At time of publishing, I was supposed to be at a campsite on the Mendips wrestling with a recalcitrant tent but… I’ve got Covid! It’s not 100% definitely that trip to London from Monday’s blog but it’s a very strong candidate.
My parents are going on holiday on Tuesday so they don’t want to catch it so I’m mostly banished to the garden so I thought I’d write you a little ode to my bit of outdoors.
Let’s start with the simple things. It’s June so it’s 30 Days Wild. Day one is the big wild breakfast, ie eat your breakfast outside. June 1st was a work day and it’s a lot of hassle to get through an outside breakfast on a work day. Well, I’ve made up for that one! Breakfast outside two days in a row! And it’ll be continuing into the weekend. I’ll be past my isolation time by Monday – and back to work – so I’ll probably be back to indoor toast by then but in the meantime, it’s quite holidayish eating outside.
I’ve seen bees in my lavender plant for the first time. There are always bees aplenty in the hedge by mid-June (and I’ve enjoyed watching them quite a few times this week) but I’ve never seen them in the lavender. There’s a lot of lavender around town and I’ve seen lots of bees in everyone else’s lavender but they’ve never taken any interest in mine. I guess there’s a massive delicious hedge out the front and they have no need for a small lavender shrub in the back but at last, one of them has found it and that’s great.
I watch the birds. We have lots of wood pigeons, rooks, starlings and sparrows. The big birds land on the bird table’s roof, slide down and then awkwardly flutter in the side. The small birds land on the feeder and chuck the stuff down onto the ladder underneath and can empty the feeder completely in just over twelve hours.
But I’ve seen some new things since I’ve been enplagued. Yesterday I saw a juvenile chaffinch, old enough to fly by itself but still somewhat on the fluffy and yellow side. It crashed into the window, sat on the ground watching stars spinning around, shook its head and fluttered off. Never seen an adult chaffinch in the garden though.
Then there was the wood pigeon building a nest in the climbing plant which poses beautifully for mid-construction photos. I had a pair in 2020 who built a nest just around the corner, outside my office window, who raised two chicks and they were a delight to watch. Maybe this is one of my pidgelets, returned to its childhood home to make a nest of its own.
I’m writing this on my phone from my camping chair (aka at the moment “my plague chair”) and there was a starling perched on the edge of the bird bath. It hastened back to the relative safety of the bird table when I picked up my camera but seeing birds using it for baths is a recent pleasure too, despite it being out here for two years now. To be fair, they probably have been all along but it’s only since the furniture got rearranged that we’ve been able to really see out the back window to watch them and now I’m watching them – sometimes – from the garden. I’ve got to know the birds over the last two years. The robin is noisy and perpetually hungry. The blackbird with the tiny bit of white fluff is incredibly nosy and always has to come and see what’s going on. I’ve also learned to interpret a particular accusing look it gives me as “the bowl of hedgehog food is empty, why haven’t you refilled it?”. Yes, the blackbirds take very little interest in the bird food but they love the hedgehog food. I’ve not seen any hedgehogs this week.
Now the self-isolation rules have changed, my daily walks are not doomed, like I thought they might be if I eventually got the plague. I’ve cancelled everything – the local pool has moved my Tuesday swim for me, I’m waiting to hear back from the campsite and I’m spending my days doing very little, which is quite pleasant. The last few weekends have been the exhausting “well, if you can survive until 6pm tomorrow, you can have a rest for an hour” type so an unexpected few days off has been exactly what I needed, which is probably why it’s happened in the first place. I’ve battered my immune system until it’s given in to the inevitable after more than two years.
Anyway, yes. I just have to “try” to avoid crowds. I don’t generally meet many people on my daily walk anyway but now I leave it until about 8pm which is when most of the dogwalkers have gone home and the streets are virtually deserted. I did see “the nosy dog” yesterday. It’s a husky thing, the kind with such thick fur that you could lose a hand in it. The first time we met, the dog stopped to sniff me and I stopped to give it a quick scritch and the owner smiled and then said “Come on, Nosy”. I was reasonably sure it was the same dog but it stopped to sniff a brown splodge on the pavement and the owner said in such a long-suffering voice “You don’t have to smell everything…” that it clearly had to be the nosy dog. Besides, it’s been too hot lately to go walking much before 8 anyway.
And then there’s my garden! I did a post about it back in April but things have moved on. I’ve actually found the time and energy to do some of the stuff that’s needed doing for a few weeks – funny how having covid gives you the drive to do all the things.
The baby tomatoes are now big bushy things which I’ve moved from the greenhouses, where they were a bit squished, into the garden and stuck stakes in them. Most of them have sprouted a string of green tomatoes so hopefully there will be something edible before too long. The carrots and assorted onions are now a sea of green tendrils but not big enough to pull up yet and my Christmas parsnips are on their way – they took longer to get going than anything else. The white onions were just bulbs but now they’re long green stalks and distinct swellings in the raised bed – not big enough to eat yet but looking promising.
The radishes didn’t make it. I usually declare loudly and proudly that radishes are foolproof but they went straight from green shoots to massive flowers with a tiny woody red nub at the end. That was weeks ago. I’ve had new seeds for at least a week, maybe longer, I’ve just never bothered to get out there and sort them. Well, I did those too this morning. Pulled out the old ones, mixed in some fresh compost, scattered new seeds and hopefully there will be radishes soon.
My herbs have improved from the pictures in April. The mint flourished and then… well, flourished. It’s flowering. That’s not a bad sign in mint. However, my parsley did the same thing which means it’s done. It bolted. Too much heat and sun. I had to pull that out this morning and when I get some seeds, I’ll start it again.
The beans are in and doing nicely. I’m starting to have to train some of the shoots to climb the frame. The cucamelons were a failure. I left them in the greenhouse in a windowsill propagator. Trouble is, those things are designed to not leak on your windowsill so the base just filled with water and the shoots had no chance. Waterlogged before they even started. I looked at them and went “ooh, a shoot!” “Oh, there were three shoots yesterday, now there’s none, I wonder what’s going on?” for weeks before it dawned on me. So we’ll be starting them again but this time with drainage.
The passion flowers looked like a failure – two tiny shoots that clung to life and now they’re doing great and trying to climb the brick wall. They’ll need something proper to climb very soon but that’ll have to wait. For now, I’m just glad that they’re doing something. They should flower next summer. Oh, and the begonias. For my Gardener badge, I had to grow things from bulb as well as from seed and I had to grow flowers as well as vegetables. Now, the begonias aren’t flowering yet but considering I thought they weren’t even going to sprout, they’re doing very nicely. Nice big curly bright leaves and they’d got to the point where they needed something bigger. So my three flame-coloured ones have gone in a big pot with my dad’s last one, which he thinks is going to be white. I’m so happy they’ve got this far and if they could just wave a flower at me each, that would be nice.
Last, there’s fruit! The raspberries survived the winter and produced raspberries. Before they got big enough to pick, the birds got at them though. The strawberries are providing two or three strawberries every couple of days at the moment. The cherry tree even made a cherry – the birds usually get at them long before they’re even properly red but there was one hiding under a leaf today that no one had noticed. Dad’s verdict was “more decorative than edible” but hey, it was a cherry that grew on a cherry tree in the garden and that’s exciting.
And of course, there’s the hours spent not watching the birds or the bees or the vegetables, the hours just sprawled on my blanket with a book or in my camp chair just sitting out in the fresh air, not being infectious, enjoying the unexpected free time out in the garden.