Tomatoes.

The tomato plants that I started growing in the house were moved to the greenhouse 3 weeks ago to stop them becoming leggy. They are very healthy looking plants now, the first varieties I have sown are;
Black Krim, Black Russian, Manx Marvel (a local variety), Pink Thai Egg and Sweet 100. The latter 2 were very successful last year and I particularly liked the taste of the Pink Thai Egg. I have sown a lot of other varieties as with all my vegetables I prefer to grow heritage varieties. I do seed and plant swaps with other local growers and buy a lot of my seeds from the Real Seed company who encourage everyone to save seeds from the plants that you grow purchased from their catalogue.
All of what I call my cabbage lookalikes are in flower and attracting many insects. These plants are crosses from the cabbage family of which I grow walking stick kale, tree cabbage, couve tronchuda and regular cabbages and sprouts. There are many bumble bees, honey bees and the first of the ladybirds around the garden. The pond is bursting full of tadpoles and small froglets are hopping around the grass.
A very fine pheasant has decided that he owns our farmyard and is regularly seen strutting up and down it.
I have great pleasure in watching the jackdaws that nest every year in our pigeon holes at the top of the cowhouse. They keep picking up branches that to me are obviously too big to go through the entrance, some get dropped but others are deftly fed sideways into the nest area. Also there is quite a bit of thieving goes on when jackdaws steal nesting material from their neighbours who have flown away for a few minutes. They also take some of the wool I have drying prior to dyeing, I don't mind this but am always more vigilant when I have washed cashmere on the line.

Water Competition

The Hodgson Loom Gallery have just had their annual competition with a huge entry of 181 pieces of work in many media including; watercolour, acrylic, textiles, woodcarving, ceramics and classes for young people.This year I won 2 runner up prizes one in the textile category and another in the wallhanging category. A third piece of work was based on snowflakes. I painted a sheet of filter paper which would normally be used for filtering cooking oil in restaurants. I painted it with dye-na-flow ink in a lilac/purple colour.
I had purchased a large number of handspun fibres from the family of one of the founder members of the Isle of Man Spinners and  Weavers as the lady had recently died. The fibre I used for this project was exquisitely spun white silk. I made a template for each snowflake in another piece of filter paper and couched the spun fibre onto the template with fine hand stitches. Beads were sewn into the centre of each snowflake.The title of the finished work is Blizzard.

 The runner up of the textile category is shown below, 3rd one down on the left. This was called Rivers and Lakes of Slovenia and was inspired by a wonderful trip I had to that beautiful country last autumn, The base of the work was procion dyed viscose onto which I transferred photos using the bondaweb method. As quite a bit of the detail was lost during transfer I machine stitched into the pictures and produced a new abstract version of the scenes. They were then mounted in a frame with 7 spaces. The rivers and lakes in that country are an amazing green or mint blue due to the limestone dissolved in the water. The air there was incredibly pure and improved my asthma symptoms.
Also the local people who I met there were very passionate about their country which was spotless and they are investing hugely in ecotourism and extreme sports such as coasteering.
The wallhanging runner up is called the Sulby river and is shown below on the right. It is made from bonded lurex and organza with painted  and stitched tyvek patches then heavily machine stitched.

forest gardening course

In September last year I went on a 3 day Forest Gardening course held by Martin Crawford at Dartington in Devon.
Martin is an extremely passionate and inspirational teacher so that the group of 25 who attended the course from various parts of the world came away ready to put many of the ideas into practice. The main demonstration garden is in the Dartington Estate, near Schumacher College and is a two and a half acre site. We also visited another of his projects which is a newly developing Forest Garden next to the polytunnels where he raises his plants for sale.
Martin trials out a huge number of plants that can be used for food, timber, dyes, nitrogen fixing and windbreaks to name but a few. This is an essential project for the world in these uncertain times of climate change. Martin provided extensive notes regarding planting, usage, preparation of your own site and many other things, too many to mention here. As we went around the garden we tasted leaves and seeds often from plants we had never heard of before including leaves from trees that can be used as salad ingredients.
We were also given 2 meals prepared by Martin's wife consisting of food from the Forest garden some of which were delicious jams and fruit leathers. It was wonderful meeting the other people on the course and finding out in which way they intended to use their new knowledge.

 Above, Martin in the Forest Garden.
for further details look up the Agroforestry research trust website below.
 www.agroforestry.co.uk

Wildflower garden.

In July our herb group had a walk around the wildflower garden at St. Johns Mill where we have been asked to redesign the two herb areas. We were very lucky that Andree Dubbeldam who designed and planted the wildlife garden could spare the time to give our group a guided walk around it. There is an enormous range and diversity of plants there all beneficial to the wildlife. The garden also has a pond and is open to the public who want to spend some contemplative time there.

As well as designing the new herb area, our herb group are hoping to start a database of the plants in the garden which would include common names of the plant, uses past and present, beneficial aspects for wildlife and any medicinal or dye usages.
Here is a selection of some of the plants in the wildflower area.
Flowers and grasses to be found in the first bed nearest to the Mill are as follows;
Pendulous sedge, greater birdsfoot trefoil, yellow rattle, purple loosestrife and sneezewort.
The first plants to be found in the next bed are,
fleabane, melancholy thistle, dotted loosestrife, ragged robin, tufted hairgrass, ladyfern, native broom, rosemary, greater  woodrush, valerian, French cranesbill, square stalked St. John's wort, marjoram, common sorrel, greater willowherb, cotoneaster, cape figwort, herb robert, lady's bedstraw, mediterranean spurge, ornamental alliu, wood forget-me-not, woodruff, tormentil, knapweed, lemon balm, red campion, privet, grey willow, teasel, bell heather, goldenrod.

Our fragile craft art exhibition

I have been involved in an exhibition at St. John's Mill called Our Fragile Craft involving 12 artists using different media. These included, photography, acrylics, oil painting and textiles. I produced 3 new pieces of work for it , one of them called cooperation was a sunflower using golden rod dyed lambswool with couched leaves and a plant dyed bee. I have taken great delight this year in watching the vast number of bumble bees of all types in my garden.  Below is a photo of this work. Another plant design was a sowthistle which seeded itself outside my back door which I did sketches of and took photographs of to produce this hand stitched design on hand made paper. I will deal with the final piece of work in another blog as it is complex and experimental.

 I am really enjoying hand stitching again, my first love, and have recently joined the Hand Embroidery Network which is a group of like minded people who are inspirational and very gifted.
I am going on holiday for two weeks so will not be blogging for a while. I am going to Slovenia for a week to a hotel in a National park with a view outside the window of the Julian Alps where I hope to do lots of sketching and photography to get ideas for my next major exhibition based on biological forms. I am then spending 5 days in London with my son, and my daughter is joining us for 2 days. I have been reading On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson and  the beautiful book, The Hidden Geometry of Flowers by Keith Critchlow and will be doing research in the Natural History Museum in London.

Magical Fantastical Exhibition

I have work hanging in two exhibitions at present, one of them is the Magical Fantastical exhibition held at the Hodgson Loom Gallery with the wonderful work of Julia Ashby Smyth on display. I have three pieces on show, one of them is called Yggdrasil, based on Norse Mythology, where a dragon lives below Asgard and chews the roots of the mighty ash tree. The base of the work is made from plant dyed wool and cashmere which has been hand stitched. A detail of the dragon is shown below; it is stitched in stem stitch using stranded cotton. Other features in this myth are deer, a squirrel, a snake, an eagle and holy wells which are shown in a larger view of my work.

Roses

Finally a new post after a very busy year in the garden. On the 12th June my U3A herb group met at Ballaghenny nature Reserve. Here we found a profusion of wild flowers but especially Burnet roses [rosa pimpinellifolia] of varying colours which spread by suckers to cover a wide area.   We studied various facts about roses and found several recipes using them. The rose is the national flower of the USA and the birth flower for June, in fact roses were Benjamin Disraeli's favourite flower.
Both the flowers and leaves of roses are edible, rose petals, once the bitter white portion is removed, along with lavender and violets add a sweet flavour to salads. Of course rose hips are widely used, those of rosa rugosa grow along one side of my pond. The outside flesh can be nibbled at as the hips are so large but be sure not to eat the internal irritant hairs. I also make rose hip syrup by adding two parts sugar or honey to the strained liquid of boiled hips. This keeps for a couple of weeks in the fridge. A tea can also be made from  the hips by pouring boiling water and letting them infuse for 10 minutes They are a wonderful source of vitamin C. Burnet Roses photographs from Ballaghenny are seen below.

Roses are also used in perfumery Attar of Roses is the essential oil extracted from various rose petals and rose water is a by product from the production of rose based perfumes.