List ticking

Glory be, it’s a sunny day. No wind, cool and perfect weather for planting the last hundred or so tulips.

We have emerged. And so has the mountain. One inch of rain fell yesterday while I felt under house arrest. But it all looks promising now.

Now you might notice that the posts are a bit bare this week; and that is because my digital camera is getting repaired. I dropped the thing a few weeks back; no surprise there. I’m forever dropping the wonder tool that lives forever in my back pocket. But this time I dropped it onto the road and the back screen shattered. I had a teensy bit of camera where I could see, but it really needed sorting out.

So once I get it back, I will retro fit these blog posts and insert appropriate pictures.

As is always the case when you have been indoors for a day writing out a long list of things to do, the first job is one that wasn’t there on the list at all.

I have swapped around two of my box balls in the shade garden.   One of them had an unfortunate incident about the same time as my camera dropping. It was decapitated by a rolling log.   Well, sheared (shorn?) in half.   So it looks like half a bush.   A bit like that I’d Like Half A Cup Of Coffee mug that still sits in my parents’ kitchen cupboard. Half a cup, Half a shrub.   So I have moved it round with the one that lies flush with a rock, and have to hope that it will bulk out eventually.

The damaged one was positioned just so that when I am sitting with my feet up on my chaise longue in the potting shed, it’s the only thing I really see looking out the French windows.   And seeing a damaged plant made my blood boil.

Well, simmer. So I now have a perfect circular one to gaze at.

Not that I’ve done much sitting in the shed. For one thing, Artur is on strike and refuses to do his lap work. He’s always mad at me for a few days after I come back. And it’s so comical how he behaves.

Twice this morning he walked right past me as I was bulb planting; and blatantly ignored my greetings. Head in the air, tail twitching, he just stalked on by and refused to acknowledge there was a friendly human within his space.

It took to just before 2pm when he deigned to even look at me. Even though I was grovelling in front of him offering a lap, and water bowls and friendly patting hands. Hah! I have to work harder than that was what he seemed to say.

He’ll forgive me by about Thursday when I have to go back to London and the cycle will be repeated.   Oh for a biddable cat.

But on with gardening.   Box balls swapped, then it was out with the tools to get all the planters in the courtyard cleared of weeds and the gravel mulch. Out with the soil, in with dozens of Mt Tacoma tulips in each box, and back with a little fish blood and bone to encourage the roses, and the tulips. And a final top dressing of stones.

And while I was working on these seven planters, I decided I should dig up the Gertrude Jeykll rose cuttings which I had struck a year earlier and were living a happy existence out in the garden, tucked behind the wall of the swimming pool garden.   Their destination; the three wooden planters on the opposite side of the courtyard which currently hold just mint and lilies.

It’s a bit of an experiment as these are cuttings I struck from a year ago.   I just dug them up and found to my alarm that they don’t have a very extensive root system on them.   So I’ll risk it and see how they do.   Just the thought of planting five new Gertie Jeykll roses for free is mouth watering. but will they put on growth and thrive? I have no idea.

My afternoon looks plotted out: there are dead cosmos to get out of the big vegetable garden and sunflower stalks to pull up (watching one’s back as they are brutes) and then a bit of sorting.

The blue and coal tits seem to be feasting on the dying marigolds which is odd. I suppose there is food in the seeds.   but it does mean I might have to think again about pulling them all up.   The frost got them last week and they are unsightly.   I think I will pull them despite the birds’ protests. We are feeding the birds with sunflower seeds on the terrace after all, so they won’t starve.   And I don’t need self seeding marigolds all over the place.

Right, that’s the game plan sorted. Lunch and then off I go.