Night of the sunflowers

Summer's gone...days spent with the grass and sun....

Apart from the Velvet Queen which is still battling away despite constant attacks from the ravenous goldfinches, the sunflowers are all dead now. Biggy Smalls...dead. Tupac....dead....maybe I shouldn't have named them after deceased rappers. Junior & Senior and the Twins gone too and now all just feeding the birds.

Who won the competition then? Who knows? Or even cares? Despite our glorious early burst, it wasn't me. We didn't pass 2metres. Moon appears to be the winner based on published evidence, but I know with mine own eyes that Ak's was bigger than that until it perished in the winds last week.

Time we got a new comp underway. Any one? I'll also need something else to write about on here through those winter months!

We're caught in a trap. I can't walk out, because my leg is all mangled like

A few weeks ago I had an unpleasant experience with a mouse. Well, this morning I was awoken by distressed calls from CP. This time her leg had been caught in a trap and so I was faced with a difficult choice.

Ha, of course not. No, CP was distressed because she had gone downstairs to find another mouse caught in a snap trap, but again not dead. Rubbish! We must have the least humane mouse traps ever! But as a now hardened killer, I began the process of mentally preparing for the next stage (the concrete flags I used last time had gone, so it was shaping up to be a case of Willis, with the spade, in the back garden). On went the gardening gloves and I was ready to go.

Last time the unfortunate occupant was clearly on the way out, but this new one was still scrabbling about trying to escape. Maybe this one could just hobble free? I took it a couple of streets away, passing a few people on the way ("Morning!") and put the trap down next to a wheelie bin. Should I kill it? See what it does when I let it go and decide from there. No bits of masonry lying about this time so I would need to strangle it. I opened the trap and before I could even get it in a headlock, it did a runner behind the bin.

It's a pity 'That's Life' isn't on anymore

Because my passionfruit's got plums!




(And those are not my elegant fingernails).

Harvest Moon: It's a wonderful life

Moon might have been better off using that title, but as far as I'm aware she's not growing her own crops. So there.

When I first moved to London I got back into my Gamecube and came very close to buying the game Harvest Moon. I was deeply attracted to the idea of coming home from work, after battling past the rest of the rush hour drones, and then spending the evening tending a computer-generated farm. In the game you grow crops to then sell at market, manage a herd of cattle, grow an orchard... whatever farming desire takes your fancy really. You can even court a local village girl, in the hope that your offspring will grow up to continue your farming legacy. What better to drown out the usual Brixton evening chorus of sirens and gunfire than immersing myself in a pretty, make-believe rural community?

Well....I decided that maybe, just maybe, real life might be ok after all. I may not have room to keep a herd of cows (and after seeing one being sick in Scotland I don't think that I would want to) but runner beans, tomatoes, and blueberries seemed a decent starting point.

And now we're reaping the rewards. We've had loads of beans (pick them when young - they're not good when they get big) and now we're getting tomatoes. Hopefully the blueberry will actually flower or something next year.