Incy Wincy Spider

I don’t know what possessed Ian to leave the house on Thursday, but he did.  He rarely goes out the back of the house (no cars there) so to do it in rain seemed most uncharacteristic, but go out he did.

Come to think of it, he was probably going out to call me in.  Friends had arrived and I was out picking soggy mulberries for a crumble mulberry cake (yum). 

Whatever Ian saw in that brief visit, he passed me on my way into the house on his way out and then he was gone for the next couple of hours.  I spotted a ladder briefly then spied the man himself from the kitchen window as I made coffee, but that was it - sightings as fleeting as those of our hedgehog.

It turned out that the torrential rain had reminded him that the gutters need some work.  He’d already celebrated the arrival of the new ladder by getting down the small forests sprouting from various points in the guttering (photo op missed), but it really takes rain to show you where the problems are.  And they were everywhere.  In particular he found that the rotting bathroom window downstairs is because the join in the gutter immediately above is not sealed.

I feel rather shamefaced that I don’t know what else he repaired, but I do know he was the unsung hero of that rainy day.  My coffee was good and the mulberry cake delicious!

Plumtastic

We have plums growing all over the place.  These aren’t all of them, just the ones that were most photogenic at this stage.

Some look like they’re going to grow into normal plums.

Some are small, but absolutely delicious.

And the rest are tiny, tasty and abundant, but most of all very, very pretty.  Sadly the yellow are the least delicious, but I’m sure they’ll make excellent gin.

The weeds in pictures

Here's the pictorial version of the weeding I’ve been banging on about intermittently all summer.

This is the bit I’ve largely done.  It looks a bit of a wasteland.  Well, it is a bit of a wasteland.  Not all my fault.  A lot of it was in the shade of the old horse chestnut tree and there never was much growing under there.  But it’s clear in my ground elder obsession I must have removed rather a lot of good stuff too.

The bit I didn’t get to yet looks great.  Look at all that purple.  And all those weeds.

The big green mound is a miniature mulberry.  It’s been trained into that shape – makes it virtually impossible to pick the mulberries, but it looks good.

I read somewhere that nasturtiums outgrow the ground elder and as I also read that they are one-year-wonders I thought they’d be perfect to outwit the elder.  They haven’t stopped the elder, but the girls had fun planting and they distract the eye from all the nettles and thistles that have leapt in to fill the gaps left by the elder.  Of course, I didn’t realise there was a purple theme when we planted them.  They’re very cheerful though… I say they, I mean it is very cheerful… only one has flowered.

Norman liked it fruity

Wow!  How did we miss all this on our regular visits to the house last year?  Several times we came down to the house before we bought it, ostensibly to measure, meet builders, or talk to tree experts, but mostly just to wander in the gardens and remind ourselves why we were taking such a crazy plunge.  But somehow, in all our visits, we missed the fruit, or at least almost all of it.

We did find the wild strawberries.  Exquisitely small and utterly delicious these tiny gems are hidden all along the garden wall.

And we have apple trees all over.  Some look like they’re going to be eaters, though they’re still pretty tart.

And the grapes are coming along nicely – they were delicious in October last year though everything’s come early this year so who knows when we’ll be starting wine production.  Ha.

 

But I think my absolute best are the mulberries.  I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted them fresh before, but they are delicious.  The juice from a single berry is enough to provide enough “blood” for even the most over-zealous props department in a school play, but they are worth every ruined T-shirt.  Heaven.

Caution: Man working overhead

Ruth and I were out of the house all day today.  First she completed her next marathon swim (2000m), then we collected the deeds to the house (rather overdue), and finally a shopping trip for essentials: coffee (Ian), books (Ruth) and underwear (me).

When we got home, I found this:

Domestic bliss.  My very own gardener.

A more entertaining shot might have been of the chainsaw stuck in the tree, but then Ian might have returned to base camp and never again ventured into the garden.

He’s done an amazing job.  Lots of the branches have dead limbs, or had… now we just have piles of them waiting for the bonfire bus.  Some will become Ian’s new hedgehog and frog hangout.  He’s worried than when we finally take down the old bonfire there will be nowhere for them to hide.

Sterling work, Ian.

And here is the Indian bean tree groaning with happiness.

And this?  Well, I haven’t a clue what it is, but I think it’s fabulous.

Bee careful

As always, the weeds are winning.  As the girls were happily entertaining themselves this afternoon and Ian had gone off to do some hunter gathering in Sainsbury’s and the Sony shop (though his laptop lives doggedly on he has to shake it occasionally in meetings to quiet the fan, which can’t look too professional), I decided the time had come to grab my tool bag and head for the muck.  Actually, as I did some weeding yesterday too, it was more a question of gathering up the gloves and tools and buckets I’d left scattered around the place, but you get the drift.

I am absolutely sick of the front flower bed and my bid to clear the ground elder.  One side of it is clear and I pounce on the smallest elder shoot, but this new desert I’ve created appears to provide ideal conditions for thistles and nettles so I’m not sure it counts as progress.   And to make matters worse, the remainder of the bed, weeds and all, is in full bloom with every purple flower you can imagine so I can only suppose I’ve dug up a lot more than ground elder from the now very empty end.

So for variety I sent off for new shadier climes today.  I chose the nettles that are blooming beneath the Indian bean tree.  The tree is looking fabulous with huge light green leaves and delicately scented blossom with boughs that grow horizontally (thanks to years of yearning for light from under the privet growing round its base).  It is clearly now a very happy tree.

I’d dug about a square foot, if that, of mainly nettles and thistles when I realised that the noise I was hearing was not electronic and in the distance, but something close to me, very close, underneath my fork.  Paying closer attention, I saw the ground was moving.  Not much, but gently, like the ground was breathing.  I didn’t wait around, but gathered my stuff, told the girls not to play in the area and backed off a little.  Then out of the blue, or actually out of the dirt, and apparently in front of my eyes though I didn’t see it coming, a huge bumble bee appeared and was examining his property for earthquake damage.  Or that was how it seemed.  We backed away and left him to restore his property.

I moved again.  Always more weeds to choose from.

Hardly had I begun when a few sharp cracks presaged the breaking of a branch from one of the plum trees.  The branch didn’t’ fall all the way (someone – Ian, I suppose – will have to head up with a tree to free it from itself) but was still a little alarming.  The second branch in two summers… I sense a pattern emerging.  It’s a pretty big tree.  Nothing like the sycamore that lost a branch last summer from several tens of feet up, but high all the same.  I could only just reach the tip of the broken branch as it dipped to greet me.

I tried to turn the moment into a learning experience for Oriana, explaining that the sound she heard first is a warning to her to get away from the trees.  It didn’t quite fall on deaf ears.  The drama thrilled her:  “Daddy, I was so scared.  It was very frightening.  It sounded like bombs going off,” she told Ian when he got home.  We get a lot of bombs in this particular backwater.