Eat Yer Heart Out Bugs Bunny!

Now isn't this a sight for a Bunny's eyes?! The carrot on the left was so perfect I just had to show yez!
Last night we had 'Chunky Soup' for supper, which was basically everything that was left from the summer crop in the veg patch, including my perfect carrot! I felt I should preserve it for immortality somehow, but Youngest thought that was taking the whole veg growing thing a bit too seriously!

I believe this is what is called a 'Swiss Cheese Plant'? My Granny used to have one in her hall and she always referred to it as the 'Cheese and Wine Plant'! So, thinking to add a touch of elegance to the bathroom, I moved Henry in there:

As you can see, he is very happy, which is good, I do love happy plants!

The only 'down' side is that it has recently become necessary to be armed with a machete when you want a bath!

C'est la vie en pays! Everything comes with a price!!

Thankful Thursday!

Thou hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more- a grateful heart;
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose pulse may be
Thy praise.

George Herbert.

Herewith this week's 'Thankfuls'!

1. The ubiquitous 'they' resurfaced our lane yesterday- hurrah! hurrah! No more rappelling down gorges, leaping crevasses, tumbling into pits, paragliding across trackless wastes, swimming through rushing torrents, or stalling in mudslides just to get the half-mile to the main road! 2. Today at 3.oo I am going into town to a coffee shop to meet a friend for tea, and if you think that's mundane you don't read my posts very often! Its REALLY exciting! Both of us have organised to be childless and we are so looking forward to a conversation in which we can each FINISH our SENTENCES! We chose a coffee shop with good cakes and fruit eats too so I'm telling you that this is one MEGA-event!

3.Look what I found along the lane this morning:

I thought the diggers and machines laying the water pipes over the last six months had destroyed all the blackberry bushes as they've bashed the hedges round pretty badly, but I'm delighted to report that there's enough blackberries for at least one crumble and possibly a pan of blackberry sauce to go with Sunday lunch's ice-cream!

4. You can laugh at this 'thankful' if you want, but this morning I thought I'd go to the Farmers' depot and get bedding plants for the window boxes to beautify the outside window sills before my mother-in-law arrives on Saturday. I LOVE the Farmers' depot/warehouse place down on the Quays! Its got hardware, paints, fencing, pet food, plants, hedging, farm implements, gardening tools, thick socks and gloves, turf bales, gumboots, buckets, horse food, fertilizer, coal scuttles, compost, bins, lambing supplements, fence wire, oh you name it all mixed up in the most unruly manner. The girls love it too as you just never know what you'll find next. Two months ago they moved into a huge new purpose-built warehouse and extended their yard, but all they've done really is to give themselves more space and appear to be more organised! It smells of earth and plants and hardware, there's generally dirt on the floor and the farmers all go in in their wellies and dirt and you can wait ages to be served if the guy in front is taking forever to explain just what he needs. The people who work there are all country folks and there's never a hurry nor a bother on them, and there's generally one or two tractors and trailers in the carpark. It drives some people mad I know but I really love it; for all its new appearance it is still stuck in the 19C and with the values to boot!
Anyhow, apart from the treat of spending a while there this morning I got several plants- 6 pansies, 6 cyclamen (Mum calls them 'sickly men'!),4 cultivated primroses, 6 button daisies, and a lovely pyracantha. The man in the nursery section picked out a pyracantha with lots of berries ready to ripen. I've got several little plants of variegated ivy so I think they'll make a nice group of window boxes. Well, not the pyracantha, I'll put that in a big pot by the door for now, and then see if it would prefer the ground next summer perhaps.

5. When I was coming out of the Bookshop this morning (and f.y.i. -Diana Gabaldon's new book 'An Echo in the Bone' hasn't yet been released here) the river was looking lovely and there was a beautiful rowan near the bridge. Luckily I had my camera so here you are:

...looking upstream...

...looking downstream... ...and the rowan.
The Garavogue River goes right through the middle of town, and the estuary and quays begin the other side of this bridge. There is one more bridge, beyond which the ocean going yachts and ships moor, but basically Sligo squeezes itself into a space between the sea and Lough Gill, which is why hockey-, tennis-,rugby and foot-balls, can sometimes be seen floating through town along with ducks and swans, the school Canoe Club and fishermen on every bridge. Just your average Irish town really but I love living back here. The Autumn colours are becoming more pronounced now but as I'm always driving its difficult to catch them on camera for you. Still, they are lovely and I'm thankful for the beauty of it all!

And there they are, this week's 'thankfuls'!

Tropical Leitrim!

It’s been another warm day, decidedly muggy in town. This morning I wanted to finish putting up the photos in School (attaching brackets to the frames, then screwing them to the walls), so the Hub came with me to speed things up. The heat in the classrooms, even with windows open and doors propped to catch the breeze, was amazing. The children were doing class tests too, poor things. We failed to finish the pictures, but hopefully an hour tomorrow will do it. They look so good in their neat rows and so much safer attached permamently to the walls.

After lunch we sat out in the folk's garden for tea. It was just lovely to sit out and do nothing. Except for Mum who kept leaping up to chop bits off bushes and dead-head flowers, and then went off to fetch the plant books in order to identify a yellow shrub. She’s decided that it is hypericum, not genestra, although there was a bit of a barney because she wanted it to be potentilla, and I knew it wasn’t that. Dad pretended to doze, occasionally opening one eye to do ‘Paddington stares’ at me! (Note to self- argue respectfully with one’s mother when one’s father is sitting by…)

Thinking of plants, the spathyphillum in our bathroom are flowering beautifully at present. Although tropical, this muggy weather suits them very well, and they are such luscious plants with the shiny green leaves and pristine white flowers or bracts or whajemies.
Another thing this warm weather is good for is rotting down the compost. I was just talking to a field mouse whilst emptying the vegetable peelings into the outside compost bin and she said it’s quite delightful in the bins at present, and the fruit peelings add delicious variety to her diet.

My amaryllis bulb flowered at least two months ago, probably more, and I’ve been watching the seed pods grow fatter and fatter. On Sunday they burst open so yesterday I collected all the seeds, except for the few which fell into the printer, and then looked up books to see how best to germinate the seeds. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have lots of amaryllis plants flowering all at once? Mum says they grow wild in Hong Kong and are lovely to see. Granny’s ‘Gardening in East Africa’ book says to spread the seeds on a sandy loam with very light covering of soil, and then keep them in a light warm place under glass until they germinate. If I planted out the tomato seedlings I could use that tray for the amaryllis, but perhaps a rummage in the re-cycling place on the Quays would turn up another seed tray- I find amazingly useful items there, and the man who works there is great at helping me load up my car with other people’s rubbish! I fould a big old tim tea caddy on Saturday, very useful for planting a petunia in. Anyhow, planting the seeds is my next job…time and tide may wait for no man, but the ironing is generally quite patient!

Yesterday I spent most of the day with a friend: we sat in the sun drinking tea and setting the Irish education system to rights. If only the Minister for Education, O’Keeffe, had had time to stop by he would have learned so much to help him!

Middle daughter, Sos, spent this morning in town going round shops to see if there were any summer jobs going. She is a bit late starting since she’s only just finished sitting her Leaving Cert, but not surprisingly, the outlook isn’t good. A friend suggested an idea for a small business so perhaps she will set that up. She would like to learn to drive this summer, before going to College. She isn’t one to let the grass grow under her, so when she returns from next week in Madrid she will have time to get on with something. Its certainly a summer of firsts. This evening B returns from France- she’ll either collapse straight into bed, or she will talk all night, there’s no guessing which it’ll be.

And lastly, when I have figured how to download, upload, sideload, or whatever, I will start putting photos in. So far, no good!