Professor Sprout lives!

I spent this afternoon making my Professor Sprout props for tomorrow's Harry Potter fun day. The hat is an old sunhat with cardboard and hessian (burlap to my American readers) pasted over the top. Not a very exact or careful work, as I had no thin card and had to make the structure out of packing cardboard.

The top part of the hessian cover. I didn't have a big enough piece of hessian either to cover the whole crown of the hat so just made a little top knot and the rest all pieced together.

At least the Professor is not a fashion plate, so I can get away with the hat looking rumpty.

The mandrake is my piece de resistance. It's a parsnip carved with a face on it and a bouquet of artificial leaves poked into the top. The "arms" are made with parsley roots attached with skewers. The thing only has to last for a few hours tomorrow; if  wanted to last longer perhaps secure these with hot glue or a construction glue like "No more nails".

The face is outlined in waterproof marker.

And here is my selfie! I hope to add a wig tomorrow and will have my smock and scarf, boots and gloves on.

Signs of spring

Had a really nice day in the garden today. Things are starting to come up and come out. These hellebores are very difficult to photograph, as the heads hang down and I have to get right under the plants. A lot of spring things do this, or grow close to the earth on short stems, to protect the central reproductive part of the flower from the cold and rain.

There's such a clear light in spring, which produces very detailed photos, like this primula.

Galanthus nivalis, snowdrops. A nice clump...

...attracting bees. You can just see a bee's bum on the left hand tallest flower.

    I weeded parts of the vegetable garden today. We've had a very dry winter, so the ground is easy to work. My garlic is starting to pop up, and the tulip leaves are emerging. Very pleasant working with the mints in pots; lovely smell! I still have to take out some oregano that has taken over in the herb garden. It grows on root stolons so is a bit tricky.
    I haven't started on pruning the roses yet, as I have to buy a new pair of secateurs. No matter how I try to sharpen the old ones, they are not so good as brand new ones. I've had these current ones for about 10 years now, so I think I deserve to splash out on some new secateurs. It will make the pruning go more quickly, too.
 
      We are having a Harry Potter fun day at the library where I work, and I've agreed to be Professor Sprout for the day! Cunning, as I know I have most of the props; boots and gloves, and perhaps a carved parsnip for a mandrake. I've made house banners and painted a phoenix for the wall of the children's library, so it's been a busy week. Now I have to work on the Professor's costume, buy a witches hat and cover it with hessian. I've got an old smock that can be my overall, and some lace doilies for a lace scarf-thing. It has to be done by Sunday, so there's a bit of work to do!

Russian spambot

   Some crazy spambot in Russia is viewing my blog 21 pages at a time. I don't like this at all. It's happened before, and I was able to track down the culprits and get them to stop, through my "traffic sources" stats. This time, they are just using Google or some kind of mask that pretends it is Google. I did some investigation last time, and found that this is a common trick that some people use to push up their own stats; they use your content and your stats and pass it of as their own, so that their own site ranks higher and they can get revenue from your original content. I can't remember the name for this. There is an official term, but I think "scum" is quite a good one too. It's usually Russia or Ukraine that does this to me.
       There is an automatic viewer in the US, but this only looks at the latest new post about a minute after I've posted it; I'm guessing it's some kind of security surveillance thing checking for trigger words and phrases. I suppose this will only get more common as time goes on. Funny thing about all this surveillance though, it doesn't seem to be catching the people it hopes to catch. Nice, Munich, and various US shooters all got under the radar, as did the London bombings and Danish massacres of a few years ago. This is the problem with surveillance; it won't pick up the lone crazy who is not part of a network and does not include others in his (it's usually a man) planning. We can't yet go down the path of knowing exactly what every single person is planning to do, tomorrow, next week or next year. Perhaps one day this will be possible. I doubt it.

Galanthus nivalis

I thought I'd lost my snowflakes, but discovered them yesterday afternoon, doing really well.

It's always St. Patty's Day for this lady

Just love this lady!

Garden pics

Pics from today's garden walkies

"Soleil d'Or" jonquils

"Romanesco" broccoli and Wong Bok Chinese cabbage - looking nice and healthy

Kowhai (a New Zealand native tree) just starting to flower

Double primulas

"Quintessence" camellia

The last "Setsugekka" flower until next year

Violets have come out during the last week...

...but is there anything more depressing than old hydrangea heads? I hope to prune these off very soon.

On with the hellebores

Hellebores are starting to come out in the garden. These are wonderful winter flowers, coming at mid-winter and continuing through till late spring. This maroon one is particularly nice.

This hellebore is the one that was in the garden when I came here. Every year I've bought a couple more to add to the collection. My favourite is a freckly pink one, but sadly that doesn't seem to have a flower stalk this year.

The snowflakes are also beginning to come out. These bulbs seem to be incredibly hardy, needing no fertiliser or care. They often pop up in the gardens of abandoned country cottages, blooming away long after the people who planted them have moved on.

The weather here is now quite cold, too cold today to enjoy being outside; a "lazy wind" (so called because it blows straight through you, not going around you) has kept up all day, although the sun was bright. I've spent most of my time watching "Wives and daughters", the BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's novel, and reading a novel called "The summer before the war" by Helen Simonson, who wrote "Major Pettigrew's last stand". "The summer before the war" is a bigger, more serious novel (First World War) but I found it very enjoyable. There are echoes of E.F. Benson, because the novel is set in Rye, where the author grew up. There are a lot of themes in the novel, but they are never hammered hard; the position of women, particularly educated spinsters, the stultifying effects of "society" and "propriety" and of course, the brutality of war.

Back to work tomorrow. Oh God, it's the school holidays. Again.