Five, Four, Three ...

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Springblooms Are Go!

In a garden near you International Springbloom Rescue is there to save you! Gone are the winter blues the moment springblooms appear in their droves. Smiles light up on many a face, puppies are frolicking, kittens are purring, birds are singing, bees are buzzing and suddenly all is right with our widdle world once more. 

If your world is still devoid of springblooms call International Springbloom Rescue, their mission is to save you from flower deprivation forthwith!

Copyright 2010 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Potager Fun: Mix and Match

Potagers are fun, anything goes. You can mix vegetables with flowers and herbs and fruit trees and whatever else you care to throw into the pot of potage (soup). Mix and match people, don't be scared, simply mix and match.

Kitchen (victory) gardens have become all the rage lately but not every (would be) gardener is the proud possessor of vast acres. Many have to make do with just a tiny plot of land. Potagers are the right choice if you want to grow your own veg, fruit, flowers and herbs but want your smallish garden/yard to look pretty at the same time. 

A potager is a kitchen garden, an ornamental one. Most people love flowers (ooh pretty!) so do add flowers to your potager. They will not only look good, both in the potager and in a vase, but will also attract loads of insects which is a real bonus. Apart from that you'll save loads of money as you don't have to buy those poisonous bunches of scentless flowers from the shop. 

There are quite a few misconceptions about the potager concept; some people think it's mostly a kitchen garden which it is not as the pretty aspect of it is also of the importance that is very. Some think that potagers are mainly about annuals but again with the no. You can pretty much bung everything in; trees, flowers, bulbs, shrubs, veg and even the kitchen sink if you feel inclined to do so. Another thing not widely understood is that the pretty is not only provided by flowers as vegetables, fruit and herbs can look awfully pretty too. See those black peppers? Gorgeous or what? I rest my case.

So go forth and potager away with gay and colourful abandon. Plant roses next to your garlic, have cabbages together with bulbs. Plunk that kitchen sink smack in the middle of your potager and plant it up with whatever takes your fancy. Be brave, be bold, have fun! Have a potager feast for all your senses, you know you want to.

copyright 2010 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Get Your Spring Fix Here

At what o'clock is Spring? That's a question I ask myself as soon as the last leaf has fallen from the trees. Spring is my favourite time of the year as it's so full of promises of things to come. Whether those promises will be fulfilled remains to be seen, but often the promise of something good and the anticipation thereof is something to treasure in and of itself.

Spring is late this year; for a long time our gardens were, in sharp contrast to many a winter in decades before, covered with a thick blanket of snow. And quite a few of us (garden bloggers of the world) suffer from a surfeit of snow even now.

Courtesy of many a night of frost and freezingly cold days we've been experiencing lately, the ground is still frozen in the Bliss garden but it hasn't stopped that most magical of moments from appearing in the garden. The moment when from the unprepossessing brown earth suddenly a miracle of flowers erupts with utterly joyful abandon.

Although it's a miracle that has happened time and time again, it never fails to amaze me and fill my heart with utter Bliss. Is there anything more glorious and uplifting than this?

 You'll have to be the sad possessor of a very cold heart indeed not to find joy in the utter sumptuousness that is Spring!

copyright 2010 Y.W. Heuzen

How Now Brown Cow Meets Piet Oudolf

That's right, it's time for an elocution lesson. As a garden connoisseur you are bound to have heard of  Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf but if you are non Dutch speaking do you also know how to pronounce his name correctly?

When I talk with non Dutch garden geeks who are raving about Mr Oudolf I often have to ask them to repeat that name as it's mostly so badly mispronounced as to leave me clueless of whom they are talking about.

Joe Swift from Gardener's World is a prime example of how not to garble Piet's name. Last year in June he presented a GW programme about Prairie Gardens where he mentioned a well known designer by the name of &^$# gobble (**&^ dy *&#@ gook. What? I am Dutch and have heard his name mangled in unbelievable ways before but this was really bad to the power of über cheese.

So here goes, please pay attention and that goes for you in the back as well:

Piet is difficult to pronounce when your native tongue is English, I readily admit it, but lets have a go at it anyway: Piet is pronounced as ....... Pete.  Sorted!

Oudolf is slightly more difficult but I think you will be able to pull it off if you put your back into it.

Oudolf has 2 syllables: Ou - dolf

First syllable  sounds exactly the same as ou in house or ouch. Now say ouch, now say it without the ch. Done.

Second syllable: dolf. Say dolphin, now say it without the in just dolfff. Let's put those two sounds together Ou-dolff. Piet Oudolf. Done and dusted.

This free elocution lesson was brought to you courtesy of your friendly Internet neighbourhood gardener Yolanda Elizabet from Bliss!

O, and if perchance you know Mr Swift personally, please put the man out of his misery and direct him  Bliss-ward.

NB all the pictures shown in this post were taken in June 2008 at Piet Oudolf's garden and nursery.

copyright 2010 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Egg, Bacon, Spam, Baked Beans, Spam, Sausage and Spam

Spammity spam, wonderful spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam! That seems to be on the menu lately and frightfully often too. Is it me or has there been an influx of spam recently?

Comments is something we bloggers love so please dear reader, keep them coming.  But spamments? Not so much!

It's very annoying when your blog gets hit by spamments. At one time a fully paid up member of the SadPeopleRUs society left 12 spamments on 1 of my posts. Twelve! How silly is that? Of course I removed them all forthwith. Fortunately this doesn't happen all that often. What does happen with nauseatingly regularity is spam left on older blog posts. The reasoning behind this tactic is probably that you are too lazy to search for that old post and remove the spam. Ha, how little do they know me. 

Blogger has been busy developing new thingumabobs and has given us, apart from the word verification thingy that stops spam bots, a new little tool to help fight evil spam! And fight it we will for the sake of Christmas, puppydogs, and fluffy kittens and stuff!

If you haven't discovered the latest Blogger Fight-That-Evil-Spam thingy yourself here's how you do it:

-go to Settings

-Click on Comments

- scroll down a bit till you reach comment moderation on posts older than ..

- fill in how many days you want

-save settings

This way you'll never have to hunt for spam on older posts ever again.

Of course you could also opt for moderating all comments before they appear on your blog but I personally am not that keen to spam-sit (simply can't be bothered) so I've chosen not to go that route.

Copyright 2010 Y.E.W. Heuzen

WeR3

Outdoor space, the final frontier

These are the voyages of the Bliss Gardener

Her continuing mission to explore strange new worlds

To seek out new life

and new civilisations

To boldly go where no gardener has gone before

Quite some time ago it struck me that embarking on a journey in space is strangely akin to starting out as a gardener as you never know what will happen next, who you'll meet and what new things you will discover. Thought it might be fun to do a post about it, especially as quite a few of my USA garden blogger friends are Trekkies as I am. I discovered Science Fiction when I was 11 years old and have never stopped reading and watching it since.

Last week I finally got a new computer, a notebook this time. My old desktop pc was so decrepit it had oak cladding and was as fast as very thick molasses. Now I've embarked on a new journey of discovery; how does my new notebook work? In the process I've discovered unknown depths in the use of both my own and the English language. Fortunately you were not there to witness it.

Today is a bit of a special day for me as I am using my new notebook for the very first time to write a post for my Bliss blog and today it's also 3 years ago that I started this blog, which explains the tittle.

Never thought that blogging could/would be so much fun and it would be such a great and fun way to explore new gardening worlds, to seek out new garden friends and encounter strange new media such as blogger and twitter.


copyright 2010, Y.E.W. Heuzen

Bad

Dolly: I can't watch this anymore, I really can't, that dog is so bad. Bad, bad, really, really bad!

Tara: who's bad?

Tara: when we went shopping the other day I just popped into the butcher's while Yolanda wasn't looking and helped myself to a string of sausages.
It is self service in there, isn't it? So who's bad?
Dolly: but stealing sausages is not the only bad thing that pup did. I won't look but have a good look yourself. I hope you have a strong stomach because this is bad, bad, really, really bad.





Honest, I kid you not, that pup is pure evil.







She's bad.





Bad, really, really, bad!






Who's bad? Well, that dog is.






See?










Been hitting the bottle lately.
Often! That dog is a lush. And if you think you've seen it all, think again.
Still not looking, but if you keep your eyes peeled you can probably catch that dog doing something very, very bad. Oh yeah, at one time in her life she must have been a fully paid up member of Fagin's gang.
See that hankie sticking out of Yolanda 's pocket while that bad pup is pretending to look the other way?
Here she is, still pretending not to look. Yeah, right!
The bad, bad, really, really bad dog lifted the hankie without Yolanda noticing a thing. And if being a pickpocket isn't bad, really, really bad enough, she added insult to injury by shredding it to bits.
Who's bad? Well, that dog is. Ladies and gentlemen of the blogging world jury, I rest my case.




Yolanda: in case you are wondering what Tara's favourite tipple is:
What else did you expect?
Tara: who's bad?


On a more personal note:
Also bad was that I had to go to the dentist yesterday to have a tooth (molar) out. For the past 2 years I've had an infection in my lower jaw and even after 4 root canals and antibiotics twice, the infection kept returning. It was a bad, bad, really really bad infection so the tooth had to come out. Today I'm feeling ever so slightly sorry for myself as I now have a gaping hole in my mouth, which is bad, really really bad. It will take 6 months before that will be sorted with an implant and some bridgework which is too bad, really!

copyright 2010 Y.E.W. Heuzen