Sunday 11 April 2010

Bee do bee do bee do

I am sitting here, trying to type as best I can with one and a half hands.  No, we haven't had another Lawnmower Incident, in case you're worrying.  Nothing so exciting. 

For a while now I have noticed a weird tiny little lump on the palm of my left hand, almost exactly in the middle.  Last night, I realised it had got a bit bigger, and so of course, I started dicking about with it.  I rubbed it, and it moved around as if there was something stuck under the skin. 

How interesting*. 

A bit more dicking around, and I realised that there was a little lump of something under the skin.  I fiddled with it a bit.

Well, what would you have done? 

I kept playing with it till I had managed to squeeze the lump right out.  It was hard, like a bit of chalk, or a teeny bit of gravel or something.  Very weird.

Once the initial excitement of getting a foreign body out of my hand (right out from under my SKIN!  Ew!) had passed, I inspected the damage.  There's a surprisingly large hole there now, which is bloody sore.  As the evening wore on, it got more and more painful, till I ended up slathering it in antiseptic and sticking a plaster over it.  Now it just looks absurd.  A plaster right across the palm of your hand makes you look like some clumsy galoot who has had a run-in with a particularly tough ketchup bottle.  It's really not impressive, and it feels weird.

This morning, as part of the Spring Madness that is currently gripping the WithaY household**, we went out to the local garden centre and bought a load of plants.  We've got some thyme planted in the flowerbed in front of the house, so it will smell nice as we walk past, and whenever the postman tramples on it.  We planted some Woodruff under the huge hedge out the front, which (apparently) will brighten up a gloomy corner.  We'll see.

We planted two blackcurrant bushes in the fruit bed out the back.  I have high hopes.  The raspberry canes have started to show some green shoots, and the redcurrant bushes have lots of buds.  There might be jam in the summer.

There are now two new climbing roses against the fence at the side of the house, but I am not very confident about them as the soil there is terrible***.  I chucked in a load of compost from a bag, but if they aren't happy then we will have to move them. 

More roses have been planted in the front garden; two ramblers at the side of the drive in an attempt to repress the weeds, and two taller bushy ones in the bed the other side of the drive to add some height and colour.  Fingers crossed that they don't die.

We chose varieties that have old-fashioned open flowers to allow bees to get in and feed.  Apparently the more modern hybrid tea roses are not very bee-friendly.  Speaking of bees, we attempted some bee rescue yesterday.  As we sat on the bench out the front, surrounded by all the flowers showcased in the last blog post, yeah you remember, we spotted a bumble bee.  He didn't look very well. 

He sat sadly on a leaf on the bay tree, so Mr WithaY carefully picked him up and put him on the heather, in case he was hungry.  Nothing.  He just hunched up, looking wretched.



Mr WithaY decided that he needed to make up some sugar and water solution to feed the bee, in case it was too tired to find food in the flowers.



It wasn't very interested, so we left it on the heather, and hopefully it will recover.

Other gardening news:  The potatoes we planted have yet to make an appearance.  Bloody things.



My camellia's have flowered, although they are a bit feeble.  The one at my lovely Mum's house is about 8 feet tall and laden with huge flowers.  Mine do not look well by comparison.



Please admire the delightful pipework on the wall behind it.  All adds to the charm and ambience.  We've got shitloads of charm round here. 










*By which I mean "slightly gross and freaky" of course.

**Mr WithaY is spring-cleaning his study as I type.  That time of year again already. 

***I dug a hole in three different spots, each time hitting fucking hardcore or paving slabs about 4 inches down.  Lord knows what the previous occupants had buried under there.  Some kind of Doomsday bunker/fallout shelter possibly. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know when you pick a scab/scar and your mouth waters up? Well mine has just watered up when reading your description of your 'thing'!

Not being green fingered: I had images of two people with woolly hats, backpacks and sat on camping chairs with a flask of tea waiting to hit some weeds back into the soil ;)

@eloh said...

Puppies, flowers, and alien pellets.... you know they will have to come back and put another homing device on you.

livesbythewoods said...

cynicalscribble, I've never had the mouth-watering thingy happen to me, you weird freak! And I might get some militant ramblers to suppress weeds, I prefer that idea to using a hoe. Or even a ho.

Eloh, I am sleeping with the lights on from now on. Just in case.