Spring evening at Sock Towers

Sunlight on tulips


Luka patrols the borders


Hebe walks the 'montana'

I've had 'Cleve West's' babies!

Yes - the Sock has nurtured and given birth to some seedlings from the 'Masterpiece' Lupins she bought last year after seeing them in Cleve West's garden which 'medalled'* at Chelsea last year.

OK most of you do this all the time - but the Sock doesn't grow much from seed so it is still an incredible excitement to do so from seeds she has harvested herself and kept in the fridge over the winter.

Will they come true to colour? Will they flower this year? Will some of them survive the journey to Fat Rascal's house in France where they have been promised a place in her new 'red bed'. Will the original lupins from last year ever re-shoot from the one living root? Will the new greenhouse arrive just in time to save the world?

Or will the whole wonderful dream be sabotaged by snails the minute they go out into the garden?

*medalled is ghastly sports speak for achieving a medal as in "Did you medal at Chelsea, dahling?" It is bad but not as bad as "this is a big ask"!

Gardeners' World - Behind the Scenes Special

A whistleblower at the Beeb has sent the Sock footage of what is alleged to be meetings held by the Gardeners' World production team at the start of the new series..

clic for the flic


NB: Apologies if the timings on the gif are wrong for you. It is impossible to take into account different broadband speeds, internet traffic, reading speeds etc. which all vary wildly. I noticed in the last gif the 'crash' effect was rather ruined when the computer was running slowly but these fluctuations are impossible to compensate for.

Gardener's World flushed away

There isn't much to say about the latest offering from Gardener's World that hasn't been summed up here

clink for the link

Sockanory II

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin

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Health and Safety VI

Back by popular demand!!!! The Sea of Immeasurable Gravy is happy to welcome the return of those fabulous, those wonderful, those two and only...

HEALTH AND SAFETY DOGS

Jobs weekend - The results!

So here we have a picture of Monday evening at Sock Towers at the end of the 'Jobs Weekend'.

The entire contents of the side passageway have been dumped over the garden along with half the contents of the 'soon to be in a skip' shed. It is making way for a greenhouse. This means that Emma will then be the only garden blogger in the world who doesn't have a greenhouse!!!! Ha ha ha hahahahahahahaaaaaa!

Unfortunately all weekends in the foreseeable future are likely to be 'Jobs Weekends' until everything has been restored back to its rightful place or 'skipped' and the new greenhouse has been delivered and constructed. We are doing the construction ourselves as the nice lady on the phone said it was really easy......................................

Easter at Sock Towers

Easter is jobs weekend at Sock Towers.

Today we have been around our tiny terraced house and made a list of all the jobs that need doing and put them into a spreadsheet.

Tomorrow we will prioritise which jobs need doing immediately, which can wait, mark which jobs will be allocated to builders and decorators and assign the others to the Bedsock or myself.

Sunday we will have a day of rest after this exertion and possibly check out the new Jamie Oliver restaurant in Brighton for lunch.

Monday we will start on some of our jobs and realise that we do not have the equipment or materials needed. This will necessitate several trips to B&Q who, as usual, will have run out of anything we want like nails or screws etc. All further work will be postponed indefinitely.

During the evenings we will endeavour to watch 30 hours of stored TV programmes on our Virgin V+ box. The other 30 recorded hours will either have to be deleted or downloaded to DVDs, a long and boring process. The box is malfunctioning - it didn't record the entire week we were away so I missed crucial episodes of America's Next Top Model and Project Runway. The Virgin engineer informed us that we need a new box and would therefore lose all our recordings on the existing one.

Nobody bought me an Easter Egg.

The picture is of 'Pheasant's eye' daffodils at Cotehele gardens.

Sockanory

The Sea of Immeasurable Gravy is proud to bring you their new production

SOCKANORY

Are you sitting comfortably children? Then I'll begin...

clic for the flic

Sea Gardens

Hi there Sockwatchers! The Sock has been on hols again - did you miss her? The Socks rented the most fabulous house (below) on the Devon coast after seeing a piece about it in Sally Shalam's Guardian Travel column. Doesn't she just have the best ever job staying at lovely places and writing about them?!!



The view from the bed.. no need for daytime TV when you can just gaze at the little boats scudding by in the distance..


The house was perched on the coast just above a glorious, deserted, sandy cove with interesting rock formations and pools covered in limpets, barnacles, seaweeds and sea anemones creating exquisite little sea gardens.


These rocks look like Picasso heads....

Even the flotsam of beach balls and fishing paraphernalia added colour and beauty to the scene reinforcing the Sock's argument that this 'debris' looks interesting in situ and Toby Buckland shouldn't be seaside scavenging it.


A view from the coastal path during a week of totally unexpected March sunshine....


Oh well back to 'work' and after having already reviewed last weeks Gardener's World as part of a Guardian gardening guest blog the Sock is brimful of ideas for her own new series. Watch this space!