Evening delights

Monday 24th September
There is a scent of roses are wafting around the room here as I type and wait for the sun to come onto the garden. The vase has four buds and two fully opened roses. This old rose in the courtyard is quite a doer and gives off a most rich and lemony rose scent. It is a mess of course, unpruned for years and quite chaotic. I dont dare prune it without help. And it needs to be properly attached to the walls.

Watering the garden each evening is a delight – the strawberries are perky at last, and the radishes seem to get bigger every day, as do the Swiss chard. I am going to plant the onion and shallot sets today. And naturally that meant I had to come up with a quick vague garden plan first. I want to have some height in each bed for the climbing beans and cucumbers. So being madly symmetrical, I have made a little 50cm square bed in the centre of each bed. Except I messed up one of the squares in the dusk last night. And need to do that first. Pictures cannot be taken until things look neat.

And I have had another go at the plan of the whole garden. Tricky to get all the measurements right.

Back inside to hide from the warmth of the day. Hot work scrabbling about the veggie bed. But I have done the onions and garlic. Took ages.  Especially as I didn’t find that ball of string I desperately needed to line up the rows. But the searching was diverting.

 And then out to measure up the place.

8pm. A light drizzle has brought me in. I only started moving the spare topsoil onto the lower potager at 7pm. It was too warm before then to do much heaving of spades full of soil. But now it is a quarter complete. The topsoil mound looks like an open caste mine. And the soil is alarmingly orange compared to the rest of the soil. I do so hope it is topsoil as promised. But it will help with the problem of that top bed being too close to the bedrock. And who knows, maybe a gentle soaking of rain will set it right.
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