ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
St Swithun's day, or St Swithin if you prefer. I'm mildly impressed that someone has gone to the trouble of putting a detailed entry about him onto Wikipedia. He was the Bishop of Winchester from 852 to 863. He got credited with a whole bunch of miracles when they moved his remains on this day…
Horticultural highlight of the week was a Hardy Plant Society garden visit on Wednesday evening to Bucks Head House near Constantine. If you're anywhere near on a Friday afternoon, it's open for NGS; go. That's quite a long way from here, down the other end of the county and well over an hour's drive, so…
Only July and already I am writing about Begonias, stalwarts of my late or very late summer display. I continue to add more forms to my collection and such is the impact that some are already making that it seemed appropriate to write a few notes about them, even at the risk of having to…
July, half way through the calendar year. Today (Friday) I woke at six to the sound of water dripping; drizzly rain. It hasn't altogether relented all day and now, fourteen hours later, the rain gauge is showing that we have had 5mm of rain, less than quarter of an inch, for those of you still…
Midsummer is now dropping away in the rear view mirror, a thought I no more want to dwell on than the continuing dryness. We had 15.5mm on Monday, it helped.I have just come back from my allotment where I've been watering. It is 8:50pm. When I consider how much goes in to getting what modest…
I keep looking at the weather radar, which shows a respectable area of wet stuff heading straight at us. I'm expecting it to fizzle out, or fragment into showers, or veer to one side or the other or to split and pass on either side. We were open today, didn't get many visitors. It's somewhat…
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…
garden ruminations 