Salaric Gardening and Wildlife

The Cotswold Litter Pickers

A few days ago me and my family where out when we noticed an old man collecting litter by himself in the drizzly rain and not pleasant wind, he had his own bin with him. It was an inspirational and heart breaking moment. It was heart breaking because the litter should not be there – I hate litter bugs and at the moment our front garden is a dumping ground for the kids coming back from the shop on the corner and I hate it – plus the damage it can do to wildlife and it generally just makes everything that bit shabbier. But also one of the things I have noticed is that since the olympics there does not seem to have been much in the way of council/government cleaning up of our roads and what not. I was shocked when I went down to London – the contrast between this time last year and even the autumn and now is disgusting!

Bins get knocked over, things fall out of pockets and so on – litter isn’t all litter bugs so there needs to be some sort of clean up operation. We take the Cubs and out every now and then to litter pick the common but it can seem really disheartening when it appears you are the only people who care. So when I saw the guy picking litter I wanted a photograph to blog about it but I couldn’t get one as we drove past and though I started to walk back to get a photo the rain got heavy and I retreated. But I did draw this picture when I got home – first in graphite pencil and then I inked in the lines and rubbed out the pencil and then I coloured it in and the I added the rain which was the most nerve racking bit. I can’t remember if he had a facial hair or anything like that but it is good enough that my little girl recognised it as the man we had seen.

I posted it to Facebook and my blog since then I have had people suggesting urls one of which are these fabulous Litter Picking Heros!

Getting the Veggies Out

It’s been hard to get the veggies going this year but yesterday thanks to turning our dinning area into a make shift green house, we had our first home grown salad of the year.

Mary has been helping me pot out seedlings most of which actually survived the lovings of a two year old!

I have courette and pumpkin plants planted out in grow bags – I am in dispare over getting an allotment at the moment, there just simply is not enough space to grow what we want. For a start I didn’t want to really be growing stuff in the ‘grassy’ area, for a start it is supposed to be a nice garden area and secondly we can not make it look nice whilst I am growing things on it.

At the moment we radishes almost ready for first pickings and various salad leafs, there are peas and beans and root crops in various containers. The apple tree and blueberry bushes have all survived the winter though the new redcurrents and black current bushes did not survive a late frost much to my upset.

Jeany is being very good about watering the pots and has her own little butterfly corner developing, also I shouldn’t moan as the salad was very tasty and Mary eat the bowl of it I was going to put in the fridge for today’s lunch!

And also we have been enjoying the sunshine and having summer cocktails and everything 🙂 Still no BBQ this year yet though 🙁