Four days of rain and drizzle...
Gnomes and Primroses
My garden has been dripping wet for four days now, with rain, drizzle, and now fog. But doing some fog-gardening should be fun. I just checked - fog is deceivingly dry for a gardener. And it makes the garden borders look so mysterious. Oooo - now where does that path go?
Friday 6th July
This headcold is still annoying. Yesterday I even spent the afternoon in the cottage, snoozing in bed with my box of tissues, my book, and my cottage cat. Doing gardening would be better than moping, sulking, and sneezing... And I think I feel better. Indicators - I've cleaned up my kitchen and soaked and washed yesterday's muddy gardening clothes. It's a start!
Later...
Oops. No gardening. But I've been out shopping, with vouchers. Vouchers! Yippee for vouchers! Vouchers are so groovy, vouchers are such fun! Vouchers feel like you're not wasting any money... And so I've bought potting mix, replacement garden hand tools, more polyanthus plants, lettuce seedlings, and some Asiatic lily bulbs whose names I will now record: 12 Vermeer (shades of pink) and 5 America (red).
Sunny Pink Cordyline
And of course I had to pop into the Ecoshop where I bought a sturdy garden bench for ten dollars, some recycled lime green paint with which to paint it, and two more large terracotta pots.
Blue Sky
Late this afternoon there was blue sky, plus an 'interesting' aftershock (shaky enough to get two of my pheasants in the orchard running around honking for the next twenty seconds or so). Daft birds. If the shaking of the earth beneath your feet is upsetting - why not fly up into the air?
I've planted a couple of vacant troughs on the house decking with polyanthus plants - the flowers are all cool blues and pretty lemon colours. Can Asiatic lilies can go in pots? I do seem to have rather a plethora of pots...
Saturday 7th July
Sniff, sniff... I've had a silly thought. I wonder what proportion of the world's humans has, at this very moment, a head cold? Such extraordinary annoying things, and to still be cure-less...
Green Cottage in the Sun
I'm Back!
Today the sun is back, and like magic so am I, the intrepid (if slightly snorty) winter gardener, running at full energy levels again. I have pot plans of some magnitude. But first, some rationalisation.
Phormium pieces are to be planted along the fence-line, thus freeing up medium sized pots, into which sempervivums can shift from their smaller pots. Then these pots planted with polyanthus can go on the cottage verandah. And there's the vegetable garden to weed (if potting up pots gets boring) and leaves to bag up (if the weeding gets too wet and muddy).
So everything has its purpose, and leads nicely on to something else. Right! Let this gardening chain begin. Fresh air and winter sunshine. Beautiful!
Much, Much Later...
Today has been a triumph. The sun shone all day, I worked really hard, and late afternoon we drove across country to pick up my new season's roses. How exciting! These were ordered as my Mothers' Day present, and I've been looking forward to them for weeks. The roses (a heady mixture of David Austins, striped roses, and climbers) have helped me forgot about my sniffy nose.
Out, Out, Phormium...
Another Flax Dug Out
I dug a coloured Phormium out of the patio garden - too many of its leaves were reverting to the species (dull green, super-vigorous). And it was well and truly flattened in the last snow. I replanted pieces of it, with three other Phormium clumps, by the Pumphouse fence. Pond Cottage now looks pretty with its flowery pots.
Then I weeded and raked gum leaves off the garden around the bay window, and pruned its roses. Mary rose looks very unhealthy - I've always suspected the soil in here to have been polluted with old building rubble. This tiny garden needs to be enriched - already I see lots of self-sown cornflowers in the rose gaps. Perhaps some carefully applied compost?
Spring! Well, not quite, but a patch of snowdrops are flowering already by the driveway. Dear things - a photograph must be taken tomorrow.