September’s weather has come in August

We’ve got some time off work for a week now and typically there’s a good bit of rain on the way. It’s good for the garden (as it’s parched), the pond (water levels are low) but not for us (lounging around in the sun doing nothing is fun, can’t lounge around in the rain!)

The garden is going to go wild with all this rain and of course mixed with a bit of sun that may come out from behind the clouds this week. Above is a reminder of what plants in the sunshine look like just in case you have forgotten. This is the salvia we got from B&Q a few weeks ago and it’s loving where it is.

 

 

But don’t worry there’s a heatwave coming…

Waking up here in South London this morning there’s been a right mixture of weather. We’ve had lashing rain and now a lovely bit of sunshine and it looks like this cycle will be continuing for the next few days (until we get the predicted heatwave, yeah right!)

Well this weather is no good if you’ve got to get the washing out but it’s good for the garden. Hopefully there will be more of the nice spells later as there’s a few more inches to fill on the garden refuse bin and you have to get your money’s worth don’t you?

Well here’s a couple of tunes to hopefully cheer us all up.The first is a chilled tube train inspired number by Commodore 98 called Mind the Gap.

And another travel inspired one by the wonderful Big Youth and Dennis Brown called Ride on, ride on/Wild goose chase. Let’s hope this weather clears up and we all can enjoy actually going outside.

What month is it?

We were complaining a few weeks ago about that there weren’t enough rain as we’ve had to go out and manually water all the new additions to the garden.

In the past few days we’ve bought some lupins and stuck them together in a group in a bed near to the house, acquired some strawberry plants (cheers Dylan!) and as reported previously the tree lilies we were given (cheers Marc!) are also starting to come up. The giving and exchanging, the swap-shop value of gardening is what we love here, we also love the local garden centre (Shannon’s) for plants and advice and it’s nice to see the re-emergence of local plants sales (plant pots stuck on a wall outside someone’s house at cheap as chips prices) or have they never gone away?

What we don’t love is the current weather. For the past few days it’s been warm one minute, cold the next and then you see on twitter someone’s had a frost or a light dusting of snow. Well it’s back on with the protection in the evenings on top of the raised beds here even though the potatoes are coming on well and the plants that have been outside hardening off (above) will have to come in for the night. We won’t get too discouraged as it’ll be summer soon. Or will it?

A date with the rain

In the days before the council introduced “wet money”, a couple of extra quid a month to work in all weathers, the rule was you didn’t work in the rain (“It’s a health and safety issue, ain’t it guv”). So at the first sign of grey clouds or even someone walking past in a raincoat, we would stop what we were doing, look up to the sky and put our hands out to see if we could feel rain and if we did, would make our way up to the shed for a few hours of tea drinking.

The hard and fast rule was if three cars passed consecutively with their windscreen wipers on, it was officially raining so we could stop work. How mad is that?