I caught a segment of the BBC morning show this morning that left me disappointed and throwing my hands up in the air at what passes for "work" these days. The segment was supposed to be highlighting how gardeners can help to combat the decline in butterfly numbers by planting butterfly friendly plants. You can imagine my disappointment (and random mutterings) when the entire segment seemed to focus on "plant Buddleia and aren't we all having a lovely staged chat in this pretty garden?"

The guest of the slot appeared to be a dedicated butterfly conservationist who was billed as an "amateur gardener". We didn't hear very much from her, or get much information about the beautiful garden she has created as a haven for butterflies. We did hear a lot from the wittering "reporter".

Well, yes, of course you can plant Buddleia. You can especially plant the pink and lilac shades of Buddleia that flutterbies like best. But what if you want more? Or what if you want to attract/help butterflies and you don't have a garden big enough for a Buddleia?

Here's some collected wisdom on butterfly friendly gardens:

• Single flower forms are preferable so butterflies can get to the nectar (think Pot Marigold instead of French Marigold)
• Wall planters, window baskets, hanging baskets and patio pots are fab if space is limited
• Hang a bowl filled with pieces of ripe fruit (bananas, strawberries, oranges, apples etc) covered in fruit juice to make a simple butterfly feeder
• Make a mineral drink by placing some rounded pebbles in a saucer and add some muddy water and place in full sun near their favourite feeding place

Butterfly plants:

• Buddleia - pink and lilac forms
• Petunias
• Trailing Lobelia
• White Alyssum
• Million Bells
• Bur Marigold
• June Berry
• Lavender
• Ivy
• Hops
• Wallflowers
• Honesty
• Heliotrope
• Scabious
• Phlox
• Rudbeckia (fulgida)
• Aster
• Purpletop Vervain
• Echinacea (Purple coneflower)
• Purple Loosestrife

Once you have planted up some butterfly plants, get involved with the Butterfly Conservation Trust Campaign and Big Butterfly Count (July 16-30).

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Butterfly Flutterby originally appeared on Taexalia on April 5, 2011.

Last week my personal equilibrium was assaulted by an idiot from Scottish Hydro. This was later followed up by a pointless email from their customer service department who suggested I go and buy a sticker and decorate my door with it and their sales reps *may* adhere to the reques but, since the sticker is not legally binding, then again they may not.

This week my personal space, and indeed my personal equilibrium, has been assaulted by a charity no less.

Plastic bags are banned from my home. People who bring them in, even my mother-in-law, are given them back as they leave. Plastic bags are a scourge to the environment, whether they have a supermarket logo on them, or indeed a charity logo. As a person who sees the impact of plastic rubbish on wildlife, I detest them.

Since we moved here I have become increasingly appalled at the sheer volume of plastic sacks that are shoved through my letterbox by various charities (and companies trying to appear as charities). Some weeks I find myself with five different plastic bags begging for my old clothes. No-one, not even me, has enough clutter to fill these sacks. Each time one appears I have to take responsibility for the plastic piece of rubbish that it becomes because there is no-one to hand them back to.

Today, as I wandered to the kitchen for a coffee, I noticed that some idiot had left one of these sacks in my garden. Rather than walk four feet further and climb a thigh killing three steps to my front door and letterbox, they decided to simply dump their piece of DiabetesUK plastic waste in my garden. When I had collected the rubbish from my garden, I placed a call to the number on the sack to complain. You could say I reached the tipping point.

It seems that it is not even DiabetesUK who left the sack there, but a company they pay to deliver them. This means that the hard earned money that people donate to their charity is actually being used to pay non charity litter louts.

Having made the call, I then noticed that it wasn't just my garden that had been treated with such disrespect - the property next door also had a baggy dumped - this time on top of the wheelie bin at the top of the stairs. This property is empty and no-one will be there to collect the litter. When the wind picks up, I wonder what will happen to that piece of plastic waste?

Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Or the plastic islands in the Atlantic Ocean's Sargasso Sea?

Charity status should not mean these organisations are free to litter and pollute our world.

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Charity Pollution and Littering originally appeared on Taexalia on August 20, 2010.

Whilst I never really doubted it, there is something to be said for companion planting lore. When I read that peas don't like onions, I decided against planting them together - and both are thriving. Of course that doesn't really prove they don't like each other, it just proves they like where I planted them.

As I said in the same post, I had also read that sunflowers and potatoes are not comfy bedfellows, but it was too late for me because I already had half the sunflowers growing along the bottom of the potato rows. I left them together to see what would happen and here's the proof of the pudding - the sunflowers that have bloomed (despite lack of sun!) are the ones who don't have potatoes at their feet. It will be interesting to see if the adjacent potato plants show a smaller crop than the plants further up the row.

In the greenhouse I am about to enjoy sweet tasting success. I have two tomatoes that are nearly ripe, with a potentially huge crop to follow. This is my first serious attempt at growing tomatoes - last year I was gifted one of those wee kits and ended up with a scrawny single plant that cropped four marbles. A couple of years ago I had a similar result on a north facing windowsill in a flat.

This year I read a lot about tomatoes in books and online and I planted two types - a cordon variety and a bush variety. So many seeds germinated that I gave some plants away and was left with a surplus that allowed me to experiment... some in the greenhouse with growbags and growpots, some in the ground and some in planters in two different locations. Final results naturally aren't in, although an early conclusion is that we will likely be turning into tomatoes if they all ripen...

Creativity can flourish with the help of received wisdom but in allowing space for experimentation, and accepting failure is a part of the process, we can end up with more than we expected.

Like the sunflowers, creativity flourishes when it is given space away from things that detract from its growth. Creativity and competition are not good bedfellows - and a great post appeared yesterday on Journey To Authenticity that touched on my thoughts about this. A great reminder that creativity is about doing and being yourself, rather than trying to fit into everyone else's box/shoes/views.

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Sunflowers Potatoes Tomatoes originally appeared on Taexalia on August 9, 2010.

Weeds, they say, are simply flowers that are in the wrong place. A clump of thistles encroaching on my lettuce seedlings will end up in the composter, but the field nearby that has been left running wild with swathes of thistles that dance in a rich tapestry of colour are a favourite sight at this time of year.

Garden weeding has taken a back seat this week - the rain rain rain has kept me inside, and I have unleashed my frustration on some of the boxes and clutter that have encroached on the room that is supposed to be my creative den. I've been weeding the house, you might say.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to give it all away, what it would feel like to have nothing that needs to be tidied, organised, stored or dusted. Then I lay my hands on a tattered piece of paper with some scrawny handwriting that reminds me of something I never want to forget...

So I let go of the idea of turfing it all and focus on weeding out and discarding the real clutter and I sort the seeds of memories into boxes for the loft.

I wonder about this modern need to store memories and trinkets and souvenirs in rooms we never visit, rather than keeping the stories only in the mind... but the creative den is starting to look like the room I've been conjuring and less like an excuse not to create things.

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Weeding originally appeared on Taexalia on August 8, 2010.

It doesn't look like much more than a scrawny patch of neglected garden - and in a way that's exactly what it is. The hedge-in-the-wrong-place was dug out a few months ago and still I haven't come up with A Plan for this corner, other than vague references to "a wildlife garden, or "a wildlife pond"...

Yet this bare patch of soil has been as much a part of the circle as the Borage flowers, or the goldfinches.

Can you see any holes? They were made by solitary ground-nesting bees. On the day I noticed them I was sitting on the edge of the strawberry patch humming and hawing about where to set up the overflow veg patch. Had the bees nested elsewhere then this patch of ground might currently be sporting the crazy growth of the pumpkin plant. Instead, I left it to the bees.

Yesterday, before the deluge, a family of sparrows entertained me as they bathed in the dust. A patch of bare earth is vital for feather maintenance - removing excess oils, cleaning out parasites and even just cooling the birds and fledglings on a hot day.

So whenever I do create a Plan, the wildlife garden will have a patch of bare soil to keep the birds and the bees happy. Sometimes doing nothing in the garden is all the wildlife needs.

The sunflowers are giving up waiting for the sun and opening their glowing heads regardless...

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Nothing Is Useful originally appeared on Taexalia on August 1, 2010.

Gardening involves a lot of standing staring at a space waiting for ideas to materialise, or seeds to sprout, or plants to flower, or flowers to fruit, or fruits to ripen...

I tested a bulging pea pod this morning. The peas inside were sweet and delicious and tiny. Not yet peas.

Elsewhere on the plot I found bulging kohlrabi, a courgette, salad leaves, beetroot, teenage carrots and potatoes.

We ate well.

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Harvest Basket originally appeared on Taexalia on July 30, 2010.

"Should is a word that makes a prisoner of us." ~ Louise L Hay

I'm completely rubbish at exuding self-confidence. I've come to the conclusion this is why I seem to be afflicted with unwanted, ininvited "you shoulds".  It seems to me that if I had the knack of exuding self-esteem, people wouldn't feel compelled to patronise me or treat me like I need help and advice with everything. It's pretty much like this: if you aim a sentence at me that begins with "you should" then my brain is going to shut down on you. "You should", you see, is so often about failing to acknowledge the current achievement. "You should" ignores the smile on my face because a seed turned into a seedling and survived weather, snails, slugs, soil conditions and my erratic planting calendar and grew into a plant.

My gardening seems to attract a lot of this negativity from one or two people, and half the time I have to sit down a figure out whether I really am the crap gardener they were anticipating, or whether I'm doing just fine after all. I'm quite happy to potter about in my garden and do my own thing. I'm not afraid of failure and I'm lucky enough to be in a position where, if all else fails, I can still put food on the table - even if I did have to buy it from someone else. I'm one of those people who learns by doing, by trial and error, by searching out some information and maybe applying it and maybe making it up as I go along. I like to experiment.

My potato patch is a case in point. I had no idea how to grow potatoes when I started out. I didn't care if there was a school of thought that potatoes are hard to grow because they sometimes get blight. I didn't care about how much space they need and whether that was too much in relation to the rest of my garden. I still don't.

I wanted to grow potatoes because my Granda grew potatoes, because I remembered the excitement of sticking a fork in the earth and uncovering the swollen white tubers that would be on the table within hours, shiny with melted butter and bursting with taste.

I bought some seed potatoes, chitted them and planted them out in the soil. Maybe I was too early, maybe I was too late, maybe they were too close to each other, maybe not. I watched the soil every day and nothing. Hindsight says that of course I didn't know how long potato seedlings take to show because this is the first time I ever put a tattie in the soil and waited. But the doomsayers had a feel day (is it field day or feel day? I think feel day, in the Doric sense, is about right...) and the "you shoulds" came pouring out - as well as the even more unhelpful "you should haves".

When the greenery finally started poking out of the soil, the congratulations did not come. "You should" prefers failure.

The potato plants got bigger and bigger. I had to endure more than one conversation about how I've grown too many potatoes. Because of course I have to have done something the wrong way.

At this point I will add that my own internal critic quite often feels redundant.

I'm told it is too early to pull a plant up for potatoes and I'm thinking that if I have too many potatoes then surely it's best to start eating them sooner rather than later... No?

"You should wait..."

Which is sort of like a red rag to a bull.

The fork goes in the soil a little later, and I dig up the first ever portion of tatties that I grew myself.

Just enough for two people to have with home-grown salad...

You should have seen the smile on my face.

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Not Buried originally appeared on Taexalia on July 18, 2010.

The veg plot looks like a veg plot today.

The salad bed is overflowing with goodness, the brassicas appear to be flourishing under their bridal veil and the potatoes are hinting at underground promise.

The Everything Else plot isn't big enough. There were originally two Everything Else plots in the plan but I randomly decided to grow tatties and figured I'd figure everything else out later. For now, the EE bed is full - although it doesn't look it yet as some seedlings are tiny and some seeds only went in today.

I was going to plant more peas but I read they don't like onions and the onions needed a space. Cucumbers are friendly with everyone so I popped them in next to the onions and added a sneaky row of radishes because the peas do like them.

I didn't know that sunflowers and potatoes don't make good bedfellows but it's too late to fix it since, for now, both seem to be growing well and I don't have the heart to pull up sunflowers.

So far cats and snails have not induced blue words...

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Peas Don’t Like Onions… originally appeared on Taexalia on June 16, 2010.

Earthship Fife Troll

We visited the Earthship Fife today for an informative and thought-provoking tour. If you get a chance to visit and take a tour, I highly recommend it.

Sustainable living is something I aspire to and, since we acquired our 1950s built hoose, we have been trying to come up with a plan (and dosh!) to turn it into as eco-friendly a pad as possible... Visiting the earthship did inspire the odd ideafest that had us imagining knocking down the hoose and digging an earthship hobbithole into our hilly site - but I rather suspect the ethos of the earthship idea revolves around inspiring people to make the best of old builds as well as inspiring people to build new homes in a greener way.

There were two things that really excited me:

Blackwater Reed Bed

I knew there was a blackwater reed bed at the earthship and I have seen them on Grand Designs and whatnot, but when we walked into the actual greenhouse I was happily surprised by how lovely, comfortable and fragrant this one was. It didn't look like a poo recycling system, it looked just like a happy and prolific greenhouse.

Unfortunately legislation demands that any blackwater reed bed system must be sited 50 metres from the hoose, and since I doubt any of our neighbours would agree to us taking over part of their garden, I won't be building one here.

Some legislation is just silly.

Old Car Tyres

These were recycled not just to build the walls and create the biomass which stores heat and regulates temperatures within the earthship hoose, but also used as steps and landscaping around the site.

Since I can't build my own earthsip on the current T@exalialand, I started seeing ways that old car tyres could be useful in solving some of the problems in our garden which has lots of different levels and slopes.

I've also got a great idea for potato planters...

I need old car tyres!

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Earthship Fife originally appeared on Taexalia on May 2, 2010.

"Did you ever think, when you held or looked at a beautiful pearl,
that its origin was irritation? An oyster, in response to the
irritating presence of sand within its shell, creates a thing of
beauty." ~ Thomas F Crum

I thought I had found the pearl birthed from the last piece of grit but it seems that I have just floated on the ebb to a different shore and inherited a new piece of grit. A second strike of lightning.

I want to know what the thing of beauty is that this piece of grit is going to create. I don't want to wait, to fight, to stand up for my rights. I don't want to endure, to learn to relax and cope. I don't want to be told to shut up and do some gardening. The piece of grit has really really sharp edges and is irritating me multiple times a day. It is constant. It is in my shell, in my body mind and emotions and it isn't going to go away.

It interrupts my work flow. It interrupts my sleep. It interrupts my creative flow. It interrupts my dreams. It interrupts the chapter of the book I am reading.

It breaks into my world whether I am doing something mundane like washing the dishes or something constructive like trying to figure out code on my website or something deeper like just trying to meditate.

Funnily enough I feel emotions when this piece of grit makes its presence known, when the people who are meant to clean the grit up fail spectacularly - not all of these emotions are sunshine and daisies. In fact none of them are.

That is all.

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But I *am* Living In The Moment – It is the moment that is the problem originally appeared on Taexalia on October 6, 2009.