Our garden in the spring sunshine.

Look at these lovely tulips - they are really early flowering, and light up the garden wonderfully.

We've moved them to a better place in the garden to enjoy them in the sunshine.

We have quite a few daffodils flowering too. I think they are one of my favourite flowers. They burst onto the scene like miniature rays of sunshine after the grey gloom of winter. They totally cheer me up.

And here we have the show stopper. This stunning rhododendron is tucked out of sight on the left hand side of the garden hidden from view by a conifer. Talk about beauty flowering unseen... it is the most gorgeous shade of pink, which you can just see from the photo. We love our garden and spend a lot of our time in it. It's not big but we have crammed as much as we can into it.
Thanks for reading. I've enjoyed sharing our early spring garden with you.

Irish rose granny square blanket finished

I finished the Irish rose granny square blanket, and I love it.


I couldn't resist taking it into the garden and photographing it there, along with our lovely toy GR. We've all been enjoying the beautiful spring weather lately - doesn't it lift the spirits? I can't wait for the Spring-Proper to start. My husband and I have already started our spring sowing - we've sowed? sown? anyway, whatever it is, onions, broccoli (calabrese), leeks (ooh, I'd love these to be successful!), tomatoes, bush and tall (whatever the opposite of bush is...!), lettuce, some herbs (the herbs are part of a gift set from our lovely daughter, thank you babe,) and one or two others. We have a few fruit trees too, a new blackberry plant and 2 rhubarb plants, and all these are in a tiny area at the bottom of the garden., just beyond the slabs in the photo above. I'll take some photos of it to share with you all. Now we need lots of sunshine and a few showers (not too many, please) to help all our seedlings on their way.


And the blanket...? I made it in aran weight yarn and I already want to start another one. My inspiration was Nicki Trench's book, Cute and Easy Crochet. I love this book - the projects are presented so beautifully, and the photographs are stunning. My sister saw the granny square bag pattern in the book, fell in love with it, and made it in no time. So now I want one of those too!

So many projects, so little time... *sighs dramatically*

Me and Soda bread

For years I've wanted to make Soda bread for my Irish husband. All my attempts so far have turned out mostly too heavy, sometimes too dry, and often underbaked - you name it, I baked a version of it. I collect soda bread recipes and occasionally compare them to try to understand how they work and to see if I can hit on a successful one, as they all seem to differ slightly. A couple of weeks ago I tried Lorraine Pascale's Soda Bread recipe from her book Baking Made Easy. Success! - it was almost perfect, [note the 'almost']. I couldn't wait to see the end result and I took the loaf out of the oven too early. It needed 5 or 10 minutes more so it was slightly underbaked in the centre, but the rest of it was wonderful! It tasted really really good, really authentic, and got the thumbs up from my husband. We had to stop ourselves from devouring half the loaf immediately.

Don't you think it looks yummy? I am thrilled with it. And next time I will have more patience...