between showers

When I woke up this morning I could hear the rain drumming on the roof.  On the Today programme they were saying something about the summer solstice, which experts have decided was not so big a deal for our pagan forbears as the winter solstice.  How they can tell after all this time I have no idea, but if the weather in those days was like it is now then I'm not surprised.  Ah, an English summer.

The rain passed by mid-morning.  Our rain gauge must have been under-reading, since the display said we'd had only 1.4mm and I could tell from the weight of some pots that were dry last night that we'd had more than that.  The Systems Administrator went to investigate the problem, and said that a large plant was partially blocking the funnel.  There is an apparently reliable station at Epping whose readings the SA follows, so I suppose we're now faced with the choice of keeping our records as they are, knowing that last night's rainfall measurement was wrong, and doctoring them using a best guess based on the Epping site (6mm, which sounds much more plausible).

I planted out the last tulips from pots into the dahlia bed, and started mulching it with Strulch and tying heavy twine between the coloured posts.  The trouble is the chickens, which love scratching around in there, and have eaten some plants almost to stumps, while others are half a metre high and forming flower buds.  It is irritating of them to fixate on the dahlia bed, when they have the whole of the front garden to play in, but they do.  I suggested that if I got a water pistol the SA could stand guard over the dahlia bed during chicken exercise time, but the SA seems to think that this would not be so good as sitting in a deckchair listening to cricket on the radio, or podcasts of The Bugle or Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Friday afternoon film review.  So I am trying string, again, although determined chickens can be very expert limbo dancers.  I threatened to go and blast them with the hose if they went on eating the dahlias, and the SA said I was being cruel to them.

Then it began to rain again, and I potted things on in the greenhouse, though what I really need to do is plant things out, because the greenhouse is full to bursting, so that I have to be very careful walking from one end to the other, and there is nowhere to put anything down.  At the moment it is difficult even to get in there, since the trellis that I built myself, very slowly and laboriously, to help screen the view of the end of the greenhouse from the rest of the front garden (I told you we had some fundamental design problems in the front), blew over in the gale a week ago.  This is an inconvenient time of the year for it to do so, since the honeysuckle that by now more or less covers the trellis is in full bloom, and looking rather lovely, and the climbing rose 'Chevy Chase' is just making soft new growth as well as opening its little red flowers.  I would rather the trellis had stayed where it was, just at the moment.  The uprights, that I cadged off the boss a few years ago when we were demolishing a pergola in the plant centre, have rotted through at the base.  The SA has bought a couple of Metposts, and mending the trellis has been added to the long list of things to do.  In the meantime the honeysuckle dumps water over me each time I squeeze into the greenhouse, if it's been raining.

The big tabby appeared at lunchtime for his supplementary feeding, and would not eat his helping of ordinary cat food.  I thought it was because he wanted an expensive pouch, but when the SA moved his dish from its usual place in the hall to its Special Lunch place next to the dustbin in the kitchen the cat ate the normal tinned food with relish.  He is a quick learner, for an animal that generally gives the appearance of being rather absent minded and quite dim, and very set in his ways once he has learnt something.  The SA says he has OCD.