It's raining!!

Nice, gentle, sustained rain.  You can hear the garden purring!!!!!!!  And the weather pundits say that we may get more rain through the course of the week.

Excellent :-)

Fortunately, it held off until after the weekend.  The Under-gardener has now rescued most of the paths in the flower garden - which were over-grown with wild strawberries, weeds and flowers.  There's just one more path to excavate, although that is mostly covered with exuberant lavender and rosemary bushes.  I really must trim them back, once they've finished flowering.  There's also quite a handsome crop of wheat and oats, which we were going to pull up. Then it occurred to us that they're getting very close to ripe, and the chooks might rather enjoy them in a few weeks time.  We'll pull them up then!

We have an abundant harvest of gooseberries, not a bad crop of morello cherries, about 10 sweet cherries and a small box of blackcurrants.  The apples appear to have stopped dropping for the moment.  Even so, there's only one bramley.

The Under-gardener has been bemoaning the fact that we never get any pears and that the apple crops are a bit hit and miss.  Then I read somewhere that, given even a modicum of luck, an apple or pear tree can live for upward of 250 years.  In which case, our 5 year old trees are mere babies and shouldn't be expected to fruit abundantly just yet.  You need patience to be a hard fruit grower, it seems (that's a grower of hard fruits, not a grower with chain mail and knuckle dusters!!).

Our peas and broad beans are delicious. And doing very well.

Now we just need a drop more rain.  And a fence around the orchard so the chooks can range free unsupervised. Although we must remember to go and sit with them still in the evenings.  We want them to stay friendly.  Kiev was sat on my knee the other evening :-) 

(We can't let them amble about in an unfettered sort of a way.  It wouldn't take long for the fox to have them.  Or they would quite quickly find a way to escape - and vanish.  Wouldn't take them long to find the gate out onto the road!!)