Today’s been a mixed bag of weather again and it’s been sending the garden into madness, flowers are blooming everywhere. The scattered poppy seed have given us some great purple blooms dotted around the garden.
The courgette/zuchinni seed we bought off the web is now well and truly on its way and flowering and we’ve even had a water lily open up (below). We’re well chuffed but would appreciate less rain during the day (could it rain at night?) and more sun!
It’s all gone a bit bonkers in the garden here what with the good weather of late plus the combination of the rain we had a few weeks previous to that. The veg in the raised beds (above) are tearing away and the spuds are almost flowering.
We’ve let the grass go a bit wilder due to No Mow May and we’re beginning to like the idea. I think it’s the council gardening background made us a bit reticent to let the lawn grow more than a few inches. The only thing is now that we can’t see where our old cat leaves its “presents” so we have to go by smell and tread very carefully in the evening.
The pond is going great after the big pond liner change. The fish seem to like it and we’ve even got tadpoles in there now and we didn’t even spot any frogspawn beforehand. We were told many years ago by a workmate that down the Walworth Road one Sunday in the 1960’s “It rained frogs” (a report of raining frogs in Croydon here), perhaps it could’ve been raining tadpoles overnight in Forest Hill recently?
And the bed next to the new fence has come alive with new plants procured from the market, garden centre and seeds off ebay and friends. The comfrey plants that usually go mad have probably been checked when the fence went in so the comfrey feed has suffered so far but you never know as we’ve got a few months yet. But can you believe that it’s really June? We cant.
Whilst we’ve been writing this, the below was the musical background. One of the best music shows on the shortwaves!
Here’s some pictures to convey how bad the weather was yesterday around 5pm in London town. It started as a downpour, then heavier rain and then mad hail! To say it was chucking it down was an understatement. A fast flowing stream appearing under the back gate from the drive and then the hail built up at the start of the lawn and it’s still there now.
Watch those seedlings. We may not be having frosty nights but heavy rain and hail can be a pain. One good thing with all of this rain is that the pond is filling up. That makes a change!
Yesterday evening just after sundown we wandered to the bottom of the garden just to take in a bit of the night-time air. With a little bit of light coming from the back of a neighbour’s house we could just make out two frogs “doing lengths” in the newly renovated pond. Lovely to see them back. Nice to hear their croaks too!
The netting which keeps the Lewisham Heron from getting its beak in has a few raised areas at the side that night visitors can get in and out of and in the top left hand corner is a moss covered stick come frog ladder. it was great to see we have visitors making a trip and it’s been a while since we noticed we had frogs and we wonder if it was the ever decreasing depth of the pond was putting them off before.
It was also nice to see that the Tree Lilies we got given from our good mate Marc B (cheers for passing them on Marc!) have started to sprout! Here’s one of them above. That’s what’s good about gardening the receiving and passing on of surplus plants and seeds.
We’re writing this while listening to an old Ross Allen show on NTS and this is playing from the late great Bunny Wailer.
And a couple of posts ago we posted up the track by L.S.Diezel called Volume 1 that had a lovely Yabby You sample in it and Ross has just played the tune that was sampled in a remix style. Tune! Roll on the good weather so we can play tunes like this loud!
And as the wind and rain lashes against the back window here in south London on a May Bank Holiday Monday evening here’s some pics from our pond project that got away so to speak.
Firstly (above) the ton of sludge at the bottom of the pond that has now been distributed around the back garden and being washed into the soil as we write. When we looked into our empty garden pond we were reminded of one of our favourite places in London The Strand Lane “Roman” Bath (below) which is basically an old water tank too. More details about that wonderful place of “Antiquity” here.
When all gets back to some sort of normality it’s a place worth visiting perhaps just once. You can’t see anything at all through the dirty viewing window and if you are lucky to go inside, the smell of damp and lack of anything to actually capture your imagination will drive you out after five minutes. As a certain John Lydon (possibly) sang about the place once “The side of London that the tourists never see”.
And (below) the great piece of carpet underlay that was sitting on top of the skip when we walked back from the local shop with a cheap bucket and two pairs of long armed washing up gloves. It’s all about “keeping ’em peeled” as Shaw Taylor used to say combined with the old “make do with what you got” Punk maxim!
The job is near enough done! Apart from the last bit of smoothing out of the sides and cutting off the excess pond liner below the broken slabs, that’s it. The fish and the newts are back in, they’ve been fed and getting to know their new abode after being manhandled by the “Giant pink hands from the dry” (thanks to our good mate Marc b who coined this apt phrase.)
It looks though we’re in for some rain this evening and there’s a fair bit of wind about too. The rain will be good for the pond and the rest of the garden that is looking parched. And we’ve got a loads of silt and stuff that we added to the flowerbeds. Judging by the look of the stuff from the bottom of the pond it just has to be good for the garden (we hope!)
Have a good rest of the bank holiday!
Weeds up to me knees 