Gardening is a bit like holidays, in that the disasters are much more interesting to write about than the days when everything goes smoothly and you trundle around, having a nice time. Today was a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, and in this Goldilocks world I dug, weeded, mulched, planted and picked up two sorts of stones, the rough and the smooth, without anything exciting happening at all.
White flowers are about to burst upon the garden. After the white of snowdrops it all goes yellow, with daffodils and primroses, and the chrome yellow flowers of Euphorbia, and blue and mauve, with hyacinths and grape hyacinths, violets and pasque flowers. Now the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden is just opening, and the buds on 'Taihaku' and the wild gean are, as the suppliers' weekly lists put it, showing colour. The trees are studded with knobs of white, and very soon will burst forth in a cloud of whiteness.
Three buzzards circled over the next door field for a long time. They often seem to occur in threes, and I wonder what the group consists of. Rival males and one female? Last year's chick still flocking with its parents? I need to find somebody who understands the habits of birds and ask them.
The Systems Administrator was all set to get the next coat of gloss paint on the section of barge board the scaffolding currently reaches, as the thermometer had hit the vital level of 15 degrees, but discovered that the new and unopened tin of paint bought last autumn and never used as the weather got too bad for painting, was not white, but Parisian Pink. The SA must have picked up the wrong tin from the DIY store shelf, and six months on, with no receipt, there's not a lot we can do with it except think of something we would like to paint pink. It looks rather a nice shade of pink, like a squashed strawberry, and I fancy a little pink summerhouse, but there isn't anywhere to put one.
We are starting to be able to tell the new little hens apart. One has yellow legs, which are very distinctive, and another has a row of dark feathers down the outside of her legs. One of the last two is lighter coloured than the other, so that we can tell them apart when they're side by side, but not necessarily identify either one in isolation.
I ran the hose on recently planted trees and renovated areas of the border while working. Digging holes to plant out hyacinths that have finished flowering in their pots, as I suspected the soil 25 centimetres below the surface is dust dry. A rose in the back garden, that was struggling last year, has suddenly died off in great sections. It is supposed to rain hard on Tuesday, which will force me to clean the house and get to grips with the beekeepers' treasury stuff, both of which urgently need doing, but quite apart from that we desperately need the rain.
About the only exciting thing to happen in the past 24 hours was that the big tabby set his ruff on fire. He has never done this before, and I thought he was more sensible than that around candles, but now know differently. He decided to march straight across the dining table just as I was snuffing the candles out after dinner, and suddenly I had a flaming cat on the loose. I managed to extinguish him before it could burn his skin, or he could set fire to the curtains, but the smell of burning fur was terrible. I don't think he understood in the least what had happened, so was bewildered that I'd suddenly hit him with the candle snuffer, and gave me a wide berth for the next couple of hours. Excitement is frequently greatly over-rated.
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