"Hot July brings cooling showers, Apricots and gillyflowers." - Sara Coleridge, Pretty Lessons in Verse
As The Blooming Old Gardener, our usual blogger, is off on their holidays, I am blogging this week (Claire aka Wheelbarrow Wielding Lady of Runcorn, wearer of bright apron).
It has been a busy busy time, and the weather has been relentlessly lovely, which has been great for the garden, but not so much for the grass or those of us that have been watering. Luckily we have had a great team of folk that have chipped in and helped out. The weather gods decided to be kind and we were granted a lovely bit of rain yesterday evening and this morning. Hopefully it will perk up the grass slightly and give us a break from watering today. The worry with rain, is the inevitable slug and snail invasion it brings, so it will be interesting to see what happens.
The Veg Zone is producing lots of lovely vegetables at the moment, and I think we are going to have one or two very large pumpkins! It has been wonderful to pick veg straight from the garden and have it for lunch or tea, definitely a perk of being a volunteer! Whilst our main veg gardener has been away, Pauline has been helping out, will her efforts pass muster?
The Book Tree (our Little Free Library) has been closed for maintenance this week, whilst we fixed the latch (Thanks Angela and Nick). We then proceeded to clean the wood with delightfully scented orange oil infused spray. After the wood was all cleaned, we then moved on to oil the wood, with rather sticky oil (more went on our hands). This has really improved the wood so far, but I think we will need at least another coat or two, to really help weatherproof it. Thanks Helen, for literally getting your hands dirty!
So for the time being, the book tree will remain empty and we will see what the weather does this weekend. Aiming to reopen it, by early next week. In other book news, we have had a humongous amount of excellent children books donated, so the tree is going to be very happy!
Did you know that now was a great time to collect Pinecones? If you visit the Astmoor Industrial Estate, particularly by the Mersey Flow offices, there are tons! We harvested some for our bug house and other crafty projects. Thanks to Mima aka HedgeRose Healing for pointing them out to us.
Our 'Britain in Bloom' judging date is on the 27th July, so we are creating a few more fun things to go into the garden, as well as develop some of the scenes, you may have already spotted.
The Wheelbarrow Wielder
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