ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
There's no escaping the fact that midsummer is well behind us and the days are getting shorter. Our garden openings are behind us, or so we thought before we were asked if we would have a small group, just four, round on Monday. The forecast for the weekend is warm, sunny and windy, not the…
Our penultimate garden open was yesterday, the final one today. We had a fair turnout yesterday and would normally expect more on Saturday than Friday, so finishing on a high.In spite of many weeks without significant rainfall it is all holding up remarkably well, and there are plenty of flowers with accompanying bees and butterflies,…
August. I was talking with my neighbour on the allotment earlier about how much of the growing season was left and whether seeds I'd sown a month ago would yield a crop. A day earlier I was talking to the neighbour on the other side about autumn sowing annual flowers in cells under cover to…
A month ago I had just taken on another half plot, cleared a section of it and sown seeds of carrots, beetroot, perpetual spinach, chard, spring onions and lettuce. All but the lettuce germinated, mostly within a week to ten days. Emergence was a little patchy and in the weeks since the rows have become…
Let's not beat about the bush, I am well and truly pissed off. Last week I reluctantly dug out and got rid of an Agapanthus that had become quite seriously infested with Agapanthus gall midge, causing its flower buds to become distorted or destroying them completely. There is no treatment available, as far as I…
The garden is beginning to look a little tired. It needs a really good downpour and none is in prospect. Then there's the problem with Agapanthus, gall midge, which seems to have infected every Agapanthus plant I have. This morning I went around searching for and snipping off all the shoots I could find that…
I'm not getting any younger and my memory is not what it was. I like to keep track of the names of the many plants that I grow and I am not very good at doing so. The simplest and safest way is to have a label stuck in the ground or attached to the…
Wednesday was a day of almost constant drizzle which by Thursday morning was registering 7.5mm of rain in the rain gauge. Even so, such is the total area of roofs from which I collect rainwater that it added a lot to my storage. More rain is forecast for the weekend which should add a good…
Oh dear, doesn't time fly. My last post on ferns was in May 2022, more than three years ago. Since then I have lost a few and added a few, plus I have three years more experience of all the rest. In this post I will continue the roundup of the varieties I have and…
Friday evening again, on a very warm day that it seems wrong to complain about, given how few of them we get, so I'll say nought more about it. We are having to do a lot of watering and are getting through our stored water quite quickly. So far there has been no mention of…
garden ruminations 