A bowl of food, fresh from the garden

Pippa dog is....

 wishful thinking

Allie dog is......

DOG of HARDWARE

Tiggy and Wuwu are......

on the wondowsill, watching the sun go down.

The return of the watermelon

Watermelon 2 is 14cm!

Already twice the size of watermelon the first.

It's heavily protected:

But it also has a sidekick, who's doing just fine, free range:

Hiding amongst the petunias

An inside out day

The weather has not been helpful to building work

Extremely hot with frequent thunderstorms has made progress on repairing the cistern, difficult.

A settled couple of days was forecast, so we took a day off work.

Settled means no thunderstorms to wash mortar away. But also means unpleasant heat to work in.

So we tried an early start.

3hrs work and back to bed at 9am.

It was hard getting up, but a beautiful morning and another row completed.
(That's row as in horizontal level, although the other did come in to it at one point when things came unstuck)

It worked so well we carried on doing it for the whole weekend.

And when the thunderstorms returned, it didn't matter, because most work had ceased by lunchtime.
(The storms have always been mid afternoon.)
It seems we might be falling in to an afternoon siesta lifestyle.

Pusties approve!

Storm clouds on the horizon!

 

What is "improved" grassland?

Thunderstorms every other day are making it very difficult for farmers trying to get in hay.

But it makes for lots of beautiful meadows.

I have no idea or interest in the official definituon of improved grassland, but walking the dogs down a local slovenian valley this afternoon, I came to a point where the meadow on either side was very different.

On the right

Looks like alfalfa and a single species of grass

On the left

So much variety, I don't know all of them.

Unfortunately I couldn't show the distribution of butterflies. But I'm sure you can guess. 

I think the first is known as improved grassland. But I think it is an interesting term. Improved from who's point of view?

Mine? Definitely not.

Future generations? Who can say?

I think the UK is beginning to regret that too much of its grassland has been improved. The provision of funding to encourage "extensive" (presumably opposed to "intensive") farming practices, certainly suggests as much.

Will Slovenia soon be in the same position?

At the moment, what looks to me like "improved" grassland seems to be still relatively small patches in Slovenia.
Does anyone know what the Slovenian policy is - to encourage or discourage these?

Pustied

Psst! Wuwu here. Here's a hint for all you special pusties out there. These make the best toy ever. They have an excellent inbuilt noise generator to make them easy to locate, exciting erratic movement and no way to fight back. And at this time of the year there's just so many that you can't help catch one. An important feature when you're special like me. And when you're done with them you can leave them on the garden bench for your owners to find. Wuwu.

P.s. I call them pings. Aren't I good at naming things?

Watermelon watch. A sad ending

It seems the watermelon reached dog toy size and thus according to someone, it was ready for picking.

Unfortunately it was on the edge of the bed, and very obvious. A smaller one is growing in the middle. Fingers crossed it goes un-noticed until i think it is ready for picking.

This is why I have one plant in the dog's garden and one in the vegetable garden.

Double my chances.

Watermelon 4

7.4cm diameter.

A wet 24hrs.

Stump thumping and watermelon 3

A stump a day keeps the doctor away.

Unfortunately, we aren't that efficient and it's been more like a stump a week....

But every bare patch on this page marks a stump that has been removed.

It's hard tedious work that really doesn't look impressive on a blog page, so sorry for a boring post, but the elder just keeps on coming back and now the area is level, let's see how what's left copes with a lawn mower.

Just a couple left to go.

5.9 on the watermelon scale.

Watermelon update

The watermelon seems to be growing a centimeter a day.
2.7cm yesterday
3.6cm today a no longer a marble.

Watch this space to see if it keeps it up....

Not only that but I've spotted a second

Going to be a good year for watermelons.

Pees and beans and the first water melon

Beans, peas, the first tomato and the first from two varieties of chilli.

The first the watermelon: 

What?

You can't see it?

How rude.

😊

You're right. It's tiny. But it's got two months to grow......

 And fresh apple juice from windfalls

Another great productive week on the farm.