OH! STRIMMER MAN . . . .

Nothing to do with Spirituals - (that was Sinner Man) - but P came today and I have help with the manky jobs.  (Actually in the murky past you could have found me lying on my back on a stage playing a very cheap organ and singing OSM where you gonna run to etc! Now I could get down but would need help to get up again!)

So, to start with a flop - the Chelsea flop, not the Chelsea Chop. Perhaps I did not chop enough? This is  Sedum spectabile but it grew so fast after the chop I need not have bothered.

So to success and not all fruit in the garden are fruity/veggy.

These are rose hips and the Rosa rubifolia is wonderful this year. The fruit are bending the branches down with their weight.

And so to a failure - of brain.  I thought I would prune the Conference pear back a little as I collided with one of the lower branches every time I passed with the mower - AND - I pruned off the branch bearing our only decent pear!  

And to success - the green tomatoes are ripening on the kitchen windowsill. The orchid is also flowering again - it sits on its north facing windowsill in the kitchen (nice and warm with the Aga) and thrives. In fact it is getting so tall we will have to lower the window to accommodate it. (Not serious).

And more success - we cannot cut the cut flowers fast enough. Fortunately a friend came for lunch (you know who thou ist) and she loves sweet peas so she got a gert bunch.

The cosmos have fallen over and the calendulas are setting seed. I love the white and deep pink cosmos but the pink ones leave me a bit unenthused. However as the cosmos were a gift as seedlings who am I to complain. 

I have just pulled up some more multi legged carrots and cut off another courgette but the dark hours are closing in and anything gathered from now on is a bonus.

And to more success -

Damsons, figs, courgette, butternut squash and MARROWS (big courgettes). We also have a secret dolphin shadow on the right.

A man came and attached a small round yellow arrow to a post by our fence to indicate where the bridleway runs, my small Canon camera died and I am reading poetry tomorrow in the library - National Poetry Day and the vague theme is water. I have made some borscht with beetroot from (you know who thou ist) and R's iPad is plinking every time a message arrives. Cawthwaite is getting tense with Gretchen's dad being trouble, Joe Pickett is freezing in Wyoming, my golf is dreadful, a wheel broke on my trolley and is held on with garden wire - so there you are, forget the BBC News, this is what is happening in the real world.

The garden is still, the chimes are silent, we are waiting for the rain that is moving north - not everything that comes from the south is good!

Whoops getting a bit provincial there.

Sorry(ish) (a bit) (ish), nay, I am a northern lad and real proud of it (ish) (a bit).