Some Easter & garden photos

Tilly and a friend checking on the chickens

Easter dress accessorized with wellies!

Beautiful boy Duncan

Scary eyed Lady Macbeth!

One of our hens

Walk along the White Cliffs

Drawing at home

Asking for booby, most likely!

Monkey in the garden

At last the weather is mild enough to venture into the garden. We have some seedlings we are nurturing and we are looking forward to finding our green fingers! More on that soon...

The Girls

Our girls arrived on Saturday evening, along with their super-swanky new ark and run!

Lady Macbeth is keeping her eye on them:

It's good to have them at last, after lots of dithering and uncertainty. Strangely it feels like quite a lot of responsibility to take care of the four new members of the family, and in particular I've been worried about foxes, but for now we have decided to keep the girls in their run and not to let them free-range in the garden. At night they are safely shut in the coop, and it is unlikely that- as in a dream I had last night- foxes will be utilising trampolines to spring into our garden (!).

In actual fact they are no trouble at all, they like a bit of corn and a chat now and then, clean water and drink, and scraping the poo out, but in return for very little effort they are providing us with the most beautiful brown eggs. That seems like a good deal to me!

Green Johanna!

I'm ridiculously excited that my Green Johanna composter has arrived and is sitting in a corner of the garden awaiting lots of garden waste and kitchen scraps. I'll take a photo of it tomorrow to post (I'm getting really cross with myself for never taking my camera out with me anymore). This weekend I am also planning to plant some seedlings indoors and to plan out the space for my raised beds. I am also thinking of stalking the local allotments to see if some kind souls can impart some gardening wisdom to me!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Seafront walk

Photographs by Daddy

Help me discover some green fingers!

This is our new garden, and I don't know where to begin!

I think we are going to put our chicken ark somewhere near the decking towards the front of the photo, and I am planning to put in a couple of raised beds alongside the fence to grow vegetables.

I also want to grow something along the fence, not necessarily to cover it up but to make it not look so bare and fence-like. Any suggestions?

How did you begin to learn how to make a garden? I feel intimidated and I don't know where to start...

Monkey's re-vamped chest of drawers

So Christmas with us was a bit of a stressful time with the Monkey seemingly going on hunger-strike for three weeks and then finally coming down with chickenpox. But as the New Year arrived I felt the need to complete at least one small project: freshening up a tatty old chest of drawers that lives in the Monkey's nursery. Here it is before:

Excuse the chocolate-milk-splattered Monkey!

And here it is after a coat of paint. We used a lavender satinwood for the body and tester pots of emulsion for the drawer fronts. I think it looks really cute. Now just have to pull my finger out and get a second coat of paint on, as the babe's clothes have been strewn around the room for week's now!