A day in the garden

Another cloudless, warm and sunny day. Spent a couple of hours this morning weeding down at the bottom of the slope by the road. Mrs M did some weeding between the paving slabs and along the edges of the concrete.

Lunch outside on the deck, surrounded by the bits and pieces of the day - rubber strips for the glasshouse, late-sown peas, seedlings protected by yoghurt tubs, fern sporelings growing in yoghurt tubs too, and my outdoor book of the day 'The Rocky Mountains', one of my shelf of Time-Life books in the series 'The World's Wild Places'. The shrub on the right is my recently acquired oddity, Rostrinucula dependens, something I bought because I'd never heard of it! It was so shabby when it arrived that I made a fuss and got it half price. It's put out quite a few new shoots since I bought it, so today I took eight cuttings, giving the parent plant the opportunity to re-sprout and shape up.

My extra today is of half a dozen seedlings of Scilla madeirensis, a tall Scilla from . . . Madeira!

When we gave up gardening later in the afternoon to sit out with a cuppa - or in my case, a glass of ginger beer -  it was so hot, for us, that we had to put the umbrella up!