Beating the Heat

 Yesterday was very hot. It reached 26 degrees C chez nous which I know isn’t any great shakes by the standards of some folks, but it’s about 4 degrees too high for me. Anyway, this morning and with the threat of an ‘Amber Weather Warning’ for a continued heatwave (whatever that means), I was out walking Nell at 6.45 a.m so she’d get her exercise before we all started melting later on. Last week, she was enraged by a cow on a canal bridge…here she is looking mightily affronted. The cow was non-plussed by Miss Barky McBarkface…

And now it is 10.30 a.m and I feel I’ve been up and doing stuff for HOURS. After walking Nell, I stopped to get a bit of shopping on the way home. I’ve repotted the succulent that lives in the bathroom and the weeping fig that lives in the living room. I’ve repotted most of the house plants now which probably means they’ll go berserk and it’ll be like The Day of the Triffids. I also bought these little lovelies in the sale at a garden centre…

I don’t have any pot plants small enough to fit them on account of the Houseplant Repotting Project so have repurposed them as dinky vases. 

My favourite homeware shop - Dunelm - is having a Bank Holiday sale so I’ve done a bit of online browsing and placed an order for a bedspread, three enamel canisters for the kitchen, a set of serving bowls, a posh measuring jug and a pinboard for ‘Darling Buds.’ Aaah, the joys of having my teacher pension!

 I’ve put the plants in the greenhouse outside to continue their hardening off, and checked on all the vegetables that I WASN’T going to grow this year, which I planted out yesterday. Every time I move baby plants from the greenhouse into the garden I have nightmares that they’ll be decimated over night by hoodlum gangs of marauding slugs. My fears are usually unfounded and hopefully our resident Mrs Tiggywinkle is gobbling up the slugs for me anyway.

And do you remember the lupins I grew from seed last year? Well, look at them now! 

Lord Malarkey has been busy, too. He has put up the bee hotel, south facing and a good metre off the ground, as per instructions. 

It already has a resident…

Not a bee. 

And he’s put up the bird box that fell off a tree during the Winter…

I’ve been ruthless and evicted the rhubarb, which is sad because I love rhubarb, but it has failed to thrive despite all the TLC I’ve lavished on it. In its place, then, some sweet peas grown from the seeds I saved from last year’s sweet peas…

And finally, here is Bambino Bobble Wilson looking disgruntled, yet at the same time suavely attractive, because he’s just had his flea treatment.