What a wonderful day,
not sunny but soft, damp and warm, the most perfect growing weather. A
beautiful day to be in the garden, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t possible
to move peonies, it is! These came from the long border last year, to be looked after in the kitchen garden. Bella has been sorting out the compost for me, and look
who I spotted in the orchard! Oh and it’s a wonderful day for a birthday!!
Picnic anyone? Xxxx
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
border control
Gorgeous weather today; summer
has crept up softly, warm and fulsome, smiled all day upon us, and I have spent hours in the
long border pulling out the sweet rocket which is going to seed, and planting
the last of the potted dahlias, more cosmos and pink verbena. I staked everything earlier
this month with lengths of hazel bent into arches over the young plants,
and the taller things seem to be largely still upright, so it seems to have worked. Alongside the rocket which comes back every year,
however ruthless I am, there are masses of lovely tall white agrostemma, Swanlake,
also self-seeded from last year, rubbing shoulders with cerinthe, foxgloves and galega,
all back without anything to do with me. It is beautiful.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
it must have been an angel
Well, there was hardly time for it to become a raging debate here, and now it doesn't matter if they were red or grey squirrels, because Angel has eaten them. I wasn’t the only one to be transfixed so compellingly by my little squirrel friends. I have to report, to my horror, I have found three squirrel tails left at the back door and I’m afraid all blame for this is levelled at our beautiful tabby cat Angel, mostly because I caught her eating one of them. She’s normally very good at feeding herself on rabbit, although maybe she was bored with the same food, and thought, oh no, not rabbit again, and maybe it is easier to catch a squirrel than a rabbit! Although I would have expected a squirrel to put up more of a fight than a rabbit might. A quick word of caution here. While it is lovely to have a cat and then have kittens, and we had all the fun of playing with them until they went to good homes, it leaves the mother constantly wanting to provide. So Angel decided to hunt then not only for herself, her brother Dipstick, and Uncle Mo, but us too! Her mother Millie was the same. In one memorable week she caught the complete range, rabbit, mouse, rat, mole, squirrel, blackbird, all neatly presented to us on consecutive days, fortunately outside. But today Angel is now officially the smuggest and fattest cat possible, and there may be strawberries after all.
Tuesday, 12 June 2012
strawberry roan perhaps
There should be a bumper year
of strawberries at The Old Vicarage this year. Unlike last year, there has been more than
enough rain, I've managed to organise the runners I saved into sensible rows, I’ve
netted them, and laid the strawberry trusses onto straw. All we need now is
some sunshine to ripen them. That’s if there are any left to ripen of course, because they are disappearing fast! And the
culprit for this, for once is not the chickens, or the dogs, or opportunist
blackbirds or even the numerous jackdaws, but squirrels. Every time I walk down to the kitchen garden I see three
squirrels. Every single time. And every time they are either eating a huge
unripe strawberry, or flying back to their tree house with the biggest one they
can carry stuffed hard into their mouths. And the awful thing is, I don’t mind.
I don’t think they are very old. It’s almost as though they’ve just worked out the
whole business of survival. And while I
see them all the time, they are really hard to photograph, but after HOURS of
trying, here are a few pictures, and although my friends tell me there are no red
squirrels on the mainland south of Northumberland, to the untrained eye, these are the reddest grey squirrels I’ve
ever seen. Hmmm what do you think??
This little one is very grey, and very
cute, but there go the strawberries.....
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Monday, 11 June 2012
gardener required
The Old Vicarage is in disguise. Roy, our
wonderful lovely postman, tells me if we aren’t able to trim the yew trees by
the gate we should perhaps rename our house through building control.
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