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?

Welcome to the night train, welcome

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!