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What Brings You Joy?

Christina Hollis

Last week I was asked the question what brings you joy? It led me down an interesting rabbit-hole, with some great results.

canada flag with mountain range view

Canada has always fascinated me, and that was before I saw this by Gunnarolla & Bentley. Back in the late 19th century one of my great-great uncles vanished on a madcap adventure into the wilderness. Many decades later, I nearly lost my husband to the country before we’d even met. When he was a little boy, Martyn’s family were all set to emigrate to Vancouver. They were at the packing-up stage when two of the older members of his family (no names, no pack drill) decided they couldn’t bear to leave England. British Columbia’s loss was definitely my gain.

Quite a lot of time passed, and I became a very mature student at the University of Gloucestershire (you can read more about that here). One of my fellow students was from Humber Polytechnic. That’s in Etobicoke, Ontario. Those Canadian students who don’t live in England while attending Gloucestershire University use distance learning. They spoke well of Canada’s then Minister of Science, Sport, and Persons with Disabilities, Kirsty Duncan. I began following Kirsty, and her inspirational enthusiasm for education, especially in science, means that she often pops up on my timeline. She is always cheerful, and people really warm to her.

I was pleased to discover from a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) that the Honourable Kirsty Duncan PhD, as she is properly called, has just been given an honorary doctorate from Humber Poly. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Quite apart from having given many years of public service to the people of Canada, Kirsty always takes the time to reply to anyone who comments on her social media posts. That’s a rare quality, and it’s one of her replies which led to this blog post.

Kirsty asked me what was bringing me joy on that particular day. It so happens that I had been going through a rough patch. Had anybody but Kirsty asked that question, I would have said “nothing!”. Yet you can’t say that to someone who has turned Getting Things Done into a career, and is the perfect example of quiet determination. So I went outside to find something that might bring me joy.

In my case, it’s true what they say about the healing power of nature. The minute I escaped from my desk, I was on a mission. It really helped me to have a distraction. I lost myself in the garden for a while, and picked a big bunch of sweet peas.

That simple action made me feel so much better, I decided to identify something that brings me joy every day for a week. So, here’s what I found…

Monday

Sweet pea seeds cost next to nothing, but their fragrance is priceless. They are easy to grow, and this year I’ve discovered they bounce back quickly when grazed by deer. That’s a huge advantage when you live in the middle of a forest. Only our vegetable garden is protected by deer fencing. I took a chance planting flowers outside the deer exclosure, and my poor plants paid for it!

The more sweet peas you pick the more flowers they produce, so I now try and gather a bunch every day.

Tuesday

close up shot of a eurasian blackcap

Today’s moment of joy was thanks to a blackcap. When we took Alex for a walk at 8am, this little bird with a big voice was singing its head off from the top of a thicket beside the woodland track. It was only a couple of metres away but I can never get good recordings, so here’s a clip from YouTube, by My Birding Year.

Wednesday

Today’s moment of joy was completely unexpected. In 2023, I collected two ripe seed pods from lilies growing in my greenhouse. They lay around in a shallow cardboard tray, waiting to be sown. I kept forgetting about them. When I remembered it was too late in the season, or the conditions weren’t right. A few weeks ago, I decided the seeds were too old to grow and was going to throw them away.

Half-way to the compost heap I had a change of heart. I threw them onto the nearest patch of bare soil next to some sweet alyssum plants, and let them take their chance. I didn’t even bother covering the seeds, and it’s been really dry.

Even so, look what I found today. Those narrow leaves are lily seedlings!

Thursday

scenic waymark on the camino de santiago

This year, the Radio 4 programme Ramblings celebrates 25 years of accompanying people on their favourite walks. They have marked the anniversary by walking stretches of various pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in Spain with groups of friends and pilgrims. Listening today to a group on the final stretch of the Camino, telling their stories as they walk into Santiago really brought me joy. It’s an emotional climax, so get your hankies ready! https://bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002dpnl…

Friday

This morning’s Moment of Joy was a cool breeze and dappled shade on the 8am dog walk, when the sun was already bright and hot. We take Alex out early in the day or late in the afternoon, and always take water for him with us. Walking in the heat is bad enough, and he has to do it in a fur coat!

Saturday

There was a quick-or-you’ll-miss-it moment of joy today. Our mock orange flowers are nearly over, but there were still enough open flowers the perfume the air first thing this morning. The petals have been falling fast, and look like confetti when they are fresh. Philadelphus must set seed, because a bush has sprung up out in the wood. It flowers slightly later than the ones in our garden, so we get to enjoy the perfume twice each year.

Sunday

I love cooking. For Sunday lunch this week I tried out a new recipe, cobbled together from several different online sources after seeing the Tatsunami stable’s chef Kokuryunami cook it here on their YouTube channel (scroll forward to 14:37 if you don’t want to watch Morning Practice). It’s chanchan-yaki – seared salmon coated in miso butter, on a bed of vegetables and braised with the addition of a little sake. It was delicious, and these left over veg were lovely in a jacket potato next day.

Even my son, a notoriously picky eater, ate every scrap of his chanchan yaki – including ALL the cabbage!

I enjoyed concentrating on the positives in life so much this week, I’m going to do it more often. Thanks for the nudge, Kirsty!

What brightens your life when things are dark?

Blog, gardening

Looking Down and Looking Up

Christina Hollis

Last time, I wrote about facing up and facing down. This week I’ve put a twist on that idea. I’m looking up and looking down.

brown and black hen with peep of chick outdoor looking down at food and looking up to mum
Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels.com

Poultry in the United Kingdom has been in lockdown for months, because of Avian Flu. Our little flock can’t run about the garden any more. They are in an enclosure, well away from wild birds.  I go out each evening to shut the hen coop door. They’re completely safe from foxes within their run, but it keeps the birds warmer. I collect the feeder and empty the drinkers, so the contents won’t freeze overnight.

Down On The Ground

As the torch beam swept across the garden one evening this week, I spotted something.  There, against the dark earth was one small shoot of garlic. I could hardly believe it. At a local food festival last October I’d bought a head of garlic for planting. The cloves had shot up so fast, I ordered another three heads direct from the suppliers.  These arrived in early November. The weather was still very mild, so I expected them to grow as fast as the original cloves.

Then the autumn rains started. Weeks went by without a single dry day. Christmas came and went, and there was still no sign of my second planting of garlic cloves. I thought they must have rotted off in the wet ground.

Now here was one brave survivor after more than two months hidden away in the sodden soil.  It was too cold to hang about that night, but I told myself that if one clove had managed to survive, there should be others.

Looking Up

Next morning I went out at 7am to open the hen coop. There had been a dusting of snow, but the sky had cleared. Looking up, I saw the full moon glowing gold. It was low over the Sitka plantation, but high in the sky a flock of redwings called as they flew over to the orchards of Herefordshire.

The moonlight was so bright it was almost light enough to see what I was doing without the torch. A covering of snow on the frozen, sloping path made the going tricky. I had to watch my step. As I filled the drinkers and put out the poultry feeder, I could hear a hen purring in her sleep. Then a fox barked from the other side of the hazel thicket, and she went quiet.

Looking down at garlic cloves beside spices and leaves
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

After I had finished with the hens, I went to check on the garlic. The one shoot I had seen the night before was no fluke. Just enough snow had fallen overnight to throw more shoots into relief against the soil surface. While my fingers and toes turned into icicles I counted twenty four little nibs.  Together with the dozen plants which had shot up back in the autumn, it’s tempting to think there will be plenty of fat garlic cloves for the kitchen this year.  I’m already planning to get more varieties from The Garlic Farm for planting in autumn this year.

Are you planning to do any gardening this year?

You can find out more about me here, and see some of my books here.

Blog

Christmas is coming!

Christina Hollis
Passion flowers are more closely associated with Easter than with Christmas!

November has been wet and gloomy here in Gloucestershire. The news, both national and international is as dark and threatening as the weather. That’s not good for anybody’s mental health. I’ve been trying to look on the bright side, as I did with my Instant Lift page during lockdown. It’s only a month until Christmas, and luckily I’ve found some things which I hope will put a smile on your face.

Children in Need raised over £35 million on the night of its annual telethon. The Children in Read segment, which is operated by Jumblebee and the inexhaustible Paddy Heron, ran their annual book auction. I donated a paperback copy of Struggle and Suffrage in Bristol, which will soon be on its way to the winning bidder. Thank you for your generous donation, S!

What A Christmas Prize!

I’ve been finding it difficult to get out and about since the Covid lockdowns, but DD managed to drag me out of the house last Saturday. We visited a Christmas sale of work in a nearby village and had a great time. The homemade cakes were delicious, and the handicrafts were beautiful. We stocked up on Christmas presents and bought some raffle tickets. What do you think? We won not one, not two, but three prizes! A photograph frame, a box of chocolates, and this beautiful hand-made Advent Calendar which doubles as a giant Christmas stocking.

As the raffle was drawn after DD and I had left, I had to go and collect the prizes afterwards. To be honest I had a bit of a wobble about that. It took me several days to summon up the courage to do it, but the lady custodian of prizes was very kind.

Christmas presents in waiting

Although the rain here has been torrential, the weather has been mild. As well as the usual winter jasmine, viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’, and winter honeysuckle, a few last buds on the passion flower have opened. We’re enjoying them while we can. Meanwhile indoors, the cyclamen I sowed last spring have burst into flower. I should have pulled out these first flowers to make sure there are plenty for the Christmas festival itself, but I couldn’t bear to do it!

On the international stage, a lovely video was posted on Twitter by @Imposter_Edits. A baby chimpanzee at Sedgewick County Zoo, Kansas, had to be taken away from its mother and put on oxygen. This is what happened when keepers reintroduced the baby. Make sure the sound is on! https://twitter.com/i/status/1593402415985971200

My writing is fuelled by tea, and a kettle burns up lots of energy. I thought I knew all the energy-saving tips about boiling water. I either avoid boiling more water than necessary, or I fill a vacuum flask after I’ve filled the cups. Then the other day a retired science teacher suggested a real winner during a phone in programme. She pointed out how long a kettle stays at boiling point before it switches itself off. The fact is that a perfectly good cup of tea can be made by switching the kettle off as soon as the water starts to bubble furiously.

beverage filled mug beside cupcake
A Christmas cuppa! Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels.com

Standing over the kettle and turning it off manually the second it boils, I can save at least ten seconds of electricity each time I make tea. That may not sound like much, but over a year that adds up to about three and a half hours of electricity. It also cuts down the amount of steam produced. In this old house, we have to do everything we can to reduce condensation.

Have you got any good money-saving tips you’d like to share during the run up to Christmas?

Blog, Growing

Make A Fresh Start

Christina Hollis

bean-plant-2348098_1920Mustard and cress, sunflowers, peas and beans sprouting in recycled coffee cups—remember those happy times back in nursery? Getting your hands dirty, desperately waiting for the first little shoots to pop their heads up, then carrying your plant home in grubby paws to present it to your family?

Things were so much simpler back then. Life, with its tests, exams, debts, and deadlines forces us into a hamster wheel of tail-chasing, day after day. We’re already a quarter of the way through the year. Can you believe it? Where did the time go? New Year’s Resolutions to take it easy and have more fun are a distant memory (although one resolution came back to surprise me last week—you can read more about that here).

Time flies when you’re busy, and we’re all busy all the time these days. If we’re not wrapped up in earning a living, we’re on line helping other people to earn theirs, by shopping or clicking. Why not take some time out during this holiday weekend to rediscover your roots? Take a break, abandon the rat race and re-live those times when you were a lot closer to the earth— physically, as well as mentally. It’s easy to forget that until the supermarkets and their needs turned food production into an industrial process, our food was almost all local and seasonal. It wasn’t all that far back. The first supermarket arrived less than thirty years ago in the market town where I grew up.  Before that, tinned pineapple, new potatoes from Jersey or fresh mandarin oranges at Christmas was as exotic as it got!

cropped-salad-sandwich.jpg
Home made bread and homegrown salad, just waiting for a poached egg…

Reclaim your independence, if only in a small way. Make a fresh start this spring. Grow some sprouting seeds, or cut-and-come again salad  in a tray on your windowsill. If you’ve got room outside, get the biggest container you can find, and grow some beans. Scarlet runners or climbing French beans will scramble up a wigwam of canes. They make a great show in a small space. They aren’t frost-hardy, so you’ll need to wait a week or two before sowing them direct in your container, but you can make a start indoors earlier than that. At this stage you can do your bit for recycling—start saving the inner cardboard tubes from toilet rolls to make your own plant pots.

There was a big fuss a few years ago about possible hygiene concerns when handling toilet roll inners.  Take care, and wash your hands thoroughly after every gardening session, and again before you eat. There shouldn’t be a problem. If you’re still worried, stick to reusing the cardboard tubes from the middle of kitchen roll, gift wrap or baking parchment.  Each one of those will make several small pots.

sunflower_bee-3206644_1280
Bees love sunflowers, while birds (and bakers) love their seeds

Obviously, watering will make your bio-degradable plant pots soggy and they’ll break down quite quickly, so only use them for the early stages of quick-growing things like beans, peas and sunflowers.

To give your home-made pots stability, pack them into something waterproof, such as a plastic box. I use old takeaway containers. Although we eat healthy food every day, now and again it’s hard to resist something ready-made! Fill the pots to the top with seed compost (garden soil is too rich, and full of weed seeds). Firm it gently, then push one big seed into each. Add enough water to make the soil nice and moist, then put your container close to the glass on a sunny windowsill.

Wean your baby plants onto the outdoor life gradually. First, put them outside only on mild days. Bring them back indoors at night for the first week. After that,  only coddle them if there’s likely to be a frost. Once they’ve been planted in their permanent container, water them regularly and peg a sheet of newspaper around them at night if frost is forecast. Once your plants start to climb, they’ll be unstoppable. They’ll take as much water as you can give them. As the pretty flowers turn into beans, keep picking the pods to encourage your plants to keep producing. Don’t let them become has-beans. If you do, the plant will think it’s done it’s job. It will transfer its strength into maturing seeds and the beans will become tough instead of tasty.

RED_KALE_-3100694_1920Your bean plants will be killed by autumn frosts, but by then you’ll be hooked and looking forward (I hope) to planting up your container with some sprouting broccoli or red kale. The frilly leaves look good over winter, and you’ll be picking home-grown shoots next March, when they cost a fortune to buy from the supermarket.

Growing things helps me cope with modern life. It keeps my feet on the ground, encourages me to plan, and keeps me looking ahead. What’s your tip for staying optimistic, despite all the fears and frenzy of modern life?

 

 

Blog, gardening

March Towards Spring?

Christina Hollis

It feels more like we’re backing into winter!

I was planning to tell you all the things I’d be doing in my garden during March. Today is officially the First Day of Spring here in the UK.

Then The Beast From The East met Storm Emma.snowyshed 2

That sounds like a Fifties B-movie or a wrestling bout. Instead,  it’s a combination of weather systems fighting it out over Europe. The UK has practically ground to a halt. Countries who see snow every year are having a good laugh at our expense. I don’t blame them. Many of our main roads impassable. People have been sitting  in their cars for up to seventeen hours, stuck in endless traffic jams. Airports and trains have been at a standstill from the second snow began to fall.

In our defence, we’ve seen more snow in this country over the past forty-eight hours than we usually see in a whole month during the winter.

We’re simply not set up for bad weather here in England. It doesn’t happen often enough. OH and I used to fit winter tyres to our cars every autumn, but after years with no problems, we never bothered to buy them when we changed our cars. Snow chains are worse than useless unless there’s a good depth of snow, and in any case the lightest snowfall renders the one-in three lane between Tottering Towers and the country road connecting us to civilisation impassable.

So…there are my excuses. Now, down to work. In advance of the bad weather I travelled 40 miles to fetch a full canister of propane gas for my greenhouse heater. That would normally last for a month at the rate I use it. Temperatures have been well below freezing for days, so I dread to think how fast the gas is being used! I haven’t dared open the greenhouse to check. It’s well insulated, all the citrus trees and overwintering cuttings are clustered close to the heater, but there’s a limit to how much cold they can take.

PAPERWHITE_NARCISSI_CHRISTMAS_BULBS
Paperwhite narcissi, flowering in January. I wish you could experience their scent!

I’m not so worried about my fig trees, which also live in the greenhouse. They’re a bit hardier, and still dormant.  The apricot flowers I wrote about a few days ago may be damaged by the extended cold period. I’ll have to wait and see. The strawberry plants haven’t come in to be forced yet, and at this rate they’ll be staying outside! Once I can get into the greenhouse again I’ll be topdressing all the fruit trees with fresh compost. All the bulbs I forced for flowering at Christmas and in the first few weeks of the new year have been moved from the house into the greenhouse, waiting to be replanted in the garden when the weather warms up.  I’ll give them some plant food this month, to keep them going.

March is traditionally the main seed-sowing time, but they’re safer off in their packets for a day or two. I won’t be sowing anything for a while. There’s no point. It’s too cold to keep them growing, once they’ve germinated. The tomato and lettuce seeds I sowed a few days ago are living on my office windowsill, safe inside Tottering Towers, but they’ll soon get long and lanky. They need moving out into the greenhouse, but they won’t appreciate the conditions out there right now! OH wants me to get electricity in my greenhouse so I don’t need to worry about heating and lighting for my seedlings, but Tottering Towers is prone to power cuts. That’s why I rely on a propane heater.

There’s nothing to be done outside when everything’s covered with snow. The shallots I wrote about last week are snug under an insulating layer of snow. I have seed potatoes ready to plant for an early crop, but I’m holding them back.  A sheet of black polythene has been warming the soil in the kitchen garden for them. It’s been there since New Year, but I’m not going to risk planting them yet.

I need to thaw out  the hens’ drinkers with warm water several times a day, and make sure they are shut inside their insulated houses each evening. I bring the feeders in, as rats would soon discover that easy source of food. Fetching them at dusk is a challenge which means floundering downslope in the snow, then back uphill with my hands full. Alex our mad dog doesn’t help the process, dancing round my feet. One day I’ll trip over him and end up flat on my back in the snow, covered in hen food!

What’s the weather like where you are? Do you have any tips for dealing with wintry conditions?