General Chat

It is 21 here and feels very warm in the sun. I did a quick half hour weed having covered my face in suncream but came in when it felt too hot. garden bin gets empties tomorrow so goes out this evening. The rain over night seems to have done a bit of good as the weeds seemed to come up more easily.

Wall to wall sunshine, not a cloud anywhere and currently 23 degrees, feeling like 24. It is hot. Washing is drying almost as soon as it is hung out. If any of you ladies get rain please send some this way. We are desperate and I dread to think how the water bill is mounting up with all the watering we are doing.

It’s too hot to do any gardening but I’ve done all the washing and a few other indoor jobs as I won’t get much done in the next couple of days. We both have the dentist tomorrow morning and that’s in another town so more driving and Wednesday OH has his post op check up so we might combine that with a visit to Dunelm and Dobbies.

OH has just yelled out that lunch is ready so I’d better go.

Still cloudy/sunny here and 21 degrees.

I think we had rain over night as the plants are all wet. It is cloudy, sun now and 17 degrees. It is chilly indoors though so I have a cardi on.

Morning Ann and all,

Quite a bright moring but its clouded over a bit now and its 13 degrees here. Maps showing no rain here for today but sunshine and cloud so we'll see.

Nothing planned so I will take the day as it comes.

good morning all. already 14 degrees and sunny here at 0730. Looks like being a hot one but we are expecting thundery showers and have a yellow warning.

I have nothing planned for today so will find some indoor jobs. Garden jobs look unlikely if we get the storms. I have three lovely geums flowering in their pots and I just know that they will suffer if the rain is heavy. Not a lot I can do about that though.

I never liked the Germalene horrid pink stuff that smelt awful. When you use TCP the smell lingers forever but its good stuff and I can stand the smell of that funnily enough as you know what I am like with smells.

The afternoon ended up sunny and warm but I only managed a bit of ivy pulling off the fence in the back field behind the filter shed. Its grown through the filter shed but there's no way I can reach whats gfrowing up the actual shed.

Hope you all have a good night sleep tonight.

I actually like the smell of both those Mandy.

Oh TCP horrible smelly stuff I hated the smell of that ,I think we used Germolene and I wasn't keen on that smell either.

Talking about smells I ordered or rather son ordered some O'Keeffes working hands cream for my split thumb, it was six pound and he said did I want the scented or unscented, the unscented was six the scented was 20 pound .....14 pound for a little scented I don't think so .

Can you still get TCP? We always had that in before as long. I don’t know why we stopped buying it. My dad used to swear by it too. That very definite smell, and taste. Used to gargle with it too for a sore yhroat.

I don't know Annx what would they do without us? My oh would never have a plaster on just walk around with dried blood on his hands or fingers but if I cut myself he would insist I put something on it and TCP first too.

No Mel no rain here hardly a cloud in the sky .

Oh dear Ann good job you kept the dressings and the bleeding has stoped ,let's hope he doesn't catch it again and get it on the bedding tonight or there'll be more washing .

We sat out this afternoon in the shade as we got that new box out of the shed that we keep the chair cushions in and we now have a new padlock for it , it will save marching down to the shed each time we want a chair cushion .

Neither of us were that hungry tonight and as I hadn't planned a roast we both had a sandwich and an apple pie.

Just had a heavy shower although it didn’t last long but it smells gorgeous out there after even that short shower.

Ann :-D :-D :-D does that mean he had used up the last of the plaster. Better get a new roll tomorrow then. Hope it has stopped bleeding now.

It has come over very black and looks thundery, but no rain so far.

Afternoon All,

It's hot here today so we were up early to go to the art exhibition a few villages away. It's the first one I've been to there since the pandemic as I missed the first ones when they started up again. OH wanted to come so we went in his car. The standard is very good, but there were fewer paintings than there used to be. There was a lovely large painting of the late queen in 1953 on one wall. A photo had been blown up and divided into squares and each member of the group had painted a square each, then they had all been put together to make the big painting which looked very effective.

Well Vera I can imagine my OH doing that too! I just told him what your OH had done and he smiled but looked a bit sheepish. He has done something stupid himself today and not used his perfectly intelligent brain either. We went outside to do a bit more weeding and he found some longer loppers in the garage and was using them to cut more branches off a taller shrub. As usual he managed to injure himself by gouging the back of his hand on a cut edge of branch, so off he went inside to put a plaster on it. Well he came out a bit later with a long piece of fabric plaster wrapped from one side of his hand over his knuckles to the other side to cover a gouge the size of my small fingernail. I don't think he'd thought to cut a piece off the length of plaster. Well would he stop fiddling with his hand, flexing his fingers and pressing it till a small spot bled through. I'm sure he was convinced then that due to his blood thinners he was going to bleed to death. I pointed out that he hadn't bled to death at the dentist with an extraction, in fact he didn't bleed at all. He looked at me amazed when I asked him why he hadn't worn his leather gardening gloves that were at the side of his sun hat he'd remembered to put on. It was only yesterday, he'd pushed cuttings and twigs down in the gardening bin and the red berberis I'd trimmed back had stuck in his hands. I'd asked him then why he didn't have his gloves on. He said I should have warned him, but he usually uses the empty humper to push the twigs down in the bin. I told him he needs to get better aquainted with the Berberis that has been in the garden for at least 10 years so he should have known it was prickly. Worse is to come! After lunch he usually plays his music in the kitchen while washing up the things we need every day, the rest going in the dishwasher. He has some large rubber gloves in the drawer, but did he put them on......no! He plunged his hands and submerged the fabric plaster and the blood of course oozed through. So what does he do, he grabs first the teatowel, then hand towel, both of which were clean and I'd put out half an hour before and gets blood on them. He then goes into the bathroom and manages to get blood on his bath towel too. A woman would have used a paper towel or even toilet paper! I had to sort him out then with an out of date first aid dressing in a first aid box I keep in the car. He'd told me ages ago to throw them away, but I'd kept them saying they were better than nothing. He's been under strict instructions to not fiddle with it and keep his arm up since and it's not bled through again. So with having my nurse's hat on and doing an extra wash I never got the kitchen floor mopped or the fridge cleaned before the food delivery. He did say I was good to him, but what are they like eh! lol.

Rain did'nt last that long this morning but it seems to have freshened everything up and the leaves on the trees look more colourful.I had lunch and then pulled a bit of ivy off the fence at the end of the decking but I really need to have a good go at it as it is behind the Albertine rose its a bit hard and I can't stnd down the hwole off the deckking and get back up again easily as its quite a drop. I need a couple of breezeblocks down there to stand on.

Have I sent the rain over Mandy?.

Oh Vera, we would be a very dull lot without your OH. Please tell him not to change. Obviously he took what you said very literally. But, as you said, why didn't he question it. (Maybe he was scared to!!)

Mandy the trouble with our climate is we get all or nothing. It would be lovely to have two days of gentle steady rain then up to a week of sunshine and not much wind. But it never works like that.
You have reminded me I ought to weed outside the front fence. Trouble with that is, when Jake and his Dad put the fence up they trapped a lot of the weed roots in concrete for the posts. Why they didn't weed it fist I am not sure.

When we get that heavy rain it certainly spoils all the young plants ,a nice steady rain all night would be lovely but we can't pick and choose we have to have what comes .

Colin went into the shed to clear his tools away ,when he does a job every tool in the shed seems to have to make an appearance then they are just get put inside on the floor or the saw table ,I have a little moan and it seems to do the trick :-D
I washed Colins big ladder that hangs on the back of the fence it was getting a bit green in places so needed doing then we both went out the gate and weeded and swept along the outside of our wall so that looks better now .

Computer says 17 degrees and sunny, iPad says 21 and sunny and phone says 22 and cloudy. About the only thing they agree on is that there isn't going to be any rain for several days. Fwiw, it's definitely sunny and feels hotter than 17 degrees even though it's quite breezy.

Annx, OH is fine with the planting provided I give exact instructions of what to plant where. He did make one silly mistake yesterday. I wanted a phygellus repotted as the pot it's been in is now too small. I sorted out a big pot we have and suggested OH put plenty of crocks or polystyrene in the bottom so we wouldn't need to use quite so much compost - it is a very big pot. I showed him the level the plant should go at and left him to it. My instructions weren't exact enough; I didn't say to take the plant out of its small pot first! He had put a load of bricks in the container and just stood the original small pot on the top. You couldn't make it up. When I asked why on earth he had done that he said that's what he understood me to mean though he did think it was very odd. So why didn't he query it? And this is an intelligent man.

This morning I think he is trying to make amends. He has removed from another pot a Chilean Guava that I've had for years but is now not looking happy so that's in the brown bin. I've now potted the phygellus into that pot. OH has also given our big American style fridge a good clean out for me.

I saw what I thought was 2 young robins on the feeder this morning. They were clearly fully fledged but hadn't yet got red breasts so I wasn't sure but later I saw them sitting on the fence with an adult robin. I think they are nesting in a garden to the side of ours.

I've just seen the time. I'd better go and sort out my veg for Sunday lunch. Enjoy the rest of the day whatever the weather is in your neck of the woods..

We have a yellow warning now so I guess all the plants that have been flowering nicely in the dry spell will now be bashed down.

"The warning is in effect from 12pm on Monday until 10pm that night, with forecasters cautioning that up to 30mm of rain could fall in under an hour, leading to potential flooding and hazardous driving conditions.
"Forecasting exactly where thunderstorms will form at this range is fraught with uncertainty, so please stay up to date with the Met Office forecast through the weekend, and any severe weather warnings which may be issued."