We’ve had a well nigh perfect few weeks. Mostly it’s been lovely and sunny, but with enough dreary/wet days that I’ve actually managed to get a few indoors things done as well. A couple of damson deliveries from Judy have been turned to jam and curd (and in Keith’s case, vodka). The colour was so intense I’ve saved a little to see if it will tint some soap – you never know! We’ve had our first 3 apple pressings, so that’s 13 bottles of juice in the store. I’ve tied up the last of the dried flowers and spent a very sneezy and crispy afternoon rubbing and bagging thyme and marjoram. I’m now drying fennel seeds and I think I’ll be moving on to rosemary next. Poor Mum is deployed shelling and roasting hazelnuts as the trees have finally delivered and I don’t have the patience!
Lyra was a rather poorly pup recently, suspected of having eaten something untoward. However the last week she has perked up. Little Toast the terrier came for a visit the other day and she had an excellent time playing chase. Hopefully she has now learned her lesson about not eating dodgy items from the garden. This is a lesson her Uncle Keith could learn as well. A ton of mushrooms have sprung up all over the lawn and the bold boy declared them Porcini until Raymond and I ganged up on him with dire warnings and head shaking. Some minor googling later, I drew his attention to the stunning similarity with an item in the top 20 poisonous mushrooms list (and the marked dissimilarity to porcini). Subsequent to and fro with a forager in my Twitter group has me leaning to a not tremendously edible type of boletus, but the general consensus was do not go there….
Down in the woods all manner of interesting things are dropping down or shooting up. We ran through a positive hailstorm of acorns at the back of the lake yesterday. I picked up a fancy one with a curly growth around the shell that made it look like medusa last week. The growth is a gall, triggered by wasp larvae. Oak galls of different types seem to have been a massive thing this year – there were loads of oak apples in the spring. I wonder if it can be linked to the dry weather? Along the top of the woods there are some spindle trees with the most enormous fuchsia spindles. They put the tiny jobs on my trees utterly to shame. All along the hedgerows wild roses are scarlet with hips and the hawthorns glisten darkly garnet. The birds won’t go hungry. And everywhere, but everywhere, there are mushrooms in every shape and size from comical to downright sinister.
There’s still a surprising amount of colour in the garden. Some Japanese anemones that came up with us from London have gone mad and started colonising the path in the gravel garden so I have been carefully picking them out and moving them around. The shizostylis (which I always pronounce wrong!) I got from mum have responded magnificently to last year’s splitting and are going gang busters. We have some lovely big colonies of cyclamen and even the willow chippings put down as spring mulch have sprouted reddish clumps of chip cherries (also poisonous) which look really quite jolly. There are a few dahlias still going strong, some of which were left outside last year, and I have decided. that I am going to take a deep breath, mulch and leave them in situ this year to see what happens. Overwintering in the greenhouse has never gone that well so I feel that I might as well risk it. I’ve been closing my end of the greenhouse down for the season, planting out the last of the rooted cuttings and bringing in my prized galangal plant (rooted from a bit in the fridge) to the kitchen for the winter. This process took longer than intended as I had to stop midway to capture a young great tit which had flown in and was intent on breaking its neck against the windows. It was quite the farrago, but I cornered it in the end behind a cherry tomato and released it ruffled and indignant but otherwise unscathed.
The jobs on the to do list are starting to seriously mount up now. There’s a lot of cutting back and reshuffling to do, with finding spaces for all the bulbs I’ve ordered becoming a priority as there’s a huge box waiting in the garage and another on the way. However, that’ll all have to wait because I’m now off for some serious sun to top up the vitamin D before winter sets in (and make some headway on my enormous to be read pile). Toodle pip
