The cowslips are now fading, after a magnificent display. The first Welsh Poppy has just opened above them, continuing the yellow theme in that part of the garden.
strawberry towers
Three weeks after overhauling the strawberry towers with new compost, and replanting with a mix of old plants and last year’s runners, the first flowers have appeared on the early “Honeoye”.
“Billy Houston”
Continuing to clear out the attic, rather slowly. I came across a carrier bag with a few copies of Vulcan and Euroboy – twink porn mags of the early 1990s. Certainly before 1994: buying such things was always a rarity, and stopped entirely when I moved to Scotland in the autumn of 1993. On the cover of one was “Billy Houston” a rather stunning young man who had fuelled my fantasies on many occasions. Curious, I looked him up to see what he is doing now …
Sadly, he’s gone totally off the rails. Joined the Aryan Brotherhood, currently serving life sentences for murders … https://web.archive.org/web/20240303061212/https://tim1965.livejournal.com/1797446.html
When it comes to handsome young men, the gap between reality and illusion is frequently mind-boggling. Or perhaps I am just attracted to guys who I subconsciously pick up on as being disturbed and difficult.
unexpected delivery
I’m not used to the doorbell ringing for a delivery on a Sunday – especially Easter Sunday! It proved to be a magnificent bouquet of flowers, from my nibling, for my birthday tomorrow. They explain “I chose this bunch because it’s a selection of all the stems which didn’t quite fit in other bouquets … something I’m sure we can both empathise with!”
more tired than I’d expected
Yesterday left me physically (nearly 11,000 steps, and two train journeys) and emotionally exhausted.
After sorting the orchid patch at Green Mount, I went for what may be my last walk on the Common. A wild playground when I was a 7-year-old, with bracken towering above my head and almost never seeing anyone else using it, it’s been tamed over the last 63 years and now resembles a park, with well-used pathways and wooded areas replacing much of the bracken and gorse. So many memories … the concrete path, done in two stages 1966-67, with the half-completed stage leaving it abruptly terminating in a muddy puddle for many months. Orchids, fly agaric toadstools, the omnipresent gorse and bracken, the ponds with newts (maintained a couple of years ago by local wildlife interests), bluebells now in the cleared areas, birds too numerous to mention but memorably one year a nightingale nesting low in a gorse bush, cowslips, germander, primroses … the memories come tumbling out. Currently, its the time of the windflowers, great sheets of them dancing in the cleared areas.
for the last time ….
For a number of years, the shady patch to the north of my Mum’s house has had Early Purple and Pyramid orchids, and a few Bee orchids. Every year, at around this time, I’ve marked off the area so that it doesn’t get mown, using orange baler twine and whatever scraps of sticks were kicking about. Sadly, after over 62 years, we’re about to put the house on the market, so somethng slightly less yokel countryside was required for visits by prospective purchasers. Proper stakes duly purchased, along with jute rope, and I went over this afternoon to do the business. Just in time, as the orchid rosettes are now showing.
“Christmas” tree
My potted “Christmas Tree” is showing signs of new growth, encouraging, as it’s already done three Christmases here. Obviously, the re-potting in January agreed with it. It isn’t, of course, a classic Christmas tree, but rather a “Picea Glauca Conica” (dwarf Alberta spruce) Not exactly a traditional one, but slow-growing and with negligible needle drop, it’s working out much better than the assorted pines and Nordman firs I’ve tried in the past, which have only lasted a couple of years each.
apple blossom
The first apple blossom has opened. Like so much of what I grow, it’s a heritage variety: Annie-Elizabeth, dating from about 1857, and awarded a First Class Certificate by the RHS 1868. It’s a cooking apple, amenable to espalier training to keep it small, and claims to be resistant to scab, canker and mildew (although the last two claims appear not to apply in my garden!). There was an elderly tree of it in my grandfather’s garden, which is where I first encountered it, and gardening in my mind is so closely associated with my grandfather, my aunt Ann and my mother Elisabeth that it was the only possible choice of cooking apple in the small garden of my terrace house. I’ve been very pleased with it.
edible garden stuff
That’s the tomato cage dealt with! Snails removed, cover and bricks washed, pots cleaned and disinfected. The pots are now filled, apart from the Halo rings – they’ll settle a bit, I expect, so I can top up when planting the tomatoes out. They’re currently in front of a north-facing slightly-open window in an unheated room, in an effort to keep them both hardy and not too large! I normally plant out on my birthday (21st) – it’s certainly too cold at nights to think about doing so.
I’ve also trenched in a load of compost from the old compost dalek and put up canes for the runner beans. They were planted last week in yoghurt pots in the greenhouse bit of the shed,but haven’t germinated yet.
shattered
After an emotionally-exhausting Saturday (a family gathering to commit my mother’s ashes to the River Evenlode) and physically demanding Sunday doing the last bits around her house before putting it on sale, followed by the dreaded train-with-backbreaking-seats trip home, I was in no fit state to do anything.
So, the first time I’ve ever had a Macca delivered ! Not even a posh burger from the Burger shop, just whatever looked quick, though I did at least have home-grown lettuce on the side. A prolonged soak in a hot bath and an early night seem called for.
