March 10, 2025

A ladybird came inside to sit on the ivy in the bathroom :)

March 16, 2025

Something has been eating my strawberries.
I hope it's the lizards. I forgive them if it was, they're pretty cute, and they need to get strong before winter.

I decided to learn more about how to grow good strawberries. It seems to come down to enough fertilizer and the right amount of water. The crown of the plant has to sit at the surface of the soil so that it doesn't get too wet and start to rot.
I have two varieties. A tarpan, which has dark pink flowers, and a pink, which has very faint pink flowers, almost white.
I seem to be getting a lot of flowers. Not all of them grow into strawberries, but the plants seem very healthy.

Friday, March 21, 2025

A little while back, when I first started trying to learn how to grow strawberries well, one of the tips I read was to paint some rocks red and scatter them among the plants, so that birds and animals learn that the red things there aren't food. It's a bit late to start conditioning the wildlife, something has definitely learned that they are food, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway, if nothing else I can get a head start on the next crop.

It must be autumn, because a mushroom came up in one of the tubs I grow veggies in.
But in true late-summer fashion, the rabbits got to it and took some bites out of the cap. A second one came up as well, but only the stump was left of that.
I guess they know what they're doing. I don't and eating a random mushroom sounds like a good way to get a trip to the hospital.
It did look pretty, though, and I took a photo of it before it got munched.

The rabbits tend to leave my veggie tubs alone, maybe it's just too much hassle to climb up there until the end of summer when there's not as much grass around.
They've been eating the red kale as well, but that's okay, I have enough of it.

I let the perpetual spinach go to seed, and now I have a lot of little spinach seedlings growing. I guess that's why it's called perpetual spinach.

Sunday, April 6, 2025

When the covid lockdowns were just starting, five years ago now (though it doesn't feel like five years at all), I sent someone a photo of an Easter lily that I took, as a bit of a diversion and to let them know I was thinking of them. I got back a rant about how it was too early and the Easter lilies are as bad as the supermarkets, pushing Easter for months. They weren't joking.
Knowing them I shouldn't have been surprised by this (they are a bit like that, even without the unusual circumstances at the time), but I did have to shake my head. The flowers don't understand the calendar, and they don't have any commercial motivation about when they bloom. It's normal for them to flower in March, or February or April.
I have always wondered what does make some of them bloom early and some later. My theory is that it has something to do with how much shade they get. The first one I used to spot was one that grew next to a stone retaining wall on the side of a hill, tucked in between that and a concrete slab driveway. It looked like an uncomfortable sort of place to grow, and it came up weeks before I'd see any others, so I always thought it wanted to get out and up to the sun as soon as possible.
Maybe it's just one of those things kids think. I still don't have a better theory, though. Maybe how much water they get, maybe a combination of things.

Thursday, April 24, 2025

• A Ford from the 1920s. Not the sort of car I usually see on the road in front of me.
• An old English sheepdog. I don't think I've ever seen one in real life before. They're smaller than I imagined.
• A calf being born. I was surprised, I thought the cows were done calving, but I was out with my dog when I heard a cow bellow a good distance away. Another bellow and sploosh, welcome to the world.
  The dog didn't care about any of this, being much too busy sniffing around for any sign of a fox.

There are still plums in the supermarket. The stonefruit season is close to ending, so it makes me really happy every week when I go in to do some shopping and they're still there.
The rain and sun have stirred up the grass, and the hills have a nice greeen tinge again.

Current music: Wolkenschieber - Unter dem Blutmond Live In Extremo