It was not forecast to rain this morning, but it did. I was slightly suspicious that when Our Ginger came and hung around the kitchen while I was eating my breakfast, his fur was lightly beaded with moisture, and by the time I'd finished mixing the next lot of meringues, and churned the ice cream, and blind baked a pastry case for the flan at lunchtime, it was raining properly.
I went and stared at it through the sitting room window, and fulminated at the Systems Administrator that it was not supposed to rain, and it was a swiz. Why couldn't it have rained yesterday, when I was meeting friends for coffee, and been lovely today like it was yesterday? The SA showed me the rain radar, and said without rancour that it was probably going to rain until lunchtime.
After a while I thought that I had better stop behaving like a teenager grumbling that life was, like, so totally unfair, and go and find something useful to do, so I got on with updating my spreadsheet of plants in the garden. I keep a journal of what I've been doing, and what I've planted, then periodically transfer the planting details of what and where to a spreadsheet, so that when I'm staring at a chrysanthemum and trying to remember what it's called, I can look up 'chrysanthemum' on the computer rather than trawling through over twenty years' worth of handwritten notes.
It's a good system, in theory. In practice, I sometimes forget to write up the book, and am left consulting my diary, and scrolling through old blog entries, trying to remember what I was doing last Tuesday and whether I was even gardening at all. I would never advise anybody to rely on my evidence of what I did last week in a criminal trial, and I should take it very badly if I changed my mind about where I'd been and it was held against me. Either I have a particularly feeble episodic memory, or we should be equally suspicious of everybody's testament about their whereabouts or activities on a particular date, if it's longer ago than about yesterday morning.
I also tend to let the spreadsheet get out of date. Data entry is not very interesting, as a method of spending spare evenings and wet afternoons. I was shocked, even so, to find that I last updated it in 2009. It matters because sometimes, when I am considering trying to grow something, it is useful to be able to see whether I've tried it before. It is slightly depressing, updating the computer record, because it forces me to recognise how many plants have died over the years. Although, after two decades, not all of the losses are my fault. Some things simply died of old age. The two cold winters of 2010-11 and 2011-12 were massively damaging, in terms of plants that were killed outright at the time, and other things I fear lost to the surge of nature trying to reclaim the meadow, as I was left with numerous gaps around the garden, corpses to remove, and a general sense of fighting on too many fronts at once. Although the winter of 2012-13 went on for a long time, by then most of the tender things that were going to die had already done so, and I hadn't wasted my time replacing them like I did in 2011.
By the afternoon it had stopped raining, so I went and weeded the gravel, as being a job I could do without surrounding shrubs and taller herbaceous plants dumping water down my back while I worked. Later on I went and investigated the compost heap, and discovered a rich seam of compost ready to use in the bottom of the third bin. Compost is wonderful stuff. You haven't heard the last of that.
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