Awful weather - typical Brits talk

twopenny

Interesting you have a tea leaf slop bucket. My Great aunt used to so I copied for a while. My home now is so small that the smell would pervade.
 I do have a small pedal bin for tea bags and pealings.

Planned some relaxed garden tidying of the dead stuff as it was supposed to be dry and cloudy. Woke to very wet everywhere and it continued all day. Cant complain though and everything is recovering surprisingly fast.
Probably for the best not to fiddle too soon.

It's a long weekend to come and judging by the driving on the roads today best to stay home and get the jobs done.

Woolsery

I'll wager a lot of 'dead' plants recover, but the trees that dropped half their leaves probably won't grow new ones now.

It rained in varying amounts here from about lunchtime and it might not be over yet. We have a dozen people camping in the bottom field over the weekend, so I hope it dries out for them. The grass cut for hay is coming back strongly and, fortunately, there's been no dung spreading yet.

Ordered some logs, but being new owners of an old business, only one load to assess quality. The price hasn't increased....yet!

Yesterday I saw  a considerable number of similar insects on the pink Verbena hastata and took a few snaps. I think they might be a species of solitary wasp, although they weren't solitary! Maybe someone will know...   Definitely not bees.Very long antennae. Here's an enlargement:

Woolsery

Farway said:

Woolsery, tom seeds saved yesterday, just waiting for them to dry out a bit. I don't do fancy seed saving, some techniques I've seen on YouTube seem a lot of faff and in the "muck & magic" category, I just smear the tom's innards onto kitchen roll and let them dry off. Come sowing time I sow as they are, kitchen paper and all, soon disintegrates & up they pop

That's all I do to with toms. I'm behind you with seed saving. The Hesperis matronalis is doing similarly to the Coronilla in response to the dry weather, but summer isn't over yet!

Apodemus

Woolsery said:

Yesterday I saw  a considerable number of similar insects on the pink Verbena hastata and took a few snaps. I think they might be a species of solitary wasp, although they weren't solitary! Maybe someone will know...   Definitely not bees.

They look like they could be leafcutter bees.  Have you seen the distinctive half-moons missing from any plants?

Woolsery

Apodemus said:

Woolsery said:

Yesterday I saw  a considerable number of similar insects on the pink Verbena hastata and took a few snaps. I think they might be a species of solitary wasp, although they weren't solitary! Maybe someone will know...   Definitely not bees.

They look like they could be leafcutter bees.  Have you seen the distinctive half-moons missing from any plants?

Yes! I thought it was blimmin' vine weevils, so that could be good news. Thanks.

Farway

Woke to heavy rain, good & bad news. Good for the poor old garden, bad 'cos I'm off to Winchester with the youngest set of grandchildren + camera, but the rain is supposed to clear off East by midday, so fingers crossed for that part

I did notice yesterday the sun & dry looks like it has half killed a shrub I have, vert dead & brittle looking, but some branches are green, and it's a tough one which survives hacking at it so not too concerned, forgotten the name, but it's common as muck & loved by bees

On checking my ripe figs I was too late for one, the wasps had beaten me to it, my fault for leaving it too long. The other ripe one was lovely, of course

There's a garden / park near to Winchester Cathedral, near King Alfred statue, I'll be mooching round there looking at the plants & maybe getting ideas, note to self, take penknife just in case some "pruning" is needed

liberty_lily

Glad everyone seems to be over their 'off' day(s) 😀

Hope the weather stayed kind for your trip to Winchester, Farway! We used to go there a lot as DH worked in the area for a while in the 1990s....

No thunderstorms here. We had rain overnight on Tuesday and nothing of note since. Yesterday was mainly dull, but today has been all blue skies, sunny and warm...whereas we spoke to DS in East Sussex this morning and they had wall-to-wall thunder/rain 🙄

No gardening to speak of here still, but on the flying creatures theme here's a (blurry) butterfly on the eupatoriums.....

Farway

Yesterday's rain faded away, so mainly dry day out in Winchester, the flowers were nice but a formal park designs, neat rows etc, but I can appreciate the work that went into it

Here's one I took in the park, rain drops on roses etc, and on the creatures theme, a very large hare near the park gates

liberty_lily

Good to hear the rain cleared for you, Farway 🙂 Love the hare 😍 and the rose looks very like one of ours - but we have lots of apricot ones so can't think which right now...maybe Lady of Shalott or Lady Emma Hamilton??? Or quite possibly neither, lol!

Here's another apricot rose from the other day (Dame Judi Dench)...and a pink one having its last hurrah (Alan Titchmarsh)...DH had an unexpected day off today (so a fab extra long weekend ahead 😁), but it started damp so we only managed a bit of cutting back in the courtyard and general tidying of the raised veg beds etc before heading out to Been & Queued for plasterboard and CLS. Lots to catch up on after our covid-imposed break from the DIY 🙄

Hope everyone has a relaxing/productive* (*delete as appropriate!) bank holiday weekend....

Woolsery

Personally, I don't mind if the purveyor of Barleywood Blue decides he's having a last hurrah, but somehow I believe we haven't seen the last of him!

Gorgeous roses Farway and lily.

It looks like Winchester's maybe on a hare sculpture theme, as other cities have done with various animals from time to time. One of my DDs was involved with decorating  a large pig sculpture many years ago and grandson 1 won one of the  remaining un-decorated owls in his city's fund raiser. It stands about 4' tall and by the time his aunt gets around to painting it he'll probably have his own garden to put it in! 

The day here started damp and went downhill from there, so it was with some trepidation I set off in pouring rain to do a 4.5 mile circular walk incorporating a local nature reserve. However, by the time my partner and I met up, the promised dry weather had arrived, though it was still cloudy. I was worried I might not make even 2 miles after such a long lay-off, so a route with lots of 'opt-outs' along the way was my safety net, but we did the whole circuit.   Part of the route included the home of former drummer to the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, whose wife has an Arabian stud......I'm sorry, I'll read that again.....whose wife breeds Arabian horses. What impressed me was the lack of any obvious security, there being no intercom or electronics at the entrance, just the name of the house and the words "Please shut the gate." Where else but in the UK could someone so well known (albeit now deceased) have lived as freely as that?

It was a similar situation in the hide at the nature reserve. The tidily kept visitors' book dated back to early 2018 and there were two pairs of binoculars in cases and a host of reference books. Zero vandalism is rarely seen nowadays, but the only bit of naughtiness was in the comments, some of them written in a young hand and somewhat fanciful. Sadly, or maybe luckily, we didn't see a Tyranasaurus rex and the Macaws eluded us too! 

The last time I visited that hide was about 8 or 9 years ago when two ladies within informed me they'd had a bet on whether the bull in the field it overlooked would chase me. It didn't. As it was with cows I wasn't too concerned that it would, but I felt I'd disappointed the women. Maybe they'd had an afternoon like us: no heron, kingfishers or otters, just a dragonfly!