ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
It is actually raining as I write, but only just. I am not remotely optimistic that we are going to get enough rain to be useful and the forecast for next week is for it to be dry and even hotter. The garden is parched, my stored water is almost exhausted and I'm almost exhausted…
It was in my Six on Saturday post from 28th January this year that I mentioned grafting a few scions of what may be 'Meridian' onto a tree of 'Holstein'. I last looked at them when they were just breaking bud, at which stage all four grafts appeared to have taken. Today I had a…
I'm getting pretty close to the end of my stored rainwater so I'm really hoping that we'll get some rain in the next week or so. Well established plants are almost all fine still but newly planted and pot grown plants are beginning to struggle. I read on one weather forecast site that the south…
The switch from wanting it all to happen quicker to wishing you could slam the brakes on and slow it down seems to have been particularly abrupt this year. There is no happy medium because even now I'm both wanting some things to crack on a bit as well as lamenting how quickly other things…
Can someone tell me, cos I'd really like to know, how you can spend a whole week gardening from dawn till dusk and it's just as big a mess at the end of the week as it was at the beginning. I've pruned, planted, sowed, watered, weeded, shredded, potted, watered; you name it, I've done…
Nowhere in our garden does more effort go into forcing a quart into a pint pot than in the one corner that is shady. If Sue is never happier than when she's furtling about in her greenhouse full of cacti, I'm at my most content surrounded by greenery in the shade. The greenhouse is her…
What a lovely day yesterday was. Much gardening was done; progress was made on my allotment and it finally seemed like the 2023 growing season was properly under way. I've been lining things up to plant out, getting things hardened off, deciding where they are going to go. It feels like proper gardening. So, six…
Lighter evenings are supposed to give us more usable time but I feel I'm running to stand still at the moment. I can't believe how quickly these Saturdays come around. It's all growing like mad out there, Dahlias, Salvias and Cannas all coming up. Slug, weevil and lily beetle patrols will be routine until things…
Almost a third of the year gone and it hardly seems to have got started. Things are growing but plants like Dahlias and Begonias, that want a bit more warmth, seem to be falling behind. It's probably the same every year but just now I'm only concerned with this year. There's no shortage of things…
Ever since I took out the leylandii hedge along the edge of the garden - at least twenty years ago - we have had problems with honey fungus. So called because of its honey coloured toadstools, which we have rarely seen, it has taken a steady toll of mainly woody plants, the latest of which…
garden ruminations 