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2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
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Greenbench Greetings
Christmas Greetings to all my Greenbench followers. Please enjoy one of my favourite photos of the year taken on a crisp frosty winter’s morning.
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Abandonned
I couldn’t resist taking a few pics of this little cameo!
So many questions!
Are the bucket and spade not wanted any more? Were they left by an unhappy little toddler? Sad!
Did a family sit down for a rest and put the bucket and spade down by their side and then walk off leaving them behind? Sadder!
Did a family sit down to rest and a big wave took the family out to sea? Even sadder!
Another journey into Herefordshire saw us in search of a National Garden Scheme (The Yellow Book) village garden. This garden surrounded a former rectory of the village and it had been renovated over the last seven years. It was a garden of many parts, an arboretum, herbaceous borders, shrub borders, a kitchen garden and a rose garden.
Join us as we take a wander in pictures.
It is just 2 years since I launched my blog. I didn’t have any expectations of it. I didn’t know which directions it would follow. It has changed in its two years, generally the posts are longer and have fewer words but more photos.
About 330 posts have appeared on Greenbenchramblings and there have been about 22000 views and 1500 comments.
I need to select a bright cheerful photo as my Happy Birthday card to Greenbenchramblings, but I have too many to choose from. So here is my selected short list of ten photos taken over the last few weeks.
So it is up to you to decide which one you would put on the birthday card to celebrate my 2 years of blogging. Which is it to be?
We have created a new feature on our allotment this week – a green roof. We thought we would try to make up for the area of ground taken up by the footprint of our shed by making a garden on its roof. We have spent months at the planning stage, working out how to strengthen the roof, how to make sure we could still collect rain water run-off to fill our butts and choosing plants that would look good and support wildlife. We would like the roof to entice more beneficial insects , pollinators and natural pest controllers to visit our plot. Spiders, beetles, hoverflies will also be welcomed as our little garden helpers and of course we want to attract butterflies too just to delight in watching them.
After strengthening the structure of the shed by building an internal framework of 2 x 2 inch lengths of wood, we added a second layer of roofing felt. Next we fitted the outside frame out of 6 inch deep feather edge and inside this stapled down a double layer of geo-textile membrane. We hope the membrane will allow rainwater to pass through it after permeating through the compost. The rainwater will then be caught in the guttering and can run into the butts.
A structure of 2 x 2 inch lengths of wood was used to divide up the surface.
We next added the first layer of special compost to a depth of about an inch. This is a lightweight compost to which we added perlite to a ratio of 1 to 3 perlite to compost. Chicken wire was then laid over this first layer of compost and then a second one inch layer of our compost/perlite mixture was added. The wire should help hold the compost in place in times of heavy rain and we hope it will also give something for the roots to grow through and grip onto.
Finally the planting. Delicate alpines in some sections and mixed sedum and sempervivum in others. We added a driftwood feature for interest.
What we hope we have created is a little meadow in the air, a miniature garden that takes up no growing space that could otherwise be used for crop production. We will have the added benefit of an increase in insulation, giving us a cooler shed in the summer and a warmer space in the winter.
So now we are keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that we do not have any heavy downpours before the plants get their roots down, and hoping that Blackbirds do not find a way in. They have a habit of uprooting young plants in the hope of finding a tasty morsel.
I shall keep you informed of progress.
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Thanks
I have been nominated for three awards in the last few days so this is a thank you message to The Garden Smallholder for nominating me for the One Lovely Blog Award and the Very Inspiring Blogger Award and to Ariston Organic for nominating my “Echinacea the Coneflower” post for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award.
As a part of accepting these awards I have to say 7 things about myself and pass on the awards to 10 other bloggers.
So here are 7 things about me –
1 My middle name is Arthur after my Grandad who called me his Little MacGregor.
2 I am building up my Flickr Photostream but it is taking me ages.
3 I am an obsessive seed sower.
4 My Daughter keeps reminding me of the time I dropped her in the snow in order to save my Nikon from falling into it.
5 I became a fisherman when I was 4 and still love fishing 57 years later.
6 I am rekindling my love of painting.
7 I enjoy the work of land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long and sculptors who work with nature such as David Nash and Peter Randall-Page.
My 10 blogs I want to nominate for these two awards are
1 thescottishcountrygarden
2 mybeautifulthings
3 allotmental
4 grandparentsplus2
5 the pyjama gardener
6 pbmgarden
7 gettin’ fresh!
8 The Gardening Canuck
9 Penny’s Garden; a harvest beyond my front door
10 Christy’s Cottage Wildlife Garden
I appreciate that not all bloggers like the idea of awards. Please accept my nomination as an appreciation of your blog.
If you accept the awards please follow these “rules”.
1 Thank the person who nominated you.
2 Add the awards to your blog.
3 Share 7 things about yourself.
4 Pass the awards on to 10 nominees.
5 Include this set of rules.
6 Inform your nominees by posting a comment on their blogs.
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Once upon a time there was a beautiful island inhabited only by birds……
This is not a beautiful video but one that should be seen by everyone in the world and so I have it here to share a bit further. Please click on the red link and share/ re-blog it as much as possible.
Library of Most Controversial Files‘s video: This film should be seen by the entire world!
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Do snowmen travel by bus?
Sometimes things happen in life that make you ask hugely important questions, life-changing in fact. Today as we drove to the local garden centre we saw these characters waiting at a bus stop. I had to stop and snap up a photo. And this experience brought one of these massive questions to the fore.
Do snowmen travel by bus?
Sadly, the character on the left got fed up of waiting and fell asleep.
greenbenchramblings 