PARIS AND POTTING JAM

It is Saturday.

How can I write a blog on such trivial a thing as gardening when lunatics are wandering around Paris slaughtering innocent people?
How can anyone justify murder on such a scale?
They are going to get a shock, rather they are not, when they find their martyrdom led to nothing - they will simply be dead and achieved nothing.
I am sure most of us find it hard to comprehend how someone can commit such acts - and then do it in the name of a god. Too many people have died with a god on their side.
However, it does put things in life into proportion (So R says when I moan about pond liners).

Right I have had my rabbit so what does one do when the rain falls for forty-eight hours soaking everything. It is the remains of hurricane Kate dumping its moisture on our garden.

So I make jam, summer fruits jam using blackcurrants and blackberries for R's Church Craft Fair on Saturday coming.
I am also going to pot up some rooted rosemary cuttings but not until the rain stops (if it ever does). We have a flood warning out from the Met Office.
I have bought three sacks of peat free compost and wait.

There is still a delight in small things in the garden like the fallen leaves and their colours. But the rain raineth (Ambleside is virtually cut off today (Sunday) by floods on the A59) and the liner in the pond riseth and it is dark and dismal and frustrating.

So Monday is graveyard day in Liverpool - R's family have had the gravestone of their Grandfather restored so it is off to meet the myriad of cousins.

At this time of year there is much to do and I will have to turn my hand to clearing the dead and dying growth from this year, weeding and mulching, with some good horse manure if I can get it.
Have put the asparagus to bed for the winter and need to do the same with the rhubarb and strawberries.
The leaves are off the cercidiphyllums but because of the weather we have not been able to enjoy the smell of toffee they give off after they have fallen.
A man is coming Wednesday to look at the ash tree we want felling and turning into logs. There are some nearby stump shoots he can do the same to.

Then the rain eased and I donned my Wellies and paddled down into the stream. I dug a diversion from the pond drain end so the water did not rush past the outflow (if it did outflow which it doesn't) and shoved the bottlebrush the hoe handle and finally the washing line pole up the pipe. With the latter, 9 feet long, I hit a solid obstruction at the far end which could be a sediment/clay plug but I suspect is the matting underlay below the liner.

This is how it was a year ago. Maybe I will have to dig a new way across from the stream and under the liner to release the trapped water.

Isn't this extremely boring and trivial!!

Je ne suis pas Francais mais - Paris - c'est terrible.