ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
With every week that passes there is a sense of the spring slowly winding down. It's a chilly 12°C here this morning but the weather has been benign and most things are holding up quite well but a day or two of wind and rain will quickly change that. I'm not talking Ida wind and…
How quickly these weeks roll around, with little enough sense of anything getting done. I seem to spend my days being busy but have nothing to show for it. At the moment it's raining so I have an excuse. Six on Saturday is a good filler of time when it's wet. Our host, the Propagator,…
Weird it is. For a good part of yesterday the sky to the south of us was black with rain coming down in sheets. There were several claps of thunder though I didn't notice any lightning flashes. We had about five drops of rain, the rest missed us. Normally that would have been a good…
There will be only one thing happening in my garden this saturday and it involves stone. Lots of stone. You won't get to see it in Saturday fsixes, it's such fun I'll do a post about it separately.I got the sheet onto my polytunnel on thursday, so that's now ready to get tested by next…
The major event of the week was getting a visit from our local NGS organiser, resulting in provisional agreement that next year we will be opening for the National Garden Scheme. I'm in shock, I don't think the full implications have sunk in. There are things I've been putting off that I'm going to have…
We actually had a bit of rain yesterday, sorely needed but nowhere near enough. Still, every little helps. I torture myself by looking all too frequently at the Met Office radar; it's amazing how much rain just misses us. I've been up my allotment most days this week, almost on top of the weeds that…
I've done a bit of apple grafting but never anything on a large scale. I'm not skilled, I don't have years of experience but I can say that it has almost always worked, in that the grafts have been successful. I was however a nurseryman and I did have access to rubber ties and grafting…
I read a blog the other day entitled ‘How to grow Alstroemeria’ which started with an apology for its pretentious title, used because confident titles attract search engine attention. I imagine there is a lot more written about pruning apples than growing Alstroemerias, so confident or not, I’m not expecting the world to sit up…
Six on Saturday, or SOS; appropriate because my allotment seems to be constantly under assault by pests. Gooseberry sawfly is far worse than I've had before, I squash hundreds, the next day they're all back again. And I thought the slugs had been chewing my cabbages, turns out it's rootfly. Nematodes will be ordered and…
"The Propagator" has just launched a new meme which struck a chord with me, so this is by way of climbing on board. Six things going on in the garden. 1) This is Camellia 'Nightrider', very dark, very late flowering and with new leaves a similar colour to the flowers but shiny. It's a very…
