Edited by David Smith, Thursday, 29 Sep 2011, 17:08
What a lovely day! I’ve been taking advantage of the garjuss weather to mow the lawn. Well, I say ‘lawn’, but it’s more a case of ‘areas of the garden that aren’t concrete or bog’, and I say ‘mow’, when in fact I’m really just hoovering up cat shit and bindweed, but whatever you call it it’s nice to work up a bit of a sweat and the garden does look better for it afterwards, so well done me. I’m hoping now the weather will hold for the weekend, because we’ve had far too few Sundays where al fresco tray bakes of chicken, chorizo, tomatoes and chick peas etc have been a viable option and the Pimms bottle has gone largely untouched this year. Okay, so it’ll be daddy-long-legs circling us and the hanging birch this month rather than July’s midges, but at least the wasps have all done one.
Disturbed a toad while doing the edging and noticed crocuses coming up under the bay tree, so I’m guessing the warm weather has been a surprise all round. Just hope next door’s horrible overgrown crab-apple doesn’t decide to burst into blossom again – poxy thing produces about 3 tonnes of totally useless fruit every year (don’t say ‘you could make jam’ – it would take about three shedfuls of sugar to impart any sort of sweetness to a handful of the horrible little puss-nuggets it produces) which it deposits all over MY garden. It’s about 80ft tall and undoubtedly the ugliest looking tree on the planet. It makes the ‘haunted woods’ from Snow White look like Shangri La, and if it was in my garden I’d have taken an axe to it years ago.
Plants hate me. I don’t know why, they just do. Some people have green fingers; I have brownie-black ones that can reduce the handsomest pot of coriander or basil to mulch in a matter of days. I’m careful not to overwater or underwater, to avoid direct sunlight and too much shade, but if I buy it on Saturday and haven’t used it to make pesto by Sunday it’ll be fit for nowt but compost by Monday morning. Weeds adore me, and from the amounts that hurl themselves at me from next doors tree so do crab apples. Nettles bow to rub themselves against me as I pass and brambles scramble madly to sink their little thorns into my flesh, but anything you’d actually want to grow avoids me like the plague. At school, I was the only kid whose Cress-in-an-Eggshell Easter character remained totally bald, and when we did gardening in rural science I was always the one given compost duty. I spent so much time in the warm, damp environs of the compost heap I was known as Lord of the Ringworm, and went through my early teen years with a complexion reminiscent of Spam™... Ahhhh happy days...
Anyhoo. Hope everyone reading this has had the chance to enjoy the sunshine, and that anyone who hasn’t gets a chance to do so sometime over the weekend. If it is good weather and you’ve run out of Pimms, just mix gin and red vermouth. If you really want to do it properly you should add some orange Curacao too, but that pushes the price up. Much more fun just to double (or treble) the quantity of gin
Indian Summer
What a lovely day! I’ve been taking advantage of the garjuss weather to mow the lawn. Well, I say ‘lawn’, but it’s more a case of ‘areas of the garden that aren’t concrete or bog’, and I say ‘mow’, when in fact I’m really just hoovering up cat shit and bindweed, but whatever you call it it’s nice to work up a bit of a sweat and the garden does look better for it afterwards, so well done me. I’m hoping now the weather will hold for the weekend, because we’ve had far too few Sundays where al fresco tray bakes of chicken, chorizo, tomatoes and chick peas etc have been a viable option and the Pimms bottle has gone largely untouched this year. Okay, so it’ll be daddy-long-legs circling us and the hanging birch this month rather than July’s midges, but at least the wasps have all done one.
Disturbed a toad while doing the edging and noticed crocuses coming up under the bay tree, so I’m guessing the warm weather has been a surprise all round. Just hope next door’s horrible overgrown crab-apple doesn’t decide to burst into blossom again – poxy thing produces about 3 tonnes of totally useless fruit every year (don’t say ‘you could make jam’ – it would take about three shedfuls of sugar to impart any sort of sweetness to a handful of the horrible little puss-nuggets it produces) which it deposits all over MY garden. It’s about 80ft tall and undoubtedly the ugliest looking tree on the planet. It makes the ‘haunted woods’ from Snow White look like Shangri La, and if it was in my garden I’d have taken an axe to it years ago.
Plants hate me. I don’t know why, they just do. Some people have green fingers; I have brownie-black ones that can reduce the handsomest pot of coriander or basil to mulch in a matter of days. I’m careful not to overwater or underwater, to avoid direct sunlight and too much shade, but if I buy it on Saturday and haven’t used it to make pesto by Sunday it’ll be fit for nowt but compost by Monday morning. Weeds adore me, and from the amounts that hurl themselves at me from next doors tree so do crab apples. Nettles bow to rub themselves against me as I pass and brambles scramble madly to sink their little thorns into my flesh, but anything you’d actually want to grow avoids me like the plague. At school, I was the only kid whose Cress-in-an-Eggshell Easter character remained totally bald, and when we did gardening in rural science I was always the one given compost duty. I spent so much time in the warm, damp environs of the compost heap I was known as Lord of the Ringworm, and went through my early teen years with a complexion reminiscent of Spam™... Ahhhh happy days...
Anyhoo. Hope everyone reading this has had the chance to enjoy the sunshine, and that anyone who hasn’t gets a chance to do so sometime over the weekend. If it is good weather and you’ve run out of Pimms, just mix gin and red vermouth. If you really want to do it properly you should add some orange Curacao too, but that pushes the price up. Much more fun just to double (or treble) the quantity of gin