bunn

Today I have made 4 and a half jars of apple chutney.  I still have a lot of apples and some vinegar, onions and sultanas left so I may make some more yet.  My attempt to Eat All the Apples has failed : even eating 4 or 5 apples a day the lawn is covered in them.

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This weekend, my mother finally made it home after her broken hip. She's still walking on crutches and the leg is painful - not because of the hip, but because of the original problem that probably caused her to fall over in the first place. She has had pretty good care, I think, which is cheering. Note: if you want to break your hip, August is a good time to do it, because the busy time for hip-breaking is the winter. We still have her dogs, as she is not up to walking them yet. I don't know if they will both go back to her or not, but I'm leaving that decision to her. It's a bit of a pain having four dogs, but worse things happen at sea and all that.

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 I have a notification that my bulb order, of 1000 more bluebells, 100 wild daffodils and 100 Star of Bethlehem, is on its way.   Arg.  I shall not be have time to do any planting for a good week or so!   Still, they are dormant at this time so should not mind waiting, I hope.    

I have planted bluebells in the green in the past, and I don't think the whole 'green' thing is ideal for them, they always seem to arrive looking a bit bashed about with the leaves trailing, and take a year or so to recover. 

The situation seems to be that snowdrops really do need to be planted in the green, and thhat this whole 'in the green' thing has then been converted into a sort of gardening festival, like mother's day or Valentines, as an excuse for the industry to flog all sorts of bulbs at a time of year when people are thinking about spring bulbs, so more likely to put hand in pocket. 

I already have 30 hardheads stuffed into pots waiting for me to deal with the upper garden sufficiently to make a space for them and everything is looking horribly shaggy.  I really need to spend some concentrated time getting things back in hand! 

Oh, while I'm posting about the garden, I should note that although I did get some grapes this year, not that many have ripened on each bunch, and some have ended up that sort of weird shrunken effect that they had last year.   I think next year I should probably prune harder and remove more bunches to try to concentrate the goodness on a few really good bunches. 

As usual at this time of year, I am looking at the remaining figs and wondering whether to pull them off and get rid of them to prepare the tree for earlier fruiting next year.  I didn't do this last year, and did get some very early figs that had overwintered, but I think possibly not as many as the year when I did pull off all the fruit in October.  But that might be weather as much as anything: I'm sure figs don't care for summers of perpetual rain any more than I do.