Early Bird
It is MOT day today so I wake at half hourly intervals between five and seven to make sure I can drop the Mini off by eight. I am a country mouse these days. On early mornings I nod to the cows and, if they look undecided about standing up, inspect the hills for rain.…
The merits of goldfish
It is holiday season. The garden is, if not entirely under control, less chaotic in parts. It has been left to the tender mercies of ma chère maman and the dog whilst Keith and I esport ourselves in the sun. Instructions have been left about the picking of pears and plums and the watering of…
Three go to Arran (sorry Lyra)
Another blog from earlier in the summer which has been lurking unloved and unfinished in my drafts. This is, however, the last one and after this I shall have largely caught up with myself just in time to fall behind again during our imminent late summer holiday. In the last week of July Mum was…
Witchy woman
Urgh, this has been sitting in my unfinished drafts for a fortnight. I had high hopes that I would be super efficient on my trip to London and dash off a few blogs on the train. Well it was a trip of two halves. On the way down everything went according to plan. On the…
The real salt path
As I type this, I am hurtling backwards towards London accompanied by Capuçon playing Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin (a lucky score in a random selection downloaded on my last trip – I had not hitherto heard of the fellow but Dr Google has opined and he is a rather dishy frenchman). I…
A moment to myself
I am in an unashamedly self-indulgent mood. The weather is still just hot enough for me to justify a degree of sloth on the patio, trusting to drought to slow the weeds. (If I venture forth it is for light weeding, dead heading and pot watering. Everything is overblown and slightly crispy). Our stream of…
Thoughts from the patio chair
With the ongoing, maliciously fine, largely rainless, weather my mornings tend to start at 4am when the eye of Sauron inexorably finds a chink in the curtains and blasts me on the forehead. I then shuffle all around the bed looking to recover some shade. With the weary repetition of “are we there yet” from…
And as for the rest….
After a manic fortnight, with much appreciated help from mum and a posse of others who beavered away in atrocious heat, we made it to the garden open day in reasonable shape. The weather gods smiled and at 8a.m, when I got into the pond for a last minute blanket weed clear, it was almost…
5 Days to go….
The last couple of weeks have been a blur. My step count is tremendous, largely achieved by barrowing weeds to the wood and compost to the borders (combining both weightlifting, an aerobic work out and stimulation of the epidermis with nettle stings – somewhere out there, people are being charged a fortune for this…). I…
Death by a thousand cuts
I now have less than three weeks before our annual open day and the weeding of the deep interior has commenced…The process is fraught. It has been blisteringly hot recently so I’ve been resplendent in the gardening shorts, an outfit which pairs badly with the nettles and thistles which escaped the first round of spring…
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