ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
Mid July and still the weather persists with being cool and wet. Looking at pictures from the same time last year I see there is a lot less in flower, in particular Cosmos and Cleome, which are way behind where they were then. We also lost several plants over the winter, like Salvia nemorosa and…
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself in that I'm writing this on Thursday, mainly because we have visitors coming tomorrow for the weekend. Barring disasters, what is happening on Thursday should still be happening two days later.It's high summer, though it scarcely seems like it, but the flowers know and the build-up continues. Here's…
Summertime, and the livin' is easy. Which it is, if you're talking about the garden and comparing it to a couple of months ago. The work has been done and now we reap the rewards. Pull a few weeds, water a few pots. Take half a dozen pictures and post them in a blog and…
Well, that's it, the longest day has passed. The druids will all have gone home. Summer, on the other hand, hasn't arrived here yet. As I write, it's raining, and the forecast for next week is pretty mixed. I don't really mind; it's good growing weather which isn't stressing the plants or burning my head.…
The first of our garden open days is now behind us, the second is today. The less said about the first the better. Could have been worse in that it could have been Thursday, when it rained all day. Our first visitors turned up 90 minutes before we were due to open and 90 minutes…
Another Saturday, another six. There's loads happening, finding six things should be a breeze, but we have the garden open next Friday and Saturday so everything is seen half as it looks now and half as I hope or fear it will look in a week's time. I need to geta grip, live in the…
The weather man said earlier that June 1st is the beginning of meteorological summer and just for once the weather itself is in agreement. What the weather man also said was to make the best of it because it's only going to last two or three days then go back to below average temperatures. I…
I've spent another week almost entirely in the garden or on my allotment. What do I have to show for it? Not as much as I'd like but I do have the sense that it's moving in the right direction. It needs to, our first garden opening is in three weeks time and I reckon…
How can I spend day after day working on this garden and it's as big of a mess now as it was a week ago or a month ago? I can't make the chaos recede. A lot of it is the inevitable consequence of sowing seeds or allowing seeds to sow themselves. One way or…
The last few days of fine weather have almost entirely gone into getting my allotment licked into shape, a task delayed by the endless rain. I have never seen, or killed, so many slugs in my life. For the last ten years I've had two plots and I've decided that this year will be the…
garden ruminations 