18.06. Blogging break

Hello, this will be my last post in a while; I am off to the hospital on Monday to have a hip replacement operation. When I heard that it would be late June before I would get the operation I thought to myself; Oh, no, that’s going to be impossible with my garden, how am I going to take care of it while recovering? And all the watering I sometimes do during the summer? Well, I say ‘sometimes’, because it really varies, as the amount of rain we get here can really vary a lot. The last 3 months we have hardly got a drop of rain over the whole of South-East England, and several counties have declared drought already, although London have yet to do so. But the last 2 weeks it has rained almost every day, sometimes really bucketing down, and I haven’t watered my garden at all. You know, it really evens out over time usually…what doesn’t come down one month usually comes next month…so I suppose it’s just good timing if we get showers for the next few weeks then ;-) But watering is just one part of gardening and the rest will have to be just so so, like deadheading and keeping up with the pests etc…I guess the lily beetles will have a right feast the next month! But most of the lilies have finished flowering, only the Lilium regale are left and they are flowering right now, and when they are gone the lily beetles are welcome to have the remaining leaves and stalks!

15.06. Hip replacement

Hello, I have been mentioning lately my upcoming hip operation, and that I would write a bit about it in a post this week so I guess I just got to get on with it :-) I am so busy preparing for my operation though; the last 2 days I have, with the help from my son, turned my house upside down. Most of my sofa is now upstairs in my bedroom, apart from the corner section which doesn’t go up the stairs because it is too big. My coffee table and the living room chair is also upstairs, whilst my king size bed and night stand is downstairs in my living room! As I said; my house is turned upside down, all in preparation for me coming home after the operation. Because I live in a Victorian house with extremely steep stairs, climbing those stairs every evening and getting down again every morning, plus going down and up if I needed the toilet during the night to get to my downstairs bathroom is just out of the question. I therefore decided to move my bed downstairs. When I had my first hip operation in 2007 I thought I would be able to manage the stairs by the time I got home from the hospital, but it was such a frightening ordeal that this time I am making it very simple by not needing to go upstairs at all.

10.06. New neighbours

Hello, Friday already, don’t really know where the week has gone, except that I have been very busy. I did intend to write here both yesterday and the day before, but I was too knackered to even sit down with my laptop, let alone produce anything half interesting…but tonight I have some photos for you at least. As you may know if you have visited my blog before, my big project for the last 4 months has been creating a garden next door. I did it first of all because I was so fed up looking at the jungle of weeds that grew higher and higher. And secondly to get rid of the foxes that thought that garden was an excellent place to hang out with their friends…and nip over to my garden on a daily basis to dig up my flowerbeds…ugh, I have had some really bad experiences with the family of foxes that congregated on my lawn for weeks as if they owned my garden. Only when I got really close to them did they jump over the fence back to next door. Not scared at all, just at a rather leisurely pace, as if to say ‘I can hardly be bothered doing this but since you are coming right up to me I will saunter off.’ Luckily, my plan has worked; since tidying up the garden, I haven’t seen or heard a fox at all :-)

06.06. Homemade ice cream

Last Saturday I spent making ice cream, homemade ice cream – 10 litres of homemade ice cream! Actually, it wasn’t such a big job as it might sound, I did it in two batches, and each batch took only just over 30 minutes to make. So what do I need 10 litres of ice cream for? It’s actually not for me, it is for my son; it is a present for his 25th birthday which is on Friday, but don’t tell him – it’s supposed to be a surprise :-)

02.06. Red is the colour

Summer is back! After a short spell of cold windy weather we are now promised a long warm period. Today we reached 27 degrees in my garden and I have been outside most of the day. OK, so more warm weather means more watering the garden, but I am willing to accept that, I really enjoy leaving my cardigan on the coat hook :-)