a dry season

Finally I got to spend a day in the garden, as it was no longer blowing half a gale, and I hadn't arranged to do something else.  It was very nice to be out there.

The top layer of soil is getting dry.  We've noticed in the past couple of weeks how the farms have started irrigating, big sprayers sending gushing jets of water over the potatoes, and even the wheat crops.  I spent a good couple of hours watering areas of the long bed that were starting to flag, things I'd planted recently, and some of the trees that went in last autumn.  Malus 'Comtesse de Paris', which was looking good back in the spring, has started to look very stressed, with leaves not as large as they should be.  It is still doing better than M. x zumi 'Professor Sprenger', which never broke bud this spring and has died.

The ground is getting hard to work.  I planted out some more creeping things in the gravel garden, but digging the holes is becoming more difficult, as is weeding.  If it goes on like this I'll be running the hose on areas where I know I need to dig the day before I plan to work there.  The planting season is really drawing to a close, until the autumn, and once I've planted out the last of the pots by the front door that will be pretty much it, until September.  Much as my employers dislike the fact that people stop buying plants in the summer, as a hands-on gardener I can see where our customers are coming from.

In the greenhouse, at least one of the robin eggs has hatched.  I went for a quick peek to see how they were doing, and couldn't see the pale glint of eggs, but there was something unprepossessing squirming about in the nest.  Later on the robin was sitting on it again, so he or she obviously thinks it was OK.  The greenhouse was getting rather hot, since I didn't bother to put shading paint on this year, not having any seedlings going, and I poured a can of water on the floor to cool it down for them, and opened a floor vent and some side louvres.

In the chicken house, the broody hen is still determinedly broody.  She is not a very effective broody, in that she sits at one end of the nest box, fluffed up and furious, even when the other hens have laid at the opposite end and she is not sitting on any eggs at all.  I collected one egg so large that it would not fit in a normal cardboard egg box with the lid down, so I think we'd better start easing back on the layers' pellets and increasing the amount of grain in their diet again.  It can't be comfortable producing an egg that size, and in extreme circumstances the egg can get stuck and the hen die a protracted and horrid death.

I have to spend the next three days at work, so I hope the remaining weed grasses and creeping sorrel don't manage to ripen and shed their seed in that time.  There isn't enough time at this time of year, which is another reason why it isn't really a good planting season.  You need all the hours there are in the garden just to keep on top of the edges, the dead-heading and the weeding.