Points of view!

One of the gentlemen I meet walking their dogs while I am put and about first thing in the morning was complaining today about the drought. Yes, the drought! Granted we have gad a few days of sunshine but it hardly constitutes a drought. We have had some rain as well. And the ground has not really had time to dry out properly. But he wants to plant his vegetables and he reckons he cannot do so if the "drought" continues. 

And there we were hoping that the relatively dry spell would continue through today so that Phil could cut the grass before we head for Spain tomorrow. He is actually managing to do so as I type this. 

About half an hour ago he called me to take a look at something. Down at the bottom of the shared garden, just behind a fence, he had discovered a bed of baby "policemen's helmets", the local name for Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian balsam, the plant that simply takes over patches of land, whatever name you recognise it by, squeezing out anything else that wants to grow there. It's rather a shame that they are so domineering because the flowers, when they bloom, are very pretty. 

Obviously the occasions recently when I have stopped on a walk along a local bridle path and pulled up a seedling, pointing out to him exactly what it is, have borne fruit. Unwilling to pull all these up individually, we are hoping that cutting off their heads with the strimmer might do the trick. Only time will tell. 

Last year, we returned in September to find the whole of that area full of mature, nicely blooming plants, about six feet high. Sometimes local school organise for pupils to have a mass weeding session, pulling up the flowering plants and stamping them out of existence. Maybe they should organise such excursions now. Except that it would be much more wearisome having to bend down and pull up seedlings only inches high rather than grasping an almost fully grown plant. So it goes. 

Out and about, I have spotted a pair of Canada geese with six goslings on one of our local ponds. I never knew they nested locally. They glide serenely around the pond, accompanied by a white goose who appears to have appointed himself guardian of the little family, godfather, or perhaps godgoose, if such a thing exists in the waterfowl world!