ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
A month ago I had just taken on another half plot, cleared a section of it and sown seeds of carrots, beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions and lettuce. All but the lettuce germinated, mostly within a week to ten days. Emergence was a little patchy and in the weeks since the rows have become…
Let's not beat about the bush, I am well and truly pissed off. Last week I reluctantly dug out and got rid of an Agapanthus that had become quite seriously infested with Agapanthus gall midge, causing its flower buds to become distorted or destroying them completely. There is no treatment available, as far as I…
The garden is beginning to look a little tired. It needs a really good downpour and none is in prospect. Then there's the problem with Agapanthus, gall midge, which seems to have infected every Agapanthus plant I have. This morning I went around searching for and snipping off all the shoots I could find that…
I'm not getting any younger and my memory is not what it was. I like to keep track of the names of the many plants that I grow and I am not very good at doing so. The simplest and safest way is to have a label stuck in the ground or attached to the…
Wednesday was a day of almost constant drizzle which by Thursday morning was registering 7.5mm of rain in the rain gauge. Even so, such is the total area of roofs from which I collect rainwater that it added a lot to my storage. More rain is forecast for the weekend which should add a good…
Oh dear, doesn't time fly. My last post on ferns was in May 2022, more than three years ago. Since then I have lost a few and added a few, plus I have three years more experience of all the rest. In this post I will continue the roundup of the varieties I have and…
Friday evening again, on a very warm day that it seems wrong to complain about, given how few of them we get, so I'll say nought more about it. We are having to do a lot of watering and are getting through our stored water quite quickly. So far there has been no mention of…
We are opening our garden on eight days this summer under the NGS, in four sets of two consecutive days. Our latest was the 3rd and 4th of July and this video is for those of you who were unable to make it. Unlike my video of our last opening I have put a partial…
Summer trundles on, doing its summery thing. Back in the 1980's our garden was literally the corner of a meadow, though there is very little evidence left now. The farmer whose land it was is pretty elderly now and while he has been round our garden in the past has not done so recently. I…
I suspect that if I look in my draft posts folder that there will be one from earlier this year about my allotment. I'm sure I at least started such a thing and I would be unsurprised if I never finished and posted it. The allotment ticks over in very small increments so there never…
garden ruminations 