And so, to Fife.

So, all change here. We moved. Same wellies, different location. The ex-cellist is now in New Zealand for a 'pre-uni' adventure and I seem to have acquired a full-time husband and two gardens. As far as I'm aware, even by my standards that's a lot of change in a short while eh? Time for sleeves up I think. So we introduced ourselves to the plants in the garden. Lots of familiar faces, the Lonicera  (Honeysuckle) is smelling particularly fabulous at the moment. What a lovely greeting.

You'll of course not be disappointed that the garden's already been poked and prodded and some of the more adventurous of the shrubs have  had a wee haircut and a couple of beds are now duly dug. I even found a seat and a path we didn't know about overgrown under a rather rampant fushia. Some of the beds were 'double dug' or even 'triple dug' but lets not go on about that again, those with muddy paws know my feelings on the matter.

This garden is a long supermodelesk skinny garden with ample space for life. We're nicely nestled in a wee East Neuk peedie (small) village, with nowt but a smattering of hooses about the place.

I've a long association with this part of the world, my auld grandfather kept his boat in the harbour hereabouts and we holiday'd in the summers with my grandparents and cousins at the caravans up by the beach. Lots of great memories. And, of course, without doubt, the best ice-cream shop in the world, nae the universe. So we got ice-cream and visited the harbour to say hello. Rude not to I'd say. And also time for a stomp and a paddle. 

So we got the keys on Friday and have been madly emptying boxes and filling shelves and cupboards with all our clobber. We both have a shed each and Mr McFlowers is now installed in his new 'rock god studio' which is the other end of the house from the kitchen sink, we're both glad about that.

The house is beginning to look more like a home than an empty shell. Ok so a messy home, but a home nevertheless. I'm very good at looking 'lived in', I'm naturally crumply.

There's been much cooking already and a bit of gardening. (I'm also naturally 'green toed'.)

I ventured out to a local independent nursery and bought a heap of veggie plants to get the patch started pronto - I don't want to lose a season after all. So its sleeves up and get those pots sorted. Plenty to do.

Always best to start off as you mean to go along I think. Peedie the horticultural hound extraordinaire thinks so too.

He's started how HE means to go on.mind you the other one isn't much better, same style, different location.

Happy new house indeed, everyone's clearly settling in nicely.

Forecast of significant snow.........but sadly our visitors have gone

Parson Brown the snowman

Well the news tonight is telling us that there is a 'significant' chance of alot of snow again - maybe enough for another snowman like Parson Brown - who welcomed our winter holiday house sitters when they arrived on the 22nd December to look after the homestead to let me go 'sooth' - very cheerful he was too - and he did look wonderful in his bowler hat! I'm hoping the snow might be kind and come - but not block us in too much - be nice if my otherhalf actually managed to visit this month! We'll see, won't we?!

A Peedie puppy in the quadrat - I'm writing this work up now, but I won't mention the puppy's help!

Today has been a day of writing up in the office (more significant values, but of a different kind!) and a bit of a walk with the doggie around the block at work - alot of gardens looking a bit sad and soggy - but nevertheless nice to hear the birdies and have a little plod with the puppy. The birds are still mobbing the bird table at home, a few pheasants as well as many, many starlings!A glum looking kind of a dark day, but on the positive side the day length has started to increase and we're seeing a change everyday. Couple minutes in the morning and in the evening will soon make all the difference here.  I just can't wait - slowly things will get a bit lighter and then we'll be overwhelmed with day light!

A few casualties in the garden - looks like the Hebes I planted earlier in late autumn have not survived - but I'll leave that a while and see what actually pops up if anything.  I've a few runners of mint from my friends garden in Linconshire to propagate later - for now they've gone into a fishbox of soil outside - with more alpine strawberries and we've been given a beautiful purple Hazel seedling which is now tucked into a wardrobe cold frame outside. Apart from that - not much out there at all, no winter colour, no bulbs coming up yet - just a very soggy garden. Which until a wee while ago hid under the snow - which disrupted our poor visitors on thier way up - but thankfully they got here eventually!

Chickens do like being looked after, these ones were spoiled when we were off over the holidays! Thank you guys.

The hens are very happy and loved being looked after by our lovely house-sitting-fellow-blogging visitors - who were very kind to them and kept them well fed, warm and very wonderfuly looked after (Thank you Daffy!). I'm looking forward to seeing some of her photos! The wonderful visitors did seem very taken with the clever chickens, who are now being very well behaved, they've trained them well during their looking after our home holiday!

Thank you Daffy!!

My kitchen table

After alot of talk about talking, laughing, joking, cooking, writing on the kitchen table - I thought I'd give you a look at mine.

What about you what do you get up to at yours?

A waak doon the track, fae the hoose, tae the beach............

Today a wonderful day for a walk, so I thought of walking at home, rather than going out in the car for a walk saves petrol which is very expensive here at the moment £1.29.9/ltr - ouch!  We've a beach at the end of our track, so today we've taken a waak (walk), fae (from) the hoose(house), doon (down) the track tae (to) the beach - brackets are the english words of a few 'dialect' scots words. We have a friend coming to house sit soon and I thought it might be nice to be able to show her the walk from the house to the beach down our track - I hope she likes it!

Our neighbour is away, its the house in the distance on the left and we're going to feed the cats and hens for them, good excuse to get down to the beach as well. Really, you see, we're doing them a favour by walking down to the beach........................and of course taking pictures is helpful for anyone coming to stay - to entice them to come up and visit!

I love this walk, we get to look over to other islands (Graemsay and Hoy) and to the local town on the other side of the bay. What a beautiful morning, cold but fresh and clear. Lovely time to walk down and catch up with my daughter and give the dog a walk. It takes about 6 minutes to get to the beach, just strolling down, not in any sort of rush, we rush too much during the week for life, school and work.

The tide is quite high today so there's not much in the way of beach, theres a tiny lane down to the shore, which was maybe used for a boat before I guess? I like taking time out and being able to just have a catch up, just the two of us. It's not always going to be so easy when she's grown up, so I'm making the most of now time.

Its a bit of a rocky/sandy beach with seals, birds and lots of sky. We like it down here, you can only get here from the houses that are down the tracks, so there are hardly ever any people on it, mainly just us and the seals. A few lucky folk actually live right on the beach, its my dream one day, but for now I'm happy to be able to walk a few minutes from our house and be here in no time at all.



 I love the beach, one of my favourite places in the world to be and its always free for a walk. The sea can throw up some delights, treasures and wood, so we often go along the high tide line and have a look - today we found a big pink bouy - which we'll maybe take home next time if its still there - we tie them on the sign at the end of the track for a bit of fun - also to let me know where to turn in!

We talk and walk down here and laugh about life. Beaches are good places for clearing your head, having a chat and generally just getting some fresh air. Today we need to wrap up and keep warm - hat and pigtails are essental for keeping cosy - there I am again, being cheeky to my daughter - never can take a normal photo!

What a lovely little walk we had, the dog had fun chasing the birds on the beach, which of course he never ever catches but its fun to watch - we saw three seals today - they followed us along to say hello and see what we were doing. We are lucky that seals are normal in our lives - we do see them most days when we are at the beach all around the islands we've alot of seals. They do seem quite curious - I wonder what they think of us?

Time to go home for a cup of coffee and a warm up - we head back up the track, our house in the distance looking like somewhere warm and cosy! I hope you've enjoyed our walk - wasn't it fun - I might go again later on as its free - I'll be saving money too!

The start of a garden.......

Ok you might wonder what the peedie pup has to do with making a garden - well it's simple really - In order to contain my little cairn terrier I have to make my garden peedie-proof. NO mean feat. And of course, he loves the beach and knows there is a beach at the bottom of the field.........Whilst the field is empty in the winter, on our island all the coo's go indoors throughout the winter - in late March/Early April the coo's will be in this field and plodding through this burn.......

In order to have a garden on an island one of the first things you also need to create is shelter - which means the peedie proofing and the shelter sort of go hand in hand. As you can see from the photo of the burn, the whole garden is basically railed - but has little in the way of any real shelter for the garden - and a million escape routes for a very clever dog.

SO the first task of the day has to be to put up some rabbit/chicken wire fencing at the bottom of the wooden fence, also to make it slopes outwards along the ground- to start to diminish any hope the puppy has of getting out of the garden by just walking under the fence edge. The fencing is longer than needed to keep the ground covered a bit as well - I will plant cuttings of willow through a few bits of the fence on the ground to make it secure and the vegetation it lies on will make sure that it grows through to secure it as well.

The next stage is to put up some of the green webbed netting - I've 150m of this to put up around the garden, to create shelter. You can see the rabbit netting lying flat on the ground and its now tucked behind the green netting to secure it. Island living means lots of space, but it also means salt laden heavy strong winds which can shred plants at any time of year, from any direction. We are lucky to be just one field from the sea, but that also means that the winds will be heavy with salt, with little in the way of protection from thier force either. I like this kind of weather, but, as a gardener its not the best to try and work with unless you can create some shelter. So in order to start to create a garden some shelter from either fencing or native shrubs and trees to create my garden. To give the shrubs a good start - putting some windbreak up will help whilst they establish and of course they also keep the peedie-pup in the garden! So its beneficial all round. I'm also planting my hedge with a view to growing some of my own fuel for a woodburner which we are hoping to install in the house later this year. SO the hedge will have many, many functions; who say's plants don't work hard!Some plants like this Hebe (who has been nicknamed Pheobe) are really good at withstanding wind and this one has grown really well - so I'm tucking the netting behind it and giving it some TLC. I will take some cuttings from this one when I've more shelter established and perhaps a polytunnel up to nuture on the cuttings. For my hedge I'm mainly going for natives, but I am going to intersperce a few pretty evergreens which tolerate the seaside. Things like Escalonia, Hebe, Grissolenia, Olearea, Ulex and a few other evergreens don't mind the salty air. Other non-evergreen garden plants like Rosa rugosa, Fushia, Buddleia and many others also tolerate a fair bit of salty wind and are great for the birds, bees, butterflies and wildlife as well.After a bit of sorting out the netting we got to a bit which made us a bit stuck, its an old fence and whilst probably past its best in some ways - still has alot of life in it too - so we've used some of the netting to help strengthen the fence as well and perk it up a bit - which means once the hedge I want to plant is grown the fence will be just about invisible! We've a bit of sawing and sorting to do in the corner so we went for a cuppa then and had a peedie think about what to do. The little shrub there is a Fushia, whilst it looks a bit sorry for itself right now, soon enough it will be benefitting from the shelter we've created. There are very few plants in the garden at the moment - but once the fence is up that will change.

This is the view from the upstairs window of the living room, we were surveying our handywork with a cup of hot chocolate, the wind was cold and our fingers needed a warm up. For the moment I'm quite happy to see the fence in all its ramshackle glorly and look forward to becoming better aquainted with it. The next part of the fence is ready to get going once we get the saw out. I am really enthusiastic about being able to create a lovely bit of shelter here for some of my plants to get a good start. Peedie-pup, however, is less enthusiastic - he rather likes sneaking through into the field - more like a game of dog and owner than cat and mouse................... We had to stop there as I was off to teach a veggie gardening class with a local expert - he's letting me be his 'girl friday' its so interesting hearing him talk so knowledgably about growing plants on this island, it really is very different to anywhere else in the UK.

Until I get shelter here - I don't have a hope of growing as much as a tattie, marigold or a pot of herbs as the tops of all the plants will be scorched by the wind - so I had better get a wriggle on if I want a garden this year.