Rain Rain, Go away

Hooray! I ordered some sun from my daughter yesterday and it came!
And I've planted out my runner beans!

It's been dark all day here in Cheshire - not good for the spirits!

Gales here in Cornwall, sad to find many plants flattened by the wind and heavy showers, despite my best attempts at staking them. Forecast looks better for next week. Weeds are loving this weather, we are over-run with cleavers this year (or Sticky Willie, as Beth Chatto calls it - that green weed with sticky blobs on that we used to throw at each other as children, it stuck to our clothes - this was before ITV!). I threw a few annual seeds around in a moment of madness, now can't tell the weeds from the flowers! This never happened to Alan Titchmarsh!

Yes everything is growing like crazy - and my poor roses are coming into bloom.

That sticky weed (aka goose grass) is driving me crazy. It has invaded my garden in force and it's so hard to get rid of. I have too brush the burrs off when I've been down the garden.

It's easy to pull up though. You don't have to grab it, it grabs you.
I always called it Sticky Willie as a kid. Ruth Goodman called it cleavers and was using it to strain some kind of infusion through...anyone see that?

Burdock was fun as a kid too.

Looking at my garden and contemplating what IS doing well this year...
Roses very happy, unless they get rained on. They like having their roots nice and damp, like wild roses growing next to ditches.
Half hardy fuchsias are starting to flower and looking fairly enthusiastic - well they do Ok in the west of ireland don't they...
Anything remotely subtropical in origin like begonias, courgettes or tomatoes are almost at a standstill.
Slugs doing brilliantly and do are the water butts.

Horse tail is having a great summer in my garden so is goose grass (aka sticky willie). The privet hedge at the front door was doing a fine job of deterring callers - the meter reader had to to force his way past it. I eventually found a dry half hour to rush out with the trimmer and slash off the worst of the growth, but it looks terrible.

I have the most incredible crop of ----

SNAILS!

Mixed bag of weather here again..have risked some washing on the whirly-thing

garden folorn! Still waiting for the workmen to start to take up last of the concrete paving slabs and prepare the ground and lay new paving stones.

Few plants doing really well... the toadstools are now colonising the whole of the grass and there is no way of getting rid except digging up all around them...they are everywhere

Are they magic mushrooms?

I have a short wall at the front of my house, with plants and grasses. Last week I picked at least 2 lbs of mushrooms. They were beautiful and looked exactly like the edible ones in the supermarket!

Well they made a fairy ring!

Did you risk eating them, Ella?

Annobel If it looks like a mushroom and smells like a mushroom........
Doesn't mean it's a mushroom!!

Death cap is very similar

I think mushrooms have pink/ brown gills and death cap white! But don't experiment unless you've had them checked. Death cap is aptly named!

I used to have two great books on fungus identification but OH took custody of them when he slung his hook.

the stories i could tell about people I know taking magic mushrooms. Never fancied hallucinating myself!

There is a good free app for identifying fungi on ipad

I think I'm hallucinating most days! The things people tell us to believe? They can't be real!
Can they?

Wet and cold here, central heating has been on two mornings running. Everything soggy, the potatoes have blight, some courgettes to pick, everything else growing but either no flowers or flowers not setting. OH says mushrooms will be early so he will be off to the forest all day soon.

I have an amazing assortment of mushrooms/toadstools at intervals at both the front and back of my house....all different

- even one of my pots of tomatoes has some in it, don't know how they got there!

Sun? Is that that funny light in the sky? I loathe gardening but even I can see that the brambles suddenly seem to have a life of their own and are spreading like triffids across our lawn. I just hope that all the wild growth will attract butterflies and other creatures - useful ones! - so if/when the sun does put in an appearance I won't feel obliged to rush out with secateurs in hand rather than using said hand to hold a glass of wine as I amble to the lounger