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Thursday 19 March 2009

Meet Molly, currently the most spiteful cat on the planet. She might look beautiful but don't let that fool you. Underneath the calm interior lurks one of the meanest cats around. Oh she might be nice and come and cuddle up to you at night but let her into your room and she might just leave you a little something on the carpet. The weather is beautiful, the litter tray is clean but no my bedroom is currently her spot of choice for doing her business. All I can smell is cat wee. It stinks, it's pervasive and this is now the second week in a row that I've had my carpet up and shampooed. I even caught her in action the other morning so I know that it's her. As much as I love her - I am never having another cat!
So anyway to cheer myself up the last couple of days, I have wandering around my garden enjoying the sunshine. Let's face it, this is England so you have to make the most of it while you can. Still, if it carries on like it's started, we could have a beautiful year to come. I'd best start crossing all my fingers now. Actually, it's a bit cloudy and much chillier today which is why I'm in the study composing this instead of digging in the garden. Mind you, having shifted almost a tonne of soil between us at the weekend and also mended the greenhouse I don't feel so guilty about doing so. There's always so much to do in our garden as I'm not the only fair weather gardener in the house. It's an old place too with a pretty mature garden and having mature trees means it's never just a straightforward job to trim them back. This year it's going to involve ladders and chain saws at some point and that's well beyond my remit. I'll stick to the flower webs and the veggie patch. We did a soil test in the veggie patch at the weekend and wow, did we get a surprise. We have the most beautiful, light, free draining soil. Like a lot of Essex, we're on sand and over the years we have piled barrow load upon barrow load of compost into it. By rights we should be able to grow the most fantastic carrots but they never get to more than 2 inches long regardless of the variety. Anyhow, the test showed that the garden is alkaline and not just a little. I'm not sure we'll be able to pour enough manure in it to be able to fix it. Well, certainly not this year anyway.So anyway, here's my pick of the spring flowers so far. Helebores poking out from under their leaves at the bottom of the garden. This is the first year they've done as well - they don't like our regular summer droughts.
Pulmonaria or Lung Wort or as my gran always called it, Jacob's coat. It flowers really early in the spring and then all summer you get huge green spotty leaves.
The first of the violas.
Frogs, lots of them but so far, no spawn. I found young newts at the weekend too while I was moving some of the stones about. They were obviously still hibernating so I covered them back up. Finally the winter clematis - about the only thing in the garden that's a bit late flowering this year. Mind you, that could just down to it being in the shadiest part of the garden. Ah spring is definately springing, before we know it it'll be Easter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello
I love your floral photographs!
and the frogs :o)
My mother has a cat called Molly that looks just like yours. I very much like your blog. Will call agin soon. Hope you are having a good week xx
Sumea

Dawn said...

Poor Miss Molly! She has the sweetest little face tho!

I have read that they do that to try to tell you something is wrong. Changes in litter, location, the box itself, or even urinary infections can make them do that. I hope she's okay!