bunn

Posting this for my own reference, really.
Most of what I have planted here is staying, but there are a few plants I want to bring along.

This blue campanula spreads like crazy, so with luck if I bring one plant it will do the same at the other end. Also in this pot, Mexican Fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus) although annoyingly this is a white-flowered version. I must try to see if I can get hold of the default pink-and-white, which is much prettier, and wonderful when it seeds itself into a wall. Also a stonecrop that I picked up that had fallen off a wall in Gunnislake, and was happy to root into this pot though it would be happier if it had one of its own.

The pot on the right, the red daisy can come too, though I only acquired that this year, I like that it has such a long flowering season, it's still powering away now!

( More garden maunderings )

I don't seem to have posted for ages. A month ago, we had just put our house up for sale : this Friday, the painters finished painting it, and today we have (I hope!) sold it. It does look good with the sun shining and the paint all new!

So, with luck we will soon be on our way to Pembrokeshire. This is all very alarming but I'm sure we will get used to it. I had not expected to move again, not least because when we bought this house it was in a very unpopular area where houses took forever to sell. But I guess that's the Plague Year for you.

I've just been wandering around the garden, eating the figs and apples and strawberries for nearly-the-last time. I shall not be too sorry to say goodbye to the garden though. It is a source of good things, but it is also rather a strain, the size of it and the way it just GROWs with the least provocation.

I tried to take cuttings of the fig and the grape vine in the garden that I planted years ago, but the cuttings got mould. Have just taken some more cuttings and treated them with very-dilute bleach. We'll see if that helps at all! I'd quite like to plant a new clone of the fig tree, because it's very productive, and although *probably* it's just plain old Ficus Brown Turkey, I don't know for sure because I originally bought it for 50p after the label fell off.

It's been a stressful few weeks, and the stress isn't over yet, but things are happening and that's much better than NOT happening and feeling on edge because the owners of the house we are buying understandably would like us to buy it so they can get on with their lives. Bit worried that the cats won't like the move, but hey.

Rosie is currently barking loudly at Theo, because I gave them each a turkey leg and Theo ate his and then stole hers. Otherwise, all is well in the land of the hounds. I've just bought Rosie a new house collar, because her old purple velvet one is looking very tired. I went for red polkadot this time, after much agonising.

What else has happened? Oh yes, I finished the two Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang fics I was writing:
Lands, Lords and Ladies, lost beyond the Sea.
which is a crossover of Tolkien's Fall of Arthur with The Silmarillion, plus my idea of a world where the land of Elves and Valinor lies not very far away, and sometimes Elves wander through and have adventures. On this occasion, Fingon is the adventurer. Oh, and it also has the concept of Corrigans, from Breton legend via Tolkien's version of Aotrou and Itroun.

The other story I wrote was:
Sea Longing which is about the legend of the Took Fairy Wife. I'm convinced that a long way back, one of the Took family married a small and unimportant Elf, and this is how.

Oh god, the garden. The last few years my energy and optimism have been low, and I have pretty much entirely let the garden do its thing, with the expected jungly results. But this year, I seem to be keeping it together better and am beginning to hope that at least a measure of order can be regained.
I was chatting to someone about pansies, and I thought, you know, I could grow pansies. Pansies are simple and forgiving plants. So I bought a box and they are doing pretty well in several baskets and pots now.

( Read more... )

I have just eaten two ripe figs off the tree. They were sweet, too. 21st of October is, I think, the latest my fig tree has managed to fruit yet.

eta: ... LIES. Apparently in 2006, I was picking ripe figs at the end of November!

Yesterday it rained. I had planned to garden, but the sudden downpours were too much. Instead we went wandering around Tavistock for several hours with the hounds (and took them to our favorite dog-friendly cafe for lunch). I managed to get some more titanium white acrylic paint and then since the shop had an offer, I bought some silver, buff titanium, and Naples Yellow (which at least in the Windsor and Newton range seems to be quite a muted pinkish shade). Foster Ruggie was quite tired out by town life, and fell fast asleep in the cafe, so Brythen and Rosie got to split a home-made burger and chips between them. Brythen ate all the chips. Chips are not refined enough for Rosie Roo.

( ramble ramble ramble )

But then in the evening I went and checked, and there were three ripe ones!

Today, based on a weather forecast of no rain and light winds, we had planned a long canoe expedition, but in reality (not in the alternative dimension that is weather-forecast-land) it has rained pretty much continuously since 8am, and shows no sign of letting up. I'm guessing this is the rain that was forecast for yesterday, then, given that yesterday's forecast was for rain which failed to show.

I and the dogs all got very wet on the morning dogwalk, and getting wet again in a canoe seems an uninviting prospect, even though it would give me a chance to test the bailer that I cunningly made from an old paraffin jug. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Since we dutifully cleaned all the things yesterday when we could have been canoeing, today looks like a day of writing and drawing all the things instead. Hey ho!

Morning on the Tamar, and *no rain again*
( Read more... )

Baffled yet delighted by the continuing absence of rain, I launched an offensive on the garden. I have removed the figs that definitely won't ever ripen now, laid a stretch of hedge, and felled a number of hazel trees that had got overlooked because they are on an awkward bit of hedge to lay. Now I feel very tired and stiff.

I always seem to take lots of photos of the garden in Spring, and then everything starts growing like triffids, it all goes a bit aaargh and I don't take any photos after that. So I decided today as I had taken down a tree I should take photos.

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I had decided today would be a Big Gardening Day, since it is dry, but not so sunny that everyone is bound to have their washing out. In order to celebrate, I lit a bonfire and began to slay things to put on it.

And now it has begun to rain! I have retreated inside to drink Beer and hope that the rain will go away before it puts my bonfire out.

On the plus side : two ripe figs this morning.

The garden has been becoming slowly less garden and more jungle. I quite like it a bit overgrown: I prefer that to the kind of garden where each plant is surrounded by a neatly-raked border of empty brown earth, or everything is covered in gravel. I like the birds to have space, and to have bees and dragonflies and random flowers popping up everywhere.

But my mother visited recently and left wagging her head and saying 'I don't know what can be done about your garden'. And she does have a point. The worry that one day we will not actually be able to get beyond the patio without a machete is a real one.
( garden progress. )

I just popped out to grab a fig off the fig tree, and for the first time in weeks and weeks there are no ripe figs at all!

For August, the weather seems oddly Octoberish.

Two ripe figs today: the first of the year!

The garden is still rather Brythenned : holes, random bones and once-floofy toys with their insides hanging out horrifically, that sort of thing - but there are a few bright spots.( Read more... )

The Lonicera nitida is in full flower at the moment. With its modest bushes and small creamy-greenish flowers, nobody would accuse Lonicera Nitida of being excessively flashy, but as a member of the honeysuckle family it has a lovely scent, and seems to be deeply beloved of the bees.

( Photos )
This bee- attraction makes the plant not beloved of poor Brythen, who loathes buzzing things and looks sideways at the Lonicera nitida and sits worriedly on his bottom whenever he goes near enough to hear the bees at work.

I don't seem to have noted many garden updates this year, although I've taken lots of photos. I think the figs are ahead of where they were last year, I note that I did a fig update on 19th May 2013 with a photo showing figs at a stage very similar to these. ( Read more... )

( Nuts! )

In other news, Az seems (she says, very tentatively) to be once again staging a slow and wobbly recovery. Getting him to eat is still quite a palaver, but the nighttime terrors seem to have stopped, and he's generally seeming more alert. So, thanks for all the crossed fingers! I am trying to be very, very careful not to let him overdo things.

Things are looking less bright for poor Perl. On Friday she seemed quite cheery and almost her normal brash shouty Liverpudlian self. She even ate a reasonable amount. But over the weekend she has been very quiet, and I've had no luck at all getting food into her, not even sardines or chicken stew (thinking on, I wonder if I should try her classic snack of burnt oven chips in ketchup? Maybe not... She is still drinking, but she seems very, very tired.

However, even now, she is a force to be reckoned with...( Read more... )

This weekend, I have made four jars of blackberry jelly, and am in the process of making rowan jelly too. I have also made some blackberry whiskey.

The fig tree continues to be wildly productive, and had two more ripe fruit today, although I think the rate of ripening is slackening off now that the weather is getting a little cooler.

The apple trees have not done well this year. I think I'm going to prune them fairly heavily this autumn, in the hope of bringing them back to productive life.

Four simultaneous ripe figs today on the fig tree! This is a fig record!

1) a flaming VW camper van, well alight in the middle lane of the M5 motorway. With an enormous queue of cars wondering how to get past it, and two sad-faced people standing on the verge, watching gloomily as their holiday went up in smoke.

2) A madman in a car, dodging at at least 90mph up the busy motorway in a series of maniac under and overtakings of the kind you normally only see in movies.

3) A great cackling crowd of geese flying overhead, not in the purposeful manner that geese have when they are on their way somewhere long distance, but swooping and playing and shrieking and barging joyfully, somehow reminiscent of dolphins.

( And 5 more things )

Is a bit terrifying really.

I know that actually having a big garden is a remarkable privilege, but none the less, sometimes it does feel a bit like someone has given me a dragon's egg. Amazing and beautiful but also quite a lot of work and somewhat painful. And you can't look away from the bugger for a minute!

( Read more... )

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Page generated Jun. 30th, 2025 09:51 pm

Entries tagged with figs

Plants that are coming too

On the move with a fig (I hope)

A garden update

The lateness of the figs

Things done: a rambling update

I thought there were no figs ripe

Streampath and hedges slain

State of the garden in September

Random things

Gah!

Back on the horse

Winter is coming

First Figs

State of the Garden in June

Bees

Nuts! Dog! Cats!

Berrification

A Fig Record

Things Seen this Weekend

State of the garden in July