Pacing

You have to measure out your outdoor time carefully during a heatwave.  It was over 32C in the shade today with that annoying southerly wind.

The mornings are just divine. Oh that they last a bit longer. But we are lucky that it doesn’t really get too hot until 10am up on our mountain top.

This morning that meant I was able to go about collecting horse manure, pruning the wild clematis that snakes over just about every vertical protruberance. In our case, the letter box.

That done I nipped up to the grape vines in the courtyard and pruned and pruned and pruned.  I had so many heaps you could barely see the wheelbarrow under the greenery. They were carted off to the compost heap and then there was a spot of tying in of wayward growth, weeding and sweeping. It looks a treat. And I forgot to take a photo, sorry. Have a shot of the cat instead.

Then I topped up all the planters with some more compost and mulched with gravel.

There were lots of bramble tendrils growing out of the tall wall that is the edge of the potager. So down with a ladder and I hacked my way back to the lovely granite stone.

Naturally I found an excuse to prune out some nettles and other nasties lurking in the wall, and suddenly it was lunchtime and blazingly hot.

In to hide. To make more jam, pick over another two kilos of jostaberries (a nice sitting down job) and then a mad dash out for an abusrd chore.

The compost heap needed turning. Well it needed editing first.  I had a huge amount of rather dull dry matter on top that was never going to compost down in the usual swift time. So I pulled off a quarter of the heap and moved it to the far distant compost heap beyond the duck pond.

It can rot down at leisure there. Actually it’s rather shaded and damper under the trees on the edge of the property, so it will be fine.

Then back to the main bins (and aren’t you glad I’m not posting pictures of that dull subj?) where I discovered I had some lovely crumbly compost underneath. Out came the riddles, the wheelbarrow and the buckets, and I ended up with three lovely stacks of compost for the potager.

I didn’t apply them to the ground right away. It’s way too hot for that.  But I moved them into the basement where they can wait for some cooler or wetter weather.  Wouldn’t that be marvellous?

And then as it was so deliciously cool under the house I decided to sort hoses, stack pallets and generally tidy the work space.

But that was enough hot work for the day.  In to shower and enjoy the cool of the house.  Eight pots of jam. A pick of sweet peas in the potager.  A sneaky weed of the courtyard at 8pm when it was cooler and that’s the day.