored agapanthus from Susan Bradley look fab in a courtyard garden?

Sadly, this pink parasol suits neither my cream and green garden furniture nor my wallet with its £165 price tag, but it is oh so pretty and The Indian Garden Company are offering free EU-wide delivery for a limited time if you're feeling flush:

Or maybe sail shades are more your thing?

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Not sure how comfortable slatted metal folding chairs would be In Real Life, but I just love these French bistro sets:

Source

Considering the fence needs to be stained this year, a large number of our plants didn't survive the winter, and the grass is in ribbons courtesy of the dog tearing it to shreds, I may be getting just a little bit ahead of myself looking at nice garden accessories.

Now, where's me secateurs?

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Bloom 2007

A few pics of my New Favourite Periennals, Alliums.

Like proper houseowning old people, Himself & myself took ourselves off to Bloom In The Park last Saturday. Well, we had already been to a Residents' Association meeting & spend a good portion of most weekends in B&Q, Woodies, or Telfords; I guess there's just no point fighting it anymore. [God, I'm so old. Better buy something frivolous this evening in an attempt to recapture my yoof.] Anywho, I proceeded to get rather depressed about the wretched state of our own patch of muck and scutch grass while looking at the quite wonderful show gardens but took oodles of photos to document the loveliness of the landscaping and planting nonetheless. See them all here.