Bee on the White Borage.  Photo by G.  7 April 2020.

Just look at this beautiful bumble bee, gorging gloriously on the white blooming borage.  Awesome!  Love borage!  Love bees!  Over-the-moon swoony for bees, borage, blossoms!

We went up nice and early.  Packed a picnic so we could sustain ourselves for a leisurely session.  The great Malink worked at a variety of jobs.  I floated, weeded, puttered, got the potting area set up to finish potting up the little garden shop-bought zucchini, and also to start more seeds.  Sorted storage of pots to identify a good candidate for digging out the gooseberry from the raspberries and install into the new raised gooseberry palace.  

He managed to get himself totally vexed with the garden netting for the gooseberries – at which point we decided it was time to stop for lunch: egg salad sandwiches with garden-grown flat leafed parsley, and bowls of new jersey potato salad with minced onion, red pepper and radish.  Topped with crunchy little cornichons. Yum! 

We were in no hurry to rush back to work – it was a nice break.   We watched butterflies frolic together in the air – fighting or making love?  Who can tell!  A handsome comma butterfly took a liking to the new water dish, and s/he fought off all other butterflies from the area – chasing off yellow and white cabbage butterfly, then returning back to the water dish.  Mine, mine!  All mine!  A red shiny ladybird marched on patrol for aphids on the damask rose.

A handsome jay – large bodied bird, dusty brown, with flashes of blue on the wing – flew in to perch on the neighbouring apple tree.  Hard to believe that crows, magpie and jays are all related.  Or that these dun and dusty jays are cousins to the magnificent north American blue jay.   (Yesterday we spotted a slinking sneaky fox, sliding by across the bottom patch – s/he looked in fine form except for a very reedy, mange-infested tail.  No fox visits today.)

We hung the beaded Navajo arrows onto the front of the shed.  Can you believe it?!?!  I found those feathered, beaded arrows, complete with Navajo identity card, buffalo molars and pink and quartz crystal… in the garbage on Fitzroy Square!  (Some neighbourhoods have snazzier rubbish than others.) 

Navajo blessing arrows, with beading, buffalo tooth and quartz crystal.

The shed is coming on apace. A new corner return wooden shelf was installed this afternoon – to return under the mirror and back panel window.   Extra capacity for trays of seeds.

What a beautiful shed!  And just look at all that positive hoarding coming into action!  The toy bin on casters from the north London primary campus has a glass table top held aloft by four inner 2×4 beams.  Mirrors and glass shelves rescued from rubbish on the road.  And incidentally, the glass table top was also reclaimed curbside.

And it’s not just about other people’s garbage, that’s already on its way to landfill.  There’s your own life’s rubbish to consider too.  Like old steel cooking pots whose handles have rotted off act as water basins for potted-up tomatoes on the large lower shelf at the front window.   Cracked ceramic stilton pots come in handy to hold plant markers.  And so on.  So lesson is: never throw anything out!  Its day will come: I promise!

Can you see me?

I seeded another small terracotta planter with Prinz R Radish.  Soaked and then planted a mix of nasturtium seeds at the upper terrace level (by the back rose and also at the front , in front of the blueberry pot at the boundary to the strawberry bed).  Potted up the last of the little starter plants…  Prepared but did not complete the gooseberry transplant out of the raspberry patch.  Prepared but did not complete another direct sowing of more broad bean.  Prepared but did not complete a wildflower patch on H’s side to the back of the pond area.

It was a great day.  We knocked off around 3.30 and got home by 4.  There’s more to do, more seed trays to start, more seeds to dig directly into the soil, but that’s for another day’s toil.

A demain!

The ghoul count today…  Maybe I’m writing it out to simply believe it.  Not sure, but here it goes: Numbers starting to plateau in New York, but total deaths over 5,489+ – almost the equivalent of the whole of the deaths in the UK.  Ish.  (Dialled into Cuomo hour on CNN – have a big crush on that dude!  Cuomo for President!  Couldn’t happen soon enough).

Back here, today the UK death is 6,159+.  There are 18,500+ people with coronavirus are in hospital in the UK.  PM Boris Johnson remains in intensive care at St Thomas’ Hospital, central London, on oxygen.  Everyone on the news is at pains to state he’s not on a breathing ventilator.

In Nice, France the beaches have been closed and a curfew imposed.  Coming soon to Paris and Nice – and likely all of France: mandatory face-masks.   France has not yet peaked.

Switzerland’s death toll is 641, with 2,000+ cases.  Sweden reports over 100 deaths in a day – and they don’t have any social distancing measures.  Iran’s death count…  Russia reports 1,000 new cases in a day.  Growing numbers of cases daily in Mexico.  Panama has 2,100 cases (death rate not known).  Columbia quarantine extended to end of April.  Malaysia reports cases.

Writing this doesn’t actually help make it any more real.  Surreal.  Strange days indeed.