BASKETTCASE

A really good week in the garden if not the house.  I have been able to get out in the sunshine and weed the bed round the patio.  It was full of celandine, I suppose left over from the damp area round the pond.  They are dear little shiny green plants that would soon have had bright yellow flowers.  I love to see them in ditches and other damp places, but they are greedy and spread into a dense mat that doesn't give a chance to the other plants.  Their slender white stalks go down several inches into the earth before connecting with little light brown tubers, and these multiply every year forming a knotty clump that breaks up and sprreads over a wide area when you try to dig.  I'm not silly enough to think I have winkled them all out, but I have attacked about 98% of the leaves.  Some broke off so the tubers will sprout again next year, thumbing their little brown noses at me, but I feel I have done a job akin to clearing the bedrooms and store-cupboards on my garden.

The broad beans are in.  The ones I planted rather late in the autumn are few and far between - six of them to be precise.  Let's hope this lot does better, because we have extra mouths to feed this year.  I have planted early peas along the picket fence in the boys garden by the playhouse.  I hope they'll do well as they will love picking and eating them - if Dave doesn't sneak out after dark and pop his way down the row!

I have a few pots of flower seeds in the greenhouse, in a propagator.  I hope I can be organised enough to prevent them overheating and dehydrating this year.  I have no excuse now.  I have only bought a few fuschia and geranium plants for my two baskets, and hope to get cuttings from them for the hay basket.  I have been scrapbooking our first holiday in Ireland in 1996, and among the photos were some of the garden and the pergola.  I don't think it has looked as good as that since, so I have a lot to live up to.

Yesterday was scrapbooking day.  I am trying to get my own album up to date, having spent so many workshops making pages for the boys' albums.  I am a bit overwhelmed by all the envelopes of holiday photos in the cupboard - I had forgotten Malta, and Alderney, and Denia, to say nothing of the three holidays in Ireland and all the times in Wales.  And I haven't started on transferring all the slides from the 70s onto computer - Dad's as well as ours. 

I took Barbara with me yesterday.  She gets lonely in the house on her own, and needs something creative and absorbing to get stuck into.  She loved scrapbooking, and was brave enough to bring her wedding and courtship photos.  John died on Boxing Day and I think she did really well not to get tearful.  Vicki gave her a lot of help, and other people from church talked to her, so by the time she had had cottage pie with Dave and me she had had a lovely day.