Friday 17 April 2020

Rain today

Rain today, the water butts are full
and there was no lounging about on the steamer chair.
Every member of the family, spread about the country, has been working on their garden space during this period of isolation. The First Born has been scrubbing the boards on her little London patch. Easy peasy you might think. But not when you've got to lug soil up and rubbish down three flights of stairs!
Wee One and family are working on quite a different scale to solve the problem of a steeply sloping back garden.
It involves moving a great amount of earth.
Oh, the boys are happy - there's machinery to play with!
Wheelbarrows at the ready.
Welly boots on.
There's 50 tons of topsoil to move this weekend.
But today was all about the pleasure of playing in puddles.

It's quite exhausting!
I hope that, like us, you are keeping safe, 
keeping busy and keeping well.

16 comments:

  1. Hey! You're sharing other people's gardens.

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    1. Only online, Tasker, and it's jolly frustrating. I'd love to be in the thick of it all, but the Bournemouth branch are probably glad that I'm not around to interfere!

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  2. Wonderful shares of garden fun. Love the pictures. Snow here today. Still snowing but so pretty. I love it. Just got done building another raised bed. Woohoo!

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    1. Snow!! It may look beautiful but by this time of year all I want is warmth. Hope it soon warms up for you so that things can get growing in your raised beds.

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  3. Good to see everyone out working in the garden. It is good for the body and mind.

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    1. I couldn't agree more, Doc, and it seems that lots of other people are coming to the same opinion.

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  4. As I did my daily walk it was sunny and I encountered several men washing their cars. Most seemed to resent the experience, wielding their shammy as if intent on going right through the paintwork to the bare metal. Most were disposed to chat at my greeting (I've been doing a lot of that during this Plague Year although I find it difficult to pick the right words for women below the age of twenty-five) but I didn't linger. It was clear they saw their toil as some form of penance and I had no desire to interfere with the redemption of their immortal souls.

    Relative to the photo of the digger - aggressively titled a Bobcat - I was about make some biting comment about Americans carrying the concept of "work" to ridiculous extremes when I remembered you were not at all American. That you lived obscurely somewhere in England (say a parish in Rutland) and that you had even more obscure links with the county which, in filmstar James Mason's words, "spawned me." Alas this won't be the only error of memory I commit today; hence this terminal full stop.

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    1. Car washing as a form of penance - will the occasional chucking of a bucket of water do anything for my immortal soul? (Supposing I have one.)
      Yes, the West Riding spawned me, the North Riding saw my growing up (and keeps a bit of my heart.) I've been living for over fifty years in the West Country, but I'm still Yorkshire!

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  5. The photo of the three wheelbarrows is my favourite of this lot!
    No rain here, but we need it so badly. Maybe there will be a few showers here and there tomorrow, but I fear we're in for another year of draught and may never fully recover from the extremely hot and dry summer of 2018.

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    1. Yes, the wheelbarrows really tell a story, a version of the three bears, perhaps!
      I had pulled various lengths of hosepipe out of the shed ready to do some watering and it obviously acted as a message to the rain gods as the heavens opened. It is still raining today and I've returned the hoses to the shed. Excellent, but now I'm wanting the sun again.

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  6. Always liked the small London garden. Nice to see it again.
    parsnip

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    1. It's quite a precious space for a top floor flat in central London - and an order of flowering plants should be arriving in the coming week!

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  7. Sorry about misusing your blog but you may be one of the few people I know who can help me with a gardening problem. Our widish driveway is laid with bricks. Our gardener, a neighbour, is almost the same age as me and struggles to keep it weed-free using a metal-prodder. A systemic weed-killer seems a less onerous solution. Can you recommend a brand? My apologies if you turn out to be an organic gardener for whom the phrase "systemic weed-killer" is total anathema.

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    1. I'm not keen on weed killers. You could use Weedol pathclear, but I would first try boiling water or a vinegar, water and washing up liquid mix and give the bricks a good scrub with a brush. Let me know how you get on.

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  8. Thanks for the suggestion. But the aim was to find a solution that made no physical demands on a trio of shaky octagenarians. A "good scrub" is, I fear, the sort of experience I've sought to avoid these last twenty years.

    We moved into our newly built house in 1998. Even then we were thinking "low maintenance" when it came to the garden. The link below gives you some idea.

    https://ldptonedeaf.blogspot.com/2015/10/drummed-out-of-wisley.html

    I should add that although I only use the garden for contemplation I'm not against including horticultural matters in my fiction. The post attached to the pic, Drummed out of Wisley, is a short story which hovers round the fringe of gardening.

    I should have emphasised more strongly I am a gardening wimp.

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