Our own brand of "Wild Flowers"

I love this time of year. It is time to start clearing things out and tidying things up for winter.

During the summer months, I would like the garden to be tidier than it typically is, with less “wild flowers”. But in May the larger weeds appear and the rest of the summer is a battle to keep them down. We try our best but there are just too many and they are very well established. 

We normally holiday in late spring as it is not too hot, and return to find 4ft stinging nettles circling the back garden with many others dug in for the war of attrition to follow. The stinging nettles have a secret underground network like the Ho Chi Minh trail that no matter how hard I try, they always manage to come back.

But now their guard is down, and the real battle begins. This week I made a start and attacked the wilder area of our garden. It was a pincer movement that quickly pierced their defences. I then tried to find the subterranean channels that house the big roots.

This was actually much tougher than I thought as the ground is still very hard, a true reflection of how little rain we have seen in the past few weeks. It is weird because the surface is soft but underneath it is like concrete. A day of digging and bashing the ground got rid of about a ten feet strip of roots, but also managed to bring back my tennis elbow. The collateral damage was too high and I have re-trenched until the rains come.

The garden JCB returns

I need to find a way to persuade our garden JCB (badger) that stinging nettle roots taste just like worms and whatever else he digs the garden up to find. He has the expertise in digging, which he demonstrates on a nightly basis. If he would just oblige I could use the 30 mins each day I currently spend repairing the lawn, removing the roots.

Sadly, the stinging nettles will be back again next year, and maybe cleaning the outside of the greenhouse is a better idea until I work out how to communicate with the badger!

Rose-hip Syrup

One of the reasons for tackling the weeds was to get at the rose-hips that grow behind them.

There is something very comforting about the sight of rose-hips, it takes me back to my school days and the taste of rose-hip syrup in semolina for school dinners. The syrup made the semolina bearable.

I have decided to make rose-hip syrup for myself this year. Each year I look at the hips and consider making it, but this year I will actually do so. It is basically liquid rose-tasting sugar, which is not ideal for a diabetic, but the lure of a taste re-kindled is too strong to miss. You only get a small amount of syrup from a large number of hips.

It has been a good year for roses with all bushes delivering bright red hips. I didn’t realise but some of the roses had grown so high there were actually hips in the tops of the trees.

The muppets are taking over

The news this week has been dominated again by the election in America. The sleazy and personal nature of the campaigning has made the recent UK elections look like something out of the 50’s when politicians were just good fellows and no one did anything to rock the boat.

I don’t think either candidate in America is covering themselves in glory, but the thought that after the election someone who clearly has no thought for the environment could be running America in the next eight years is very concerning. Quite apart from all the other political factors, we have to make some headway with environmental improvements or there won’t be a world to lead. Handing the reigns of America over to the muppets couldn't be any worse and at least they are popular. Some would say this is really what is happening!

Something feels not quite right

Last week, we went out on Friday night and stayed over. Just for a change we left the cats to themselves with a smorgasbord of different food stuffs. We came home on Saturday morning and as I walked down the hall I could hear the cats running around the lounge.

I walked into the room and found both of them looking at me very guiltily as if to say “don’t look at me I haven’t done anything”.

I walked around the room and they didn’t move, all looked ok.

I left the room to get something and the noise started again. Darting back in I was met with the same guilty look. This time I looked more closely under the sofa and behind the chairs. Finally, I looked behind the curtain. There hiding behind a candle holder was a full sized moorhen. Our moorhen murderers were trying to strike again and we had come back at just the right time!

All summer they have waited for hours to pick off any stray moorhen chicks that have got too close to the side of the pond but now they have started on the adults. How they got a full-sized moorhen through the cat-flap I will never know. They are quite big birds.

Thankfully I was quickly able to open the French windows and hold the cats back and the moorhen took off out of the room and flew back to the safety of the water.

Keep still I am trying to help

After all that excitement the cats have thankfully kept their attentions for the rest of the week on the usual mixture of mice and voles. The routine of a strange cat call followed by presentation of a half-eaten furry animal has occurred all too often.

Because it happens regularly one gets a little blasé about the animal being already dead and the cat just playing with it. On Wednesday I bent down to check the animal was dead when it leapt in the air and ran off. I was holding the cat and the vole had seen its chance and made a run for it.

I thought I had got used to fast-moving furry animals in the house, but now that one was racing across the hall I soon realised that I still didn’t like them very much and couldn’t just stand there. Voles can shift when they need to and my lumbering body is far too slow to catch them, quite apart from the fact that I also am quite scared of small fast moving rodents.

This particular rodent survived the incident as I managed to open the front door and persuade it to run out, but not before it tried every other orifice in the hall to hide in.

It is supposed to be nice on Saturday so have a good weekend!

Picture Round

The picture theme for this week is to guess another garden. There are a few pictures from the garden to give you a clue and then some of the plants, similar to last week.

As it is much harder than last week to guess, I have also given you an anagram to decipher.

This probably describes the quality of the anagram but it is: 

GESHANKY SHIT

Enjoy.

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