On 24/2/07 18:59, in article , "Carol
Hague" wrote:

Sacha wrote:

On 24/2/07 17:24, in article , "Carol
Hague" wrote:

Sacha wrote:

We had a really huge bumble bee blundering against the panes of our bedroom
windows this morning.

snip
I hope she hasn't got out from under her duvet too soon, poor thing.

That worries me, too. OTOH, if she has been up in the eaves of the house, I
hope she's gone back up there.

Fingers crossed then :-) I like bumble bees.

So do I. They just seem to go about their business without fussing about
anyone else. Honey bees can be tetchy and I think wasps are the bovver boys
of the insect world - nowadays that should probably be hoodies!


We've had a day of intermittent rain and
very little watery sun though it hasn't been horribly cold, just a bit
dreary.

Similar here - but it was only the Thursday before last that we had a
fair bit of snow and on Wednesday morning there was thunder and
lightning so I'm not about to trust the weather much yet.

Where are you, Carol? I'm sorry if I should remember but my memory on that
subject is awful which is why I put in the occasional plea for people to put
their general location into their sigfile!

About a week ago or whenever we last had a sunny day, honey bees were very
busy on the Lonicera purpusii.

Haven't seen any bees around here yet (just south of Derby) but the
miniature daffodils are out in the back garden already and the cabbages
have germinated under cloches on my allotment.

Tète a tète aren't out yet though they're not far off but other varieties
are blazing away, the snowdrops are still going strong, plenty of Camellias
are in flower, so are Mahonias, Hellebores and a variety of other things
which seem to me to be overlapping each other much more than usual. The
Chaenomeles on the house wall is dripping with flowers.

Sounds lovely.

Well, it's the balmy, if extremely wet, south west, so conditions are kind
on the whole. We don't live on Dartmoor, though we're close to it and it's
as if it attracts what bad weather there is cold and snow wise and we are
protected from it. We do get some horrible gales here from time to time and
there's always a bit of a hollow laugh when somebody says "of course, you're
so sheltered here"!

We haven't got an awful lot in the back garden yet - we've only been
here about a year and a half.

It's pretty small and a lot of it is taken up with a large pond housing
three goldfish that the previous owners left behind.

They sound a bit like me - my motto is that any garden problem can be solved
by digging a hole and filling it with water. Since Ray and I married 7
years ago we have two new, fairly large ponds to add to the much older one
established in the 50s by a previous owner. My excuse is that I miss being
near the sea, so this is a small way of compensating and in the gales we had
a few weeks ago we did actually have wavelets on two of the ponds!

Most of the rest is
paved, but we've built what amounts to a giant raised bed with a
three-brick high retaining wall at the from and two tons of topsoil in
it, which we had to carry through the house in buckets as there's no
rear access to the garden. That was fun.

Think of it as 'fit'!

There's a high brick wall at the back with tall trees behind (the area
behind the house is the village cricket club) so it's fairly shady.

Oh, that sounds a really lovely setting - very villagey and friendly - glad
it's a *high* brick wall, though. Will you make, perhaps, a fernery there
or won't it be damp enough?

Last month I was able to take over an allotment (complete with shed) and
am gleefully planning my fruit and veg growing thereon.

Glutton for punishment. ;-)

--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
http://www.discoverdartmoor.co.uk/
(remove weeds from address)