T is for Toy Fair '18 Reports - Interplay

As we were looking at pinky-purple stuff earlier, we might as well get these out of the way; although there was a bunch more of the same gear on Schleich's stand which is still to come!

Called My fairy Garden and coming from an outfit called Interplay (IP; which is lucky 'cos that's the title of the post!), you get real grass seed, compost and a flower pot or tray, along with fairy stuff for scenic diorama modelling. Sets are in different size-price brackets.

They're useful - for 54mm fantasy; if nothing else, and well modelled, with lots of little itty-bitty things of the sort you'd find in a Playmobile or Lego house set, but slightly more realistic and scaled smaller.

I didn't get to handle them, but I would imagine a PVC or PVC-like polymer for the horses unicorns (everything's unicorns at the moment!), larger mouldings and fairies, polypropylene for the buildings and smaller accessories.

There's a website and the pictures will further speak for themselves . . .

G is also for Garden

The least accurate model and the last of the Lego-like'ies, but first a look at the actual walled garden, one of the few restored bits with two dove coops of substantial size which must have kept the garrison in eggs and meat for a portion of the siege, had they also started using pigeons for messages by then, I think they must have?

The model for some reason just shortens the wall to exclude the area now used for picnics on nice days. Despite being a ruin, this is a decent day out and the village of Old Basing has some fine hostelries - while the car park for visiting the old house is also the pub car park for a Wadworth's Inn while coffee, ice cream and snacks are available from the Little Barn vistor's centre

I collaged the above three to make it easier to compare the real with the model. The big tower (a granary?) in the model is long-gone while the space occupied by the square tower at the near-end of the wall is now squatted by a glorified potting-shed which doubles as a small museum of artifacts from the site and some other models, including the Lego garden. A few of those artifacts (mostly tiles - another interest of mine) are shown below, but again; better visited, than vicariously peered at on the Blog!

The signs of burning are from the sacking of the two fortified houses after they fell, the remains of the whole complex are a grassy hill, apart from the garden - off to one side and relatively out of harms way, i dare say it was a bit of a state for a century or two before restoration!

B is for [not] Bendy Toy!

Interesting little post today: any toy collector, especially toy figure collectors will instantly recognise these as 'Bendy Toys', those daft elongated caricatures of people, cartoon characters or anthropomorphic animals with little pairs or triangular arrangements of holes at the joints and a wire armature buried in the PVC to enable manipulation of the figure, as part of the play value, or 'play element' of the toy.

Clearing last year's tomatoes (toe'mate'ohs!)

Except that . . . in a brilliant piece of capitalist marketing (or creative 'out of the box' blue-sky thinking?) someone has decided to re-invent them as plant or garden ties! It is a very clever use of what may even be an original 1970's  moulding (?), but what rankles is that you can now get four to a card from the gardening sections of discount stores for the same money (in real, inflation adjusted terms) as you used to have to pay for one!

Have we had this shot before?

I have several of these and we've looked at them on the blog before I think . . . pretty sure the Pink Panther had his moment here, there are some Cowboys and Indians from Italy via-Hong Kong (image added above) and I know I have a 'combat soldier' type in storage, but there were loads of them back in the day, whether this frog was one of them, I can't say.

Mysterious holes

Giving thought to the little holes: I can only assume that they are left by holding 'pins' for the armature?

They could just as likely be due to the volatile nature of PVC; that when being moulded over cold wire as a hot semi-liquid, gas or condensation of some kind forms and the holes are to prevent larger blisters or blemishes' being created by letting such a build-up escape as the moulding is released from the mould-tool?

Another explanation would be that the holes allow for movement at the likely points of articulation (elbows, knees, wrists etc...) chosen by the child-user; to prevent stress cracks appearing too early in the toys life. But that seems even less believable and would seem to require more holes than are usually present.

All explanations are only my own thoughts on the phenomena, and anyone who knows for sure; please let the rest of us know!

If you collect bendy toys and haven't found these yet, try a search with 'garden-tie' or 'Plant Tie' in it, I'm sure there must be others out there!

N is for Natures Bounty!

I spent the afternoon rewarding myself for all that mud-puddling! And the bee-stings; 5 and counting this year, only 7 in the whole of last year, mowing is pretty-much out 'till they calm down a bit!

The blackcurrants were actually growing wild between the railway and the pond, someone tipped their garden-waste into the reeds in the dark - no doubt..there are lots of little ones, so a commando-raid in the autumn may well see us with a line of canes in the new year!

Also round the pond has been this chap (or chappess?), started life about 4 weeks ago, shorter that my little finger-nail and mistakable for a little bit of dried leaf, now the size of my thumb, and always easy to find as it hangs around on top of the hazelnut leaves, clearly birds have learnt a lesson there...leave well alone. Google tells me it's a Rusty Tussock-Moth.

Meanwhile when I first found these (there's a whole bunch of them) I wondered if they had a parasitic or fungal disease, but apparently they are meant to look like bird-lime! And while caterpillar-like, they are actually 'just' larvae; of a Saw-Fly.

P is for Pink Buds of Spring

Well, we nearly had a nice day yesterday, which would have made three [days] in five weeks! But it just couldn't find it in itself to be that little bit warmer.

The blossom is struggling, the wild cherries have been flowering for a few weeks now and some have almost finished, but with few bees or other pollinators flying, there won't be much fruit again this year, the Mirabelle next door lost all it's blossom after a couple of the colder nights...

Frodo has decided that Spring is still 'months' away and has returned to the fireside, where he is clearly in seventh-heaven, only opening an eye occasionally to say, more logs - NOW please!

Last Night's Visitors

So who was in the garden last night? Easy;

Next door's cat.

A fox, who took the fat-ball off the bird-table.

A pigeon who took a look at the raided bird-table!

A cock-pheasant who let everyone know he was around in the early hours, they're almost as bad as peacocks at this time of year!

B is for Bits and Bobs

The recent snow and stuff has slowed work in the garden, pruning has come to a complete standstill and we have to be careful were we walk so as not to tread on the snowdrops and other bulbs as they come up through it. So a few miscellaneous shots taken over the last few days.

This was the by-product of my 5-week bonfire, the orangey-pinkish stuff is the soil that went through the fire with huge forkfuls of wet leaves and the stuff I raked out from under the shrubs and boarders. It makes the ash 'heavy' so that it doesn't blow away and can be spread more easily on the land. So far, twenty barrow-loads have come out of this heap and have gone on all the roses, the veg garden and the tomato trench in the greenhouse. The raspberries have also had a bucket load or two, as have the currants.

The Tomato trench has also been half-filled with home made compost, after which it was topped-up with new soil, taken from a path-straitening project elsewhere on the grounds. Here you see last years compost on the left and this years ready to be covered on the right. I have put a lot of peaty leaf-mould on top to speed up the process and prevent a dry layer of half-composted stuff needing removing from the top when we uncover it next autumn. There is no Laylandii, Yew or similar fir/evergreen cuttings as they take forever to rot and tend to puddle an oily slime like Amoco-crude! Not many shrub cuttings get in either, but lots of grass mowing's, moss and weeds, shrub-bed raking and the scrapings from the kitchens. No meat or fish, no bread (only because it all goes on the bird-tables) and no fat (same reason), finally a couple of layers of old carpet are thrown on, fur side down, and the whole left to sweat through the year.

A couple of trees I photographed up on the Ridgeway path above Wantage the other day, it was bitterly cold, and we found a monument to the 'Barron Wantage' who seem to have got a VC in the Crimean war, but having been without a computer for a week I haven't managed to look him up on Google yet!

The first bunch of Snowdrops to poke up, taken a couple of weeks ago, we now have loads of them but they are all under snow at the moment.

Whoops!

No not snow! I had the blue screen of death last week, she's up and running again and normal service should be resumed tomorrow!

Today potted-out Broad Bean and Sunflower seens, prepared pots for Tomato seeds (from last years tomatoes) and sorted the greenhouse and tool shed, and got snowed-on a lot!