Campanula

Another of my successful Lidl buys, if I recall correctly. The balcony railing pots are all doing well, but especially so the campanula and the dianthus, which I think were both from Lidl. Both flowered a bit when I first got them, then died back a bit, and now have come back with a colourful vengeance. I blipped them the other day in context. Colour corner is even more colourful now.

Having had a reasonably quiet week, I’ve spent a bit of time on various days sorting out parts of the balcony garden that needed my attention. I got a cheap metal railing pot from Poundland, and moved the Alice Hoffman fuchsia into it. I made the mistake with Alice Hoffman of originally putting her in the same pot as the other fuchsia (La Campanella), thinking they would both thrive and compete. Alice Hoffman almost withered on the vine and died until I dug her out and gave her her own pot. No sign of any flowers yet, but there is still time. She has also given rise to an accidental cutting when I was digging her out of the shared pot, and that seems to be doing fine. I’m going to try very hard this year to overwinter my fuchsias, including bringing them inside if need be.

On the exercise front, I completed the last class of the first week of the peloton powerzones programme before signing on and trying to join a zoom brainstorming event about the Convention on the Future of Europe. I felt such an outsider and it brought back a lot of bad memories. I got a pm on the zoom chat from someone who was actually in Neufchâtel on 23/24 June 2016, and he encouraged me to stay, but I couldn’t stand it so logged out feeling quite sick to my stomach. Thanks guys (see extra - snapped when I popped down to the gym to go on the elliptical (it was heaving…)).

Later on we zoomed with Bb and Dd (lots of chat and laughter), and I finished off the day on another zoom, as part of an international conference. It went ok, but I was certainly feeling low energy by then… We were operating on a time zone that suited those on the other side of the Atlantic better than those of us in the UK or Germany. Straight to bed after that, without blipping.