Weather

Befuddled…

It’s been a sixes and sevens sort of a day – perhaps nothing new in the Farrell domain. It started off beautifully. At nine this morning the garden was filled with hot sunshine. There was a wind, but it felt warm, and it was wafting the scent of squash flowers across the lawn. Who knew that Japanese squash flowers smelled so lovely. And why would they need to when they already make such a show – little suns on stalks. Anyway, the bees were crowding in, not only drilling into the nectar chamber beneath the single stamen, but also bathing themselves in pollen.

Talk about a bug bacchanalia. It was all bees knees and no decorum. Each bee shoved its way in, regardless of existing occupants. After much frenzied barging about, followed by concentrated scoffing, it stumbled out again, looking slightly dazed, before diving into another squash flower.

Perhaps the bumble and honey bee punters knew the squash bar would soon be closing. For so it was. By ten o’ clock, summer had gone. The wind turned cold; sky was dark and down came the rain in short sharp bursts. We needed it of course, but for a spell it seemed as if autumn had dropped in too, the seasons changing before our eyes. All very disconcerting.

The squash flowers were spoiled of course, their petals sadly deflated.

Grey skies loomed on with more rain threatened. With the sudden coolness, it seemed like a good time to plant out cabbages, though I still had to fend off all the white butterflies who for weeks have been trying to lay their eggs on my netted kales and caulis.

And then something odd started going on with the town hall clock. Sometime around lunch time it began to chime. And then kept on chiming in somewhat drunken fashion. I think it must have chimed at least twenty ‘o clock, and I vaguely wondered what this might mean, and if we’d suffered some kind of Rip Van Winkelish space-time shift. And would we care if we had.

Meanwhile, between showers, he-who-build-sheds, pressed on with his construction that looks like a car port but isn’t for the car. The sun and blue sky returned. The squash plant developed several new buds nicely set up for tomorrow’s opening. Inside a deflated one I found a bumble having a kip. I didn’t disturb it.

Just another day at the Castle.

The Tenacity Of Small Things

A persistency of pansies

I am truly astonished by the hardiness of pansies. They must have been bred with anti-freeze in their roots and shoots. Their structure is anyway so puny and fleshy; easily crushed by clumsy humans. So how can they still be flowering?

The pansy in the photo is much tinier in real life, less than one inch across, and so tending more towards the wild heartsease, Viola tricolor , which grows in upland summer meadows.

Sister Jo gave me three little pots around the end of September. I planted them out in a larger pot and they have been sitting on the garden steps ever since, already into their fifth month of flowering. And not once have they failed. Not when they were buried in snow for several days. Or subjected to hard January frosts night after night. Or buffeted by gale force winds. Or beaten by downpours.

It’s true they look mangled after a frost, but as the day warms, they perk themselves up as if it had never happened. Bless their little pansy faces.

After the December snow and frost

A hurrah of hellebores

And cheering on the pansies comes the hellebore – a Christmas Carol gift from best chum Les. Since mid December it too has flowered its socks off in a pot by the back door where we can see it. So heartening on dull winter days when it’s too icy to venture outside: there it’s been, day after day. And according to the horticultural sites on the internet, it may well carry on till spring, which at the moment it looks like doing.

And now in the front garden, pushing up through frosty soil come miniature crocus, their stems no thicker than a darning needle. They are scattered everywhere and seem to be tiny seedlings rather than the offspring of corms; not a garden phenomenon I’d come across before we moved into The Gables. On gloomy days when they are closed up tight, you can hardly see them. But when the sun shines, the little flowers open wide. Spring is on the way, they say.

They’re nothing if not optimistic little specimens.

A cheerfulness of crocuses. Or maybe croculetti.

A Quick Trip To The Plot

Yesterday morning we woke to glorious sunshine, this after days of gloom and deluge and nights of rain battering the rooflights. With all the wetness, the lean-to greenhouse against the back door had been leaking and turned itself into a paddling pool, the garden water butts were overflowing and everywhere turned to mud. I had not been up to the allotment for days.

But then came the sunshine, and I needed leeks and herbs for the risotto I’d planned, and also salad stuff to go with it. And then there was the vegetable waste to take up to the compost bins. So I set off, though not before I’d grabbed a stick to avoid an undignified up-ending along the field path. (Done that: got the muddy bum to prove it).

It truly was all slip and slide, though in passing I noticed the winter wheat in Townsend Meadow had grown an inch or two, though there was also an unscheduled stream of water along the field boundary. Climbing through the hedge gap into the allotment also proved problematical. No foothold on the mud bank. I was glad I’d brought the stick.

Allotment plots have a tendency to dreariness in the winter months, but the paths had been mowed and some diligent allotmenteers had worked hard to tidy away the listing bean poles and decaying vegetation. I’m afraid I’m not one of them, nor did I feel inclined to make a start yesterday. Instead, I inspected the winter greens, pulled up leeks, prised some container-grown parsnips out of their bucket and gathered rocket, lettuce, parsley, fennel and baby spinach from the polytunnel. There were even a few Sungold tomatoes to pick. Now that was a treat. Then I had natter with stalwart gardener Phoebe, who was on her way home for lunch, and then, guess what…

…it started to rain. A blanket of wet mist descended and I headed home, though not before taking the header photo, snapped because somehow the drizzle made everywhere look gauzy. But by the time I reached the garden gate the light had gone and the rain set in. I turned back to scan the field: dusk at lunchtime? I really do not remember a November with so much day-time darkness. Nor a month that has gone so fast: not so much walking as galloping.

Walking Squares #26 Becky thinks we should not let bad weather stop us from walking; in fact confronting wild weather elements may well do us good.

I wasn’t whingeing…It really was the coldest April in 99 years

No alliums out in our part of Shropshire yet, though there are frosted leaf tips and a few tightly closed buds just showing. Still, when they do come, they really can’t be beaten for early season purple, and purple is this month’s Life in Colour choice at Jude’s Travel Words blog (link below).

Jude and I have also been muttering about the weather in April. At one point we both wondered whether it was growing older than made us think it was colder. But no! Now we have the evidence. The UK Met Office report:

April 2021 had the lowest average minimum temperatures for April in the UK since 1922, as air frost and clear conditions combined for a frost-laden, chilly month, despite long hours of sunshine.

Early provisional figures from the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre indicate that April had the third lowest average UK minimum temperature for the month since records began in 1884, while Wales, Scotland and England all reported their figures in their top five lowest ever recorded. Average daily maximum temperatures were also below normal, but not by as much as the minimum temperatures.

It had already been reported that April had seen its highest level of air frost in 60 years, with an average of 13 days of air frost topping the previous record figure of 11 days in 1970 (records for air frost go back to 1960). This number of air frosts is more typical for December, January or February, whereas the average number of air frosts in April is five days. For gardeners and growers there were also a record high number of ground frosts with 22 days this month compared to an average of 12 days.

And so while we’re waiting for warmer days and nights and for the alliums to happen, here are some archive allium shots to be going on with:

Life in Colour: Purple

Today ~ Airing My Clean Laundry In Public and A Storm Rising

As I write this, having just hung out the washing (and taken the photo), Storm Ali is whisking his coattails across Shropshire. The odd thing is, despite all the buffeting and bluster, it is really warm outside. The forecasters tell us the wind is set to build here tonight, though Scotland and the North West look to be in for the worst of it. My heart goes out to all the storm-beleaguered souls around the planet.

In the Pink

Watching Snow Blow ~ The Bedroom Movie

March first and the Snow Dragons of Winter were unleashed over Shropshire – huffing and puffing great gusts of iciness over the land. Oddly, there wasn’t a heavy fall, and the flakes were very dry, but they did a lot of travelling. In the night the dragons racketed and roared over the roof and blew all the field snow into heaps behind the house.

This movie of blowing snow was shot from the bedroom window yesterday afternoon. Today we have slushy roads and biting winds. Who let Siberia in?

When Ophelia Came To Wenlock ~ Red Sun At Noon

By way of a brief intermission from the on going Greek series, here is the sun over our Shropshire garden at around midday yesterday. The tail end of Hurricane Ophelia had apparently whipped up the dust of Africa along with the ash from the tragic forest fires in Portugal and Spain and so created this apocalyptic orange twilight complete with rosy sun. Nothing to do with us of course, all this global mayhem.

WPC: Glow

Black & White Sunday: Abstract

Unseasonal Weather

This week at Lost in Translation, Paula is prompting us think ‘abstract’.

Trying Not To Dig The Plot And 30 Minutes Of Weird Weather

On a very dull Tuesday afternoon I thought I’d brave the cold wind and walk across the field to the allotment. On went the woolly hat, quilted coat (over three layers) and the wellies.

Unsurprisingly I had the allotment to myself – not another mad gardener in sight. I set about emptying one of the compost bins, and spreading the contents (a hand’s width deep) over a metre wide stretch of ground that had been cleared of over-wintering sprouts and broccoli. It seemed a good day to do it, and I was glad I had prised myself from the house.

This year I’m experimenting with the ‘no dig’ system of cultivation, so apart from tweaking out one or two noxious weeds, I resisted the temptation to get out my favourite spade. The objective is to cover the soil with enough interesting organic matter to excite the worms in the soil below. They then do the digging, and other soil-friendly organisms get going too so that, hopefully, the later seasons’ crops – cabbages and sweet corn – can be planted out on the much improved, and better nourished ground.

I was thus in the middle of this very absorbing activity when someone upstairs switched off the lights and I turned to find a tempest sneaking up on me.

Yikes! By the time I had scooted across the plot to the shelter of my polytunnel, we were having a small, but very concentrated snow and hail blizzard. It was far too stormy to think of making for home. Instead, I pottered about in my tunnel sowing some purple Brussels sprouts seeds in modules, while trying to remain hopeful that this truly was a passing squall and not the heavens falling in as the heavyweight clouds suggested.

I forgot to record the actual blizzard that followed, so here are some Précoce de Louviers pointy spring cabbages that are growing most happily in the tunnel.

When I stuck my nose out of the tunnel some twenty minutes later, this was the view over Much Wenlock:

By which time it was too late, and the ground too wet to go back to compost spreading. As I walked home across the allotment, I watched strange, but less threatening clouds gather over the hills:

And when I stepped through the hedge into the wheat field behind our house, the sky looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth: snowstorm, what snowstorm?

Clearly the figment of a delusional, non-digging gardener then:

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge