Garden update & walking.

[bunn]

The fig tree is still producing new figs, but with the chill in the air now the teenies don't have a hope of ripening. I have pulled off all but the largest ones, and am hoping we will get enough sun to ripen the second crop before autumn really sets in.

The grape vine is purpling nicely, and the grapes have got quite sweet - the ones closest to the white shed wall are noticeably sweeter than the ones that are on the end and hanging into the passage at the side of the house, which does get a bit drafty.

I foolishly ate some grapes off the vine in front of Mollydog: of course she saw me do it and decided she wanted grapes too. Grapes are supposed to be bad for dogs, so I told her no, but then when I was mowing the lawn she must have sneaked back and ripped a whole bunch off the vine. I know this because I found a vine branch complete with grape stems (no grapes remaining) in the living room - I'm pretty sure that wasn't the cats,and Polo doesn't eat grapes off a plate, let alone off the floor. Still, she has survived.

Brambles in the upper garden are out of control, and a bonfire is desperately needed. I've just realised we haven't had a burning since last year, as I found the remains of last year's christmas tree still lurking in the 'to be burnt' pile. Oops.


We did a Dartmoor walk today from Merrivale, which is a route that involves a lot of old granite quarries. Reflections of the cliffs in the still water: very beautiful. BUT - there were an awful lot of people about cycling, walking, yelling, running... I know it was Sunday, but even so, you expect Dartmoor to be more remote. We should probably have gone to one of the more obscure carparks - the B3357 is probably a bit obvious. Or we could have walked further from the road. Still, it did mean we could stop on the way back and have a Willy's icecream.

I had a vague plan this year that I was going to go rough camping for a night on Dartmoor with Mollydog, but I've failed to do it because it meant buying a tent, and there are so *many* flavours of tent nowadays! Every time I started to look I was overwhelmed by choice, and gave up. When I last went camping, the kind of tent you could carry was just a sort of triangle and still weighed a ton, ensuring you didn't want to walk very far and always had a bad back by the time you stopped. Now - do I need a dual skin tent? Should I choose one like a long sausage, or a pointy one or a dome? What *is* a festival tent, and why is it so cheap?

Next year, maybe. It feels like it is getting a bit late in the year now (I'm sure September isn't normally this chilly, is it? I've got the fire on here!)

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Judging from the teenage novels I've read about festivals, I expect a festival tent is so cheap because you expect to have lost it by the end of the weekend, or to have some stranger's bodily fluids all over it, or to have had it swept away by flood water and mud. It doesn't need to be weather-proof because you'll be up all night drinking, anyway, so won't be sleeping in it - or, if you do sleep in it, you'll be too drunk to care.

I like the word "purpling", by the way. It created a lovely image of the vines sitting there making a "purple purple" noise. It took me a little while before I suddenly made the connection to the colour purple.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I must say I wasn't sure if purpling was a real word or if I made it up, but it seems to be in the dictionaries.

I am distraught to discover that empurplement - which I would have sworn was a word - does not appear in any of the dictionaries I tried!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Doh! of course it does, it's a verb though, so it only comes up if you search for 'empurple'.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Phew. It would be a sad world if such a lovely word as "empurplement" didn't exist.

I notice, though, that "embiggen" and "debiggen", staple words in my vocabulary, do not appear in dictionaries, despite appearing in the Simpsons. "Biggen" at least is acknowledged with a sneery "obs."

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Must be an (obs) dictionary. If appearing in the Simpsons doesn't make a word common currency I would like to know what does!