ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
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…
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…
garden ruminations 