Modern media Shelf

Modern media finds a modern home! This cool shelf is more like a work of art that holds your mini audio system and up to 63 CDs than a piece of furniture. The unique wave design is sure to add appeal to your home decor.

This 3-shelf unit adds storage and flexibility to store your CD collection.

Sleek and Stylish, the crisp lines of this media shelf create usable space in an artistic way. The silver and black colors create wonderful contrast on any color wall.

This is a modern media solution for your modern lifestyle. Delivering style and function together in one package this wall mount media shelf pleases even the toughest critic. The black laminate top is accented by the silver metal framing that supports the entire unit making this a real eye catcher in your office or home.

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Nature & gardening blogs

I've been enjoying reading other people's posts on their nature and gardening blogs. We share a community that wouldn't have been possible in immediate time in a pre-internet age.

I'm mindful, however, of the correspondence that keen naturalists and gardeners had via (very slow) posts that traveled by horseback, carriage, ship, and courier. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, William and John Bartram, Asa Gray, Andre Michaux, Mark Catesby, John Jame Audubon, Lewis and Clark, among many others on this continent (North America), corresponded widely with fellow observers throughout the world, not to mention the VERY many others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. And they all depended on much slower transmission of observations and thoughts.

But I''m grateful for the ability of the internet to connect us (in a much humbler way) in real time, with our observations of nature and experiences in our gardens.

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A Better Day.

Today the sun shone, occasionally, and I was able to get out into the garden to wash stones though I kept getting distracted by all the butterflies.

And then this would happen.

Yesterday we had 55mm of rain in 24 hours, half of it in just 2 hours. All the rain that falls onto the hillside gets caught on the road and then channelled down our gravel drive. Yesterday's deluge not only washed out most of the gravel that Romas had been barrowing up from the stream but overran the yard and threatened to flood out the waste water treatment thingy (septic tank). So out we went, clearing ditches and creating dams across the road to divert the water onto my neighbour's fields. Note- wearing shorts with wellington boots in heavy rain results in lots of water inside the boots. Peter had to try 3 different routes home last night to get round the flooded roads. When the postman came today he told me that many farmers' lanes had been washed away .

However, I've been reading a few blogs written by people in Louisiana, ( Thanks Julie for the 'Round the world' link,) and in comparison it wasn't all that bad.

Just another beautiful butterfly.

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Breezy Shores Home

Sculptor Elena Colombo created this fantastic getaway home located in the neighborhood of Breezy Shores, a small beach community in Greenport, New York. I love, love love all the color she uses into her little beach home and the unique elements like the red-painted tree stumps! Genius! -Martha Stewart.com

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Time to head south?

The ruby-throated hummingbirds are whizzing around our 3 feeders -- there are at least 4-5; it's hard to tell. It's a reminder that fall is coming, even though there's plenty of warm weather ahead, the days are visibly shortening. A fellow garden blogger in northern B.C. reports a first frost warning (yikes!); another garden blogger friend in England is putting one of his pea patches to bed, and sowing mustards as a cover crop.

And I'm seeing monarchs coming through as they make their way south to Mexico, and their overwintering grounds in Michoacan.

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Balcony gardening ... or just exterior decorating?

What makes for a good balcony garden? Is it the variety of plants? How healthy they are? The visual impact?



Probably the answer is all of these. But it's difficult sometimes to score highly in all three categories at once. Playing safe and only choosing plants which you know will do well often means a balcony with just the old favourites - pelargoniums, surfinia and, here at least, plumbago. Creating visual impact often means restricting the plants to just one or two colours. Going for variety can mean that half your plants are experiments that don't work and end up looking tatty.


I'll cheerfully admit that my balcony definitely comes into the "variety at the expense of looking tatty" category, especially at the moment. It's the end of the season and even the plants which did well are looking as if they've had too much sun, fought off the pests for too long, and put out more blooms than they've got strength for. Those tell tale brown stems are starting to appear, and dead-heading no longer produces the same amount of flowers as it did a couple of months ago. And most of the experiments have just given up and died. Work on the balcony now consists chiefly of tidying up and pulling things out.


But while I was on holiday I came across some balconies whose owners had clearly gone for a different approach - visual impact at all costs. And some of them were stupendous, despite being incredibly simple and confining themselve to the old favourites. I loved the mass of pink ivy-leaved geraniums growing on the balcony in the top picture, and the strong colours of the ever-present surfinia too. And the salmon coloured zonal pelargoniums reminded me that my own, though they've been wonderful for several years, are now past their best. It's time to take cuttings and start again.





These begonias weren't quite so interesting, but better than the photo shows - as ever it's the problem of photographing red.


But my favourite was a balcony with no flowers at all - just leaves. A whole set of containers full of coleus, in an amazing variety shades and patterns. I've been meaning to grow some coleus for ages but not got around to it. Next year I certainly will.

For me these single-colour, single plant balconies aren't what gardening is all about. It's just exterior decorating - though I admit that the condition of the plants on these balconies showed that their owners certainly knew how to keep them healthy. But it's a get-plants-from-the-garden-centre-and-throw-them-away-at-the-end-of-the-season approach which would, as far as I'm concerned, take all the fun out of it.

So my balcony will probably never smack you in the eyes like these did. A pity, because I enjoy the visual impact of plants too. But it would mean giving up too much. I'll stick with looking tatty.

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Dismal Days.

Yesterday, sunshine and showers.

Monsoon like conditions at mid-day today.

Matches my mood after coming home from the start of year staff meeting. I went in quite a relaxed mood as this term as I'll only be teaching part-time. Then we were told that a colleague in a nearby school died unexpectedly a few days ago, the father (39) of one of our families, who had a stroke just before the holidays, died leaving 3 young children , one of my last year's children has just been diagnosed with leukemia and the prognosis is very poor and another child will be joining us whose father has been battling cancer for 3 years and is about to have more major surgery. Other families are having desperate personal difficulties. And these are just the things that we know about. Our very caring Head emphasised that we should be focusing on getting to know our children and nurturing them before worrying about ticking government boxes. We have a couple of years' breathing space before the inspectors are due, as we had an Ofsted last December.

Sorry to write such a depressing post but these things are filling my head at the moment. Now is the time to give myself a kick in the butt and count all the blessings that God has given me and my family, no life threatening illnesses, many friends to talk to and a vision of the road ahead.

"Even in darkness there is light."

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