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Channel M latest - lawn care
More videos from me on Channel M Autumn Lawn care video
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Sweet, smoky October
What a month of contradictions October is. My breath drifted ahead of me on my morning stroll to let the chickens out and I left a trail of smudged footprints in the heavy dew on the lawn. Yet by mid afternoon the sun was strong enough to have me stripped
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More to life than gardening.
Occasionally I buy gorgeous blank hardback books and persuade myself that I'll write something interesting in them. But faced with the starkness of the bare paper, the terrifying permanence of the ink and the unnattractiveness of my own handwriting I scribble a few inconsequential sentences and shove the
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Where were we?
It's hard to know where to start when I've not updated the blog for three weeks. On Sunday we closed the garden and nursery for the winter - always a moment of mixed emotions. The place softens at the edges when we aren't open
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Four cockerels and a bowl of raspberries.
Our suspicion that four of our six May chicks are cockerels was put beyond doubt this morning. The usual manic pecking around for corn and morning wing stretch was accompanied by a four way show down as the four largest birds squared up against one another in every combination for
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When Sally ate sweetcorn...
Wow. Streuth. Cor. Ooo er missus. (Best stop there, my parents read this blog ...) I planted two blocks of sweetcorn (Northern Extra Sweet F1). The badgers got all the ones in the veg plot, but never found the block near the house. We picked the first ones tonight, boiled them
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...'as if craving alms of the sun'
Wuthering westerlies have sent us scurrying from shed to shed this week, diving out of the heavy showers and whipping wind. The trees are taking a battering too, perfectly illustrating Emily Bronte's description as the wind bends them in unison to the east. We've let the
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..like the eternal rocks beneath...
Joy, tears and frustration, just as it should be. Well done ITV. An adaptation is always an adaptation, but I was captured. Joy and tears watching Wuthering Heights unfold beautifully on TV, for once. Frustration because I forgot to record the second part on Monday night. OK. I know I
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More Channel M videos...
On deadheading and feeding baskets: And great perennials for wildlife: If you're an experienced gardener you'll probably find these rather basic. The aim is to add a spot of gardening into a wider 'magazine' style programme and deliver clear and straightforward advice in a
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Wuthering Hopes
I fell for the bleak beauty of Emily Bronte's masterpiece as a love-lorn teenager, despite being required to read it for the 'O' level English Literature syllabus. It has stood up to multiple re-readings as an adult and I still think it the greatest novel I&
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How to build a heated propagation unit....
I've had the parts for ages but was goaded into building it 1) because the days are getting shorter and will soon be colder too, and 2) If Toby Buckland can do it in half an hour.... OK, it's much bigger but it took me a
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Happy Birthday, David.
My beloved received only a few books and some promises from me for his birthday. But I threw salt over my shoulder, whispered sweet nothings to Gaia, looked out for pairs of Magpies and black cats and twiddled my lucky charms. Maybe something worked, for England won the Ashes on