For more news of my puppy Trouble.

For more news of my puppy Trouble please go to my other blog Jopanofmanyplants.

Some good news.

I got a puppy. :D The person in the picture is not me.

She's eleven weeks old, she's a Turkish Kangal cross boarder collie and she's beautiful. She's going to grow very big. :)

Very pleased.

Sour-dough bread, 36 hour rise with cheese, salt and pepper on the top. I hope it tastes as good as it looks. :D

Update: it does! It tastes divine.

So close I can almost taste it.

The garden so far.

For such a small garden, it has taken a lot of work to get it to the state that it is in today.

 And I wouldn't have gotten this far without a lot of help from my dad and my boyfriend. Thanks guys.

I still need to seriously improve the fertility and water retention of the soil, sow more grass seed, fill up the last raised bed, dig over/weed the border. Attach weed suppressant between the raised beds and cover with gravel.
After that and a bit of weeding I can start planting out, finish sowing, build my bean wigwams and maybe, Just maybe, I can start harvesting some food. We can only hope. :)

Things are coming along - Nettle tea.

I set out early this morning, looking for nettles.

Niche came with me. :D

Well that didn't take long. I found this bank of nettles not five minutes from my house. 

The highland cattle are having a little rest. Perhaps they're not even up yet. Lazy cows. 

 I know I've complained a lot about moving away from my dads, but when you have a view like this a twenty minute walk away, it kinda makes everything better.

I filled a carrier bag full of nettles and chucked um all into a bucket.

Filled the bucket with water, with the tap with half a mile an hours water pressure. 

stuffed a brick on top of it all to keep the nettles submerged. 

And hide the bucket away, as far from the house as humanly possible, as this concoction is going to be very, very smelly.

The potatoes are starting to come up now. I've been covering them with alternating compost and grass cuttings, depending on which one I have at the time.  

It is getting better out there. I still have a lot of work to do, lots of clearing and digging. But I'm starting to feel better about it all. 

Sowing seeds.

My tomatoes, I had labelled them but the cat pulled them all out.

This is going to be for the cucumbers. 

I'd run out of labels for these pots but they're cabbage, tomatoes, cape gooseberry.. And erm... Hopefully I'll remember what the rest are when they're up. :/  In the tree root trainer I have half a dozen broad bean Karmazyn.

strawberry, basil, spare chillies, rosemary and squashes.

I bought labels for these, thyme, cuca-melons, celery, cabbage, cauli, brussles, Sutherland Kale and more basil.

And my ever present audience are in attendance as always.  

I'm going to try an anti crow collar on this guy as I would quite like to keep a rooster. If it doesn't work I will have to sell or cull him and I will only do that as a last resort.