Hacking Through the 100 Aker Wood

Yes, it's Thoughts From a Secret Garden... secret because it doesn't look so much like a garden at the moment as a combination wildlife meadow and rubbish dump. Or possibly an art installation featuring a large Ikea sink unit (yes, we really do have everything including the kitchen sink in our garden!), a washing whirligig that looks as if it was designed to go on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, heaps of dead Garden Stuff waiting vainly to be taken to the tip, and now, arrestingly, several teetering stacks of old tyres, all sizes from tractor down to quad bike, awaiting their transformation into raised beds. 
Oh, and three puzzled but philosophical guinea-pigs and their moveable, posable ark-and-run combo with purple extendy-tunnel, who watch the chaos happening all around them with interest, and provide an encouraging chorus of whistles and squeaks every time someone walks past. That is, I know what they really want is for me to stop and pick dandelions for them, or shower them with food, or top up their water bottle, but hey - we need all the encouragement we can imagine here!

We're a bit further along with the Grand Plan now, clearing weeds and rubble. Everything has taken off from a standing start since the weather warmed up. I spent a week catching glimpses of bindweed shoots growing vertically up out of the rockery garden and each time telling myself, "...must make half an hour later on to pull that up before it gets any bigger..." and now it's two feet long and trying to strangle my potted honeysuckle before I can even plant it. Agh.

Talking of Grand Plans, my Freedom Cats scheme, designed to provide our pampered but imprisoned moggies with a taste of the great outdoors by bolting a sturdy fruit cage to the outside of the house and having, in effect, a feline aviary (a feliary?) outside the kitchen window where they can run up and down branches and sun themselves and froth over the sparrows flying past their noses, is still, alas only a scheme. It's nesting time, and the cats are not amused. Rabbit leaves her 2nd-floor window open at the bottom, and they line up to watch the birds fly past, like spectators at an air-show.

Here's Sping, being Royally Unamused in the grip of Rabbit.

Meanwhile, outside, the gardening zigzags haphazardly onwards... Tigger has sunk a bucket of tadpoles into the ground as a pond, and claimed a tractor tyre (which I personally rolled across from Tyre and Battery... stopped the traffic, that did!) to use as her own raised bed. I'll have to fetch another one now for my Tyre Garden project. Sheesh.

Agh, frost... and in the second week of May. It's such a frost pocket here. The cold air just rolls down the hill from the Planning offices (thanks again, guys) and flops over our gardens here like a big, deep-frozen duvet. I have just bought a wee zip-up vaguely pagoda-shaped greenhousey thing from Down To Earth (local garden centre), just big enough to grow some tomatoes because I simply cannot resist that tropical, peppery smell from the foliage, and am currently, nervously, trying to figure out if the plants I bought will be safer being plonked in the shed every night, or whether the Plastic Pagoda will protect them. Hmm.

Tigger is resisting all attempts at blandishment vis-a-vis growing veg.  "I just want pansies," she reiterates firmly every time I try. "Pansies and frogs." Sounds like a specialist dating service. Oh well. I still have my secret weapon... Grow Your Own Sweetcorn; that being her favourite veg of all time. I grew it myself when I was her ageish, but back in the 70s, Mum had never encountered such culinary exotica before, and boiled my single cob gingerly for a few minutes. It was practically raw, still trailing whiskers of silk, unseasoned, unbuttered... not a good introduction. The Jolly Green Giant would have fainted dead away.