The weather is getting gradually warmer, though it's two steps forward and one step back at the moment, but one afternoon this week it was warm enough to wear shorts while working in the garden trying to tame the damned couch grass that infests our flower and vegetable beds.
Because we try and be as organic as possible in our garden, dealing with the couch grass infestation means getting down on one's hands and knees with a bucket and a hand fork and trying to dig out the root nodes and runners - something which I find strangely therapeutic.
Our bower bird is chirping away trying to lay wings on a mate, and is raiding the peg basket on the washing line for blue pegs, and scattering all the other rejected ones round the garden, giving us a little task to gather them all up every morning though I leave him any of the blue ones he takes.
All this gardening and bower bird foraging hasn't turned up anything so far this year in the way of garden archaeology - no interesting bits of glass or old medicine bottles, but there's a lot of couch grass left to root out.
Down at Lake View I've been working on the room that's been dressed as the nursery, but while doing so I had an important realisation about oil lamps - that lamp makers bought in burners from specialist manufacturers - the burners being quite complicated bits of brasswork, and hence the name on the burner isn't necessarily the name of the lamp maker.
I also spent some time trying to track down what had happened to the Florence Nightingale Digitization project, principally because one of my back burner projects was to investigate the treatment of mental trauma during the Crimean war.
For the rest it was just the mechanics of life, but tomorrow's clock change day when we spring forward an hour, which at least will have the benefit of the cats trying to wake us at 0630 rather than 0530 to be let out, and I probably ought to check my bike in the hope that it will soon be warm enough to start my morning bike rides over summer ...
No comments:
Post a Comment