AH BUT IT"S COLD OUTSIDE AND THE DICK FEST

Wednesday - Wild too, gale blowing, showers, some with hail, spattering the windows, not much above freezing (I know, I know, you that live in Canada, Siberia and such places think we should be out sunbathing), but it does deter one from the garden. 

By now almost all the trees have lost their leaves - the beech hedge, of course, hangs on to its leaves and the great white cherry is not quite stripped. However the liquidambar just gets redder and redder. 

I have been keeping the field drain steam clear as best I can but it clogs so easily with leaves at this time of year. When it does the water finds all sorts of alternative underground routes down the garden so a little trench has been dug near the compost heap to try and dry out the grass.

I have brought out the potted bulbs for Christmas but am not very hopeful - they should be sprouting now they have had their shot of cold and dark but, apart from the amaryllis, not a thing. They sit inertly on my windowsill.

I have been surveying the internet for sleepers - railway ones, to replace the worn out and rotten scaffolding planks I first used for the sides of the veg beds. Not cheap. I think I do not want the creosoted ones - might not agree with the plants so will ask locally with prices from the internet search in mind. May need quite a few.

Still collecting stick fall from the trees - put somewhere dry for the kindling.

Using a sunflower and niger seed mixture has really attracted the goldfinches.

Moles are about heaping up their soil mountains - I tried the human hair approach suggested by G from Dublin but the just move a few feet to one side. If G. has any further ideas I would be interested to hear of them.

Friday - R has been labouring away clearing the debris of the year from the flowerbeds and plonking it on the compost heap. I dug up some of the yellow montbretia (crocosmia) as it was spreading too widely on the bed below the house and have relocated it on the banking above the Wendy House, I am not too bothered if it spreads there - it may crowd out the bindweed and couch grass.

The grey squirrel with the red face has all but demolished its chosen peanut feeder.

I am at a bit of a loose end at the moment - thrive on projects and have just completed the last one - the family history book. I am sustaining myself with biscuits, chocolate and Heineken, tea, coffee and golf but need something more. Somehow the garden does not fit the bill. Every night, in bed I look to R and say, 'Well, here we are again. It seems like only yesterday we were here before (which of course it was) but the interval feels like a couple of hours - very strange.

It seems a bit sad when the highlight of the day might be a few wheelbarrows of well rotted horse manure.

In fact we are such a loose end that we have got almost all our Christmas presents by mid November. However, I do remember one year when I went to the January sale of cut glass at the local works and bought many of next year's presents then! Mm! a bit sad?

This weekend it is Ulverston's Dickensian Festival (Locally known as the Dick Fest) where anything vaguely Victorian goes. There will be roasting chestnuts and mulled wine on the street and the weather is set fair for the thousands who come.

R and I will walk in and back as parking is horrendous - eyes open for a bargain and something for the garden.

That reminds me that our neighbour has given us some double white sneezewort for the garden and I have not put it in - knuckle rap and stuff - off to do that before dark.