ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
There seems to be fair bit of stuff that is perhaps a bit too far on, at risk of getting frosted, vulnerable to slugs. Then there are last year's leftovers, things like Salvia and Plectranthus, that got singed by frost but are still hanging on. Difficult to know what to try and protect, what to…
There are odds and ends of things flowering in the garden. Some are in their normal flowering season, most are aberrations, an odd very late or very early bloom, usually very tatty. I'd hoped for Alstroemeria 'Indian Summer' but it wasn't to be. There are buds still but they're not opening. Makes you wonder what…
The output from my solar panels gives me a check on how much we've seen of the sun this month and it's not a lot. It's still already higher than for the whole of December last year though. The total for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week wouldn't have brewed a cup of tea. In…
Benign day today, gales tomorrow. We had a couple of frosts during the week so there's a lot of mush about but we're now back to the more usual succession of weather systems coming in off the Atlantic. It's not so much that nothing is happening outdoors, just that it's the same few things going…
I just listened to Sandy Denny's 'Late November'; first time in years. Getting nostalgic. How can she have been gone over 40 years? It's cold and wet and drear and dreich and I've got a cold. Must be winter. I haven't been out much lately, it never seems to stop raining and there's not a…
Keeping a garden interesting gets more difficult as autumn slips into winter. The climate here is not warm enough to have nearly as wide a choice of material for winter display as for summer, nor is it cold enough to force me to shut up shop altogether. I have a choice, I can give up…
Commercial horticulture relies heavily on covered space. Uncertainty is the enemy and the weather is one big part of that which can to a degree be controlled by growing crops under glass or polythene. The nursery where I worked for 30 years had several polytunnels and three glasshouses. The biggest polytunnel was 63 feet wide…
