Gardening
A rather scruffy bee in my garden in Keswick. The Lake District is about insects too! Really quite weird and wonderful to find myself eyeballing such a strange creature, usually they are darting about so much that you never see the detail. This one was moving with difficulty so is an old bee, think of an octogenarian in human terms. A bumblebee queen lives for up to a year, workers and males for far less. It would be great to think that this queen has fulfilled her biological instinct and established a colony in my garden.
Who’d have thought it, enough Wild Strawberries to harvest in my garden in Keswick. I introduced some casually a few years ago and they have spread. Growing outside but hidden under ferns and Rosemary in the kitchen part of my garden, the fruits have evaded the birds and thrived in the warmth and rain of this June. Small fruits but with a very intense flavour, they made a satisfying dessert with Raspberries from a shop.
Trimming the Rhododendrons in my Keswick garden now the flowering season has passed. But as well as plenty of flowers there was plenty of growth, obscuring a bird feeder both aeronautically and visually.
Hand pruning doesn’t seem to upset the birds for long. The local tits were back on the feeder within half an hour and, due to the trimming, I could watch and hear them clearly while taking a break in the shed.
Potting up one of the Mammillaria cacti of my balcony terrace in Marseille. A lot of root below the ground; the roots bind hard on the terracotta.
Flowering is over for this year for the old Wisteria in my West London patio garden. Now time for trimming to protect the boiler chimney from being strangled by Wisteria tendrils. Tree fern and apple trees doing fine, and some flowers on my citrus trees growing in pots.
