Spring Garden and Juice Fast Update

Well this is a beautiful spring day and there's the most amazing amount of blooms coming out, plants coming up, it's just fabulous. Ribes flower very early and are essential for the bees coming out early as well and pansies and not forgetting the beautiful rhododendron that I have just outside the back door. So I'm going to just take you around the garden in little snippets of what's blooming, what's growing and the joy of it all. Early flowering heathers are essential for the bees especially the wild bees and the magnolia comes out before the end of March and then you pot up or plant in some tulips along with euphorbia which will flourish anywhere. Lots and lots of London pride, it's just all over the place. By the way London pride along with adzuka is an incredible weed suppressant. If you plant it, it'll just bully everything else out. The adzuka grows really well in gravel. The variegated ivy also is a great weed suppressant and that's happy to grow along the ground as well. As is honeysuckle, aquilegia, all these beautiful plants have come up on their own because of the gravel and I don't have a membrane under the gravel. That's really important if you want plants to self-seed. Same with all these beautiful primroses here. There's just so many plants which are very happy to do their own thing. So here we have the beautiful geranium which grows all over the place. The flowering quince which comes out in March as well and that's a joy to behold and lovely for the bees. And then this beautiful nickel mass daisy which of course doesn't show itself until September. And then there's the sedum, absolutely gorgeous. And the poppies. These are the perennial poppies, the papyrus, and actually sort of do your gardening for you. That's something worth remembering. So I've been working on the dead hedge. I've added some more layers to it as you can see. So it's now about four foot high I'd say, something like that. I've put big chunks of willow on the top. I'm going to create another dead hedge just up the ways a little, where I was cutting back all the dogwoods. So that's going to be happening. There's this kind of beautiful layer of green coming up as well which is incredible. I love it because it just adds a sort of beautiful, sort of organised colour to it all. Anyway, yeah, a little update. I am continuing on my juice fast. So this is now, you see I started on March the 10th, so whatever that is. I think today's the 26th I think. So that's about 16 days and I'm feeling really good. I'm just drawing up plans now for when I come off the juice fast because I need to step up my steps, keep that sort of energy going, and address my eating plan. So I have lots of ideas and I've been doing lots of research on that as well. But the main thing is, I'm just feeling so much better. I had a lot of fat around here. I still have. And this is a very dangerous area, you know, to kind of store fat around your belly and from under your bust down to the tops of your legs. That can be quite dangerous. So that's still diminishing, which is lovely. Anyway, I'm happy about all of that. So let me show you another part of the garden. Okay, I want you to listen to these birds because there appears to be hundreds of them up here in these big old ash trees with the ivy in them. You can't actually see the birds. So That's a little clothes dryer that I made using a bowl and two cupboards. My son was around yesterday and he said, but mum, how do you get the clothes up there? I said, ah, when you don't have the brawn, you use the brain. So I made this little sort of long piece of wood with a little, oh, I'll show you it. Let me just show you it. I think it's ingenious. But then I do think that women are very creative and especially when needs be. This is one of those cases where needs be. So this is what I made. Look, it's a long piece of wood. This is what I do. Okay. Right. There you go. How simple is that? Now I would love one of those little dolly laundry thingies, but I could never find one. Built in the cottage in 2004 when I first bought it on the three acres. This is it last summer, 2024. So 20 years on. This was the driveway up to the cottage in 2004. And this was the driveway last summer going on into autumn 2024. So 20 years on. And this was the view from the top of the driveway looking down in 2004. And of course, you can't see that same view today because it's all trees and woodland and garden. Blessings to you all.