Frugal Living, Gardening and Pets Vs Pests!

September Sunshine and Fun in the Frugaldom Garden
Part 1

This is part 1 of a 2 part post for today. I hope nobody minds, but it's a bit of a frugaldom experimental game.

Better late than never - the sunflowers are all beginning to open now, bringing some added colour to the garden. What I love about these is their immense size, towering above everything else out there. They seem to lift their faces to the sun, then bow their heads to the birds and insects that descend upon them. They make ideal models for some frugal camera fun.

I love taking a photograph and then finding out that it has so much more detail than you had ever imagined. It's like discovering extra photos in a box, ones you didn't know you had taken. This morning's offerings provided many more than the handful I snapped, making this an excellent photographic game, worthy of competitive status.

The garden is a great place for playing this frugal game, but you can organise your frugal shoot absolutely anywhere you choose.

These are the handful of photographs that I took this morning.

Once they were opened up on computer screen, they revealed much more than first expected.

The garden looks lovely and sunny, you can just make out one of the ducks in the background.

The rabbit is out and about, scurrying around beneath the veggies and getting up to her usual nonsense.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, Scruffy cat is lurking, but I couldn't see her at the moment.

The wall is, once more, a blaze of colour from yet another flush of sweet peas, so I'll be cutting more of them this afternoon to refill the vases indoors - much nicer and far more frugal than air fresheners, in my opinion.

Even the dog roses are still finding the will to flower, despite there being so many rosehips around.

This particular part of the wall is a mass of ivy, roses and sweet peas, all fighting for space.

In the vegetable plots, the greenery is now reaching almost a metre high in places, as the brussel sprouts, kale and sprouting broccoli take over their allocated patches.

None of these were covered this year, so they have been open to the abuse of hundreds of white butterflies that are forever fluttering around the place. Fortunately, their numbers seem to be in gradual decline, being replaced by many more tortoiseshells.

Floppity has a whale of a time in the garden. She just pleases herself where she goes, what she does and when she eats - not always a good thing, I might add. There are numerous digging patches around the garden where she has been attempting to burrow.

Eventually, however, she usually locates the cat for us, then has a game of chase around the garden. The cat always wins the race but that's probably owing to the fact that the rabbit is bigger than her.

This morning, Floppity eventually found said cat sleeping beneath the sprouting broccoli. Scruffy cat was not overly amused by her rude awakening!

It has take me until now to realise that my purple curly kale isn't all purple! There seems to be two varieties, or else colour is dependent on some other factor.

I don't suppose the chickens will bother, they seem to enjoy pecking at it whatever type they are given.

Further down the wall are my late sunflowers. These have all decided to flower, although I'm not sure how many finches will remain in the garden by the time these turn to seed.

All going well, I'll save some heads off these glorious flowers and store the seeds for future use, probably for feeding the wild birds that frequent the bird tables and our wildbird corner at the bottom of the orchard.

These really are flowers that look like the sun! I love them and will certainly be planting more for next year.

The packs of seeds I received have both sunflowers and sweet peas, so next year's display should be very colourful if I adopt a sowing strategy to make the most of their majestic height.

If you grow no other flowers, I can recommend that you do, at least, plant a couple of these beauties, even if they are in big pots or recycled buckets. Well worth it!

For part 2 of this post, I'll be taking a closer look at what the above photographs actually revealed.

Isn't technology a fantastic achievement? We look, we see what we think we see and then, suddenly, we find out that there's a whole other world out there, just waiting to be discovered. We just need to look for it. And the best part is, it's all FREE.