Rainy Sunday

Got up late, which was good as I've not slept well lately.
Worked in the garden. It's looking the best it has in years this Spring. I dug up some self seeded lady's mantle, from the patch we laughingly call a patio. I love this plant it but it really takes over if you let it. Then I went into the greenhouse and dug over and manured the two borders. Tomatoes and chillies are growing in the propagator in the house, they'll move out to the greenhouse in April. And the flipping jasmine has tunneled in from outside and rooted itself right through the borders, so I had to clean their roots out. Then I pruned the grape vine, it's 10 years old now, planted it on my fortieth birthday, and it now looks all gnarled like a real a vine should - a bit like me I suppose! Last year I got 35 bunches of grapes - and my family just complained about the pips! It's a variety called Black Hamburg, pretty reliable greenhouse variety for up here in the frozen north. The root is planted outside the greenhouse, and is brought in under the founds, so it gets a good winter chill, and enough water in the summer. I have a passion flower trained through it, and a tender clematis.

Photographs of the vine sell really well on stock sites, I think designers must do a lot of work for restuarants and wine growers. This is a shot of it taken in fall two years ago.

(BTW I appreciate my pix can be nicked from here, but be warned they are less than 300 pixels each. I don't want to watermark them as it spoils the effect, but they do carry my EXIF info)

Yesterday I went to an antique fair. Nothing much took my fancy, but I did buy a second hand poetry book, an anthology of garden poems, edited by Germaine Greer. It has some good poets it, Larkin, Heaney, Plath, and Simon Armitage who I've recently discovered and really like. I'm enjoying dipping into it.