flies – Page 4 – derrickjknight

Message In A Bottle?

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This morning I tidied up the Head Gardener’s Walk. It was becoming a little overgrown.

This was the result.

Apart from a brief spell of sunshine when I was carrying out this task, today was very dull and overcast. It was not the afternoon to go in search of a field of bluebells – especially as we didn’t find it.

We understood that it was part of Ballard Water Meadow and Woodland.

So dry has been our month of April, that the streams that cross the area are all but dried up.

Conservation has been in progress for some years. A footpath, logging, and cutting back of undergrowth beside the main ditch provide evidence of industry.

A handful of small black cattle sat around chewing the cud as I left Jackie sitting on a bench and went off on a bluebell hunt. The beasts contributed plentiful pats as their contribution to the ecology.

The cows quietly tolerated the flies crawling around their eyes.

Many dog walkers availed themselves of the pet-emptying facility.

I continued in search of the elusive bluebell field, and settled for the odd clump of the English variety – not the Spanish Armada.

I reached a man-made lake with its share of water fowl and reflections of nearby buildings.

Unfortunately there was a smattering of litter in the surrounding woodland,

and in the lake itself.

The Maltesers container lay at the edge. A couple of bottles stood up in the water. Was there a message in this?

On my return the cattle had risen to their feet and started foraging.

This evening we dined at The Crown Inn at Everton. I chose well-filled steak and kidney pudding with carrots and swede wrapped in a cabbage leaf, chips and gravy. Jackie chose duck with noodles, stir-fry vegetables and hoisin sauce. Desserts were respectively bread and butter pudding with pomegranate seeds floating in creme Anglaise, and sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream. Jackie drank draught Becks, and I began with a glass of Brown Brothers Everton Red, which was accurately described as having the flavours of the hedgerow. My second glass was the well-tried Mendoza Argentinian Malbec.

The Birds And The Bees

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I spent some time in the garden today observing avian activity.

Although some wood pigeons waited hopefully in the beech and in the weeping birch,

where one pair thought about it,

a loving pair petted each other in the as yet naked beech.

Flies were attracted to the hellebores;

two of them joined a dove threesome on the decking.

Bees plundered the pulmonaria,

and another insect I cannot name sunk its lengthy proboscis into a daffodil.

A cheerful robin trilled encouragement high up in the birch.

This evening we dined at Lal Quilla in Lymington. Before the meal we made a brief list to the quayside where

a young man manoeuvred a motor boat and dinghy around

the moored yachts, avoiding disturbing

reflections on the water.

Mallards mingled with black headed gulls,

both of which engaged in preening activities.

My choice of meal was Goan lamb with special fried rice. Jackie chose chicken biriani, and we shared onion bahjis. We both drank Kingfisher.

Today’s title was inspired by a recent comment from Mary Tang.

Country Girl

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This morning I received a request from Judith Munns to post a daily wildlife picture on Facebook.

I spent some time making a few selections and began with this one from https://derrickjknight.com/2015/04/14/close-encounters-of-the-asinine-kind/

This afternoon Country Girl was delivered.

At Fiveways she has replaced the chimney pot,

removed by Jackie and Ian to a corner of the Dead End Path.

Jackie found several versions on this young lady on the Internet, but none with such an pleasingly elegant face.

On Fiveways she has several viewpoints.

Jackie has filled her planter already.

Later, after Becky and Ian had returned home, our new garden chairs were delivered. Naturally they had to be introduced to Peroni and bordeaux. This magnificent, reasonably priced, furniture is made locally by Handmade From The Heart at hmftheart145@gmail.com

Behind Jackie is the Dead End Path. From there I once more photographed our Country Girl. The camera picked up that the poor young lady was covered in flies.

Jackie and Becky have been experimenting, rather successfully, with making Cornish pasties. Fortunately this meant that there was enough surplus pastry and contents for Jackie to produce a beef and vegetable pie for our dinner this evening. Despite there being carrots in the pastie mix we had more, with cauliflower, green beans, and new potatoes, served with the pie. Orange trifle was to follow. We continued with the drinks we had consumed earlier.

More Printing

This morning I filled two more cuttings bags, and this afternoon we took them to the dump. This time, the Head Gardener only liberated a trio of terra cotta containers from a wine rack.

I spent much of the day printing and exchanging e-mails with Paul about the exhibition. The final batch of 50 completed my tally of 250 flyers.

Paul Clarke has put as much meticulous effort and skill into the hanging and display of the exhibition at The First Gallery as he did with the design of the flyers. He has made quite specific size suggestions for prints with which to adorn the walls, ranging from A2 to A6. As I Can only go to A3+ on my printer, I will need to investigate the cost of commercial printing for the one A2.

Here are some of the offerings I have sent:

This was the view through the red Japanese maple on 21st April 2014.

I made a very small crop of this gladiolus in order to position the burrowing fly;

on 14th September 2014, just a week before that one, another alighted on a colchicum.

Two days later this bee settled on an eryngium planum;

another made for this libertia on 18th May last year.

On 25th February 2015 snowdrops were in abundance.

This Red Admiral butterfly cast an intriguing shadow on 21st November 2013.

Finally, here is a tulip from 14th April 2015.

For this evening’s dinner Jackie produced perfectly baked ham, moist ratatouille, creamy mashed potato, and crisp brussels sprouts; followed by sticky toffee and ginger pudding and custard. I drank Louis Virion Costiers de Nimes 2014, and the Cook drank lemon squash.

Before And After: The Oval Path And Elizabeth’s Bed

It was June 2014 by the time we began to tackle the southern end of the garden between what is now the rose garden and the back drive. We began with the Oval Path and made a start on Elizabeth’s bed.

This is what confronted us on 5th June. We thought there must be a path in there somewhere. We did not know then that these were two parts of an oval around a bed, beyond which the strip along the fence was a jungle, overlooked by the rose Altissimo which managed to soar above it.

Later in the day, all was becoming clearer.

This broad view from the next day shows how this corner of the garden fitted together. The rose garden hadn’t even been thought of then. The Oval Path is to the right.

The bamboo seen in the third picture above sent roots right under the gravelled path. I had fun digging them out.

By 10th Jackie was sieving soil from the gravel that we had weeded.

The Oval Bed was better established by 11th June 2015, and Elizabeth’s bed, named because she cleared much of it, was far more inviting.

Altissimo could now be reached.

By 25th September 2015, Elizabeth’s bed had been fully planted up ready for next year. It is now difficult to imagine how obscured that fence was.

Today was another wet, but very warm day. Between steady bouts of rain, Jackie continue to cram as many plants into the front garden as she could. I’m pretty sure I give the entries into the garden album, on which I continued to work today, more breathing space.

We dined this evening on juicy belly of pork. mashed potato and swede, crisp cabbage and tricolour carrots (orange, red, and white); followed by apple crumble and custard. I finished the beaujolais. Jackie had drunk her Hoegaarden whilst cooking, but she didn’t mind.

As I write this post I flip flies from my face and hands. Surely they should all be dead by now.

Off The Leash

The morning was spent in Lymington Hospital, to and from which Jackie drove me. First off was a physiotherapy appointment for my hand. This is apparently doing well. I need not see the therapist again, but will continue finger straightening exercises and massage myself for another six weeks. We then had a wait for an orthopedic appointment to discuss the knee x-ray results. I have no cartilage either behind the kneecap or on the left side, but there is some left on the right. The pain relief is working, and with careful management of that, I am encouraged to walk on the flat. On our return, the wind having desisted, we toured the garden replacing hanging baskets which, Jackie having taken them down before the gales, suffered minimal damage.

On the peach roses A fly was supervising its infant on its first outing into the world. Can you see the baby?

Another attractive variety of allium has flourished.

After lunch, Jackie drove me to the pharmacy at Milford on Sea to collect co-codomol which had been omitted from the medication collected yesterday. The fact that twice the normal amount of tablets had been left for me was rather ironic, since I had agreed with the physiotherapist that I would ween myself off them and turn to paracetamol. I now have a telephone appointment to discuss this with G.P. Dr. Moody-Jones. On the strength of all this, Jackie left me at the green at Milford and I walked up Park Lane, joining the cliff top path at The Beach House, turning into West Road and home through Shorefield. OK, it was a little more than the recommended half an hour, and not totally flat, but I managed it with just a few aching muscles that had not really been put to use for six months.

I had a long talk with a gentleman tending his roses in his small plot opposite the bus shelter in Milford.

The wind coming off The Solent was still strong

enough for a windsurfer and a few small yachts to relish its power, and,

passing an empty bench, a woman, already being propelled along by the gusts, strained to contain one of her dogs.

A new set of warning signs has been posted along the cliff top since I was last here.

Attracted by honeysuckle in the hedgerow leading to West Road, I thus avoided missing

the rather splendid caterpillar lurking in the shadows. I rather like its red warning lights. Can you see it in hiding?

I definitely felt that Cheryl, the physiotherapist, had let me off the leash.

This evening we dined on smoked haddock fish cakes with cheese centres and topping; parsley sauce from our own crop; piquant cauliflower cheese; firm young peas and creamy mashed potato; followed by Lymington-grown tangy strawberries and vanilla ice-cream.

Pretty as was the presentation of the meal,

it tastes better off the plate.

Boiling Hankies

Once again this morning we welcomed the company of an Openreach engineer. This is because we continue to have access problems with BT Infinity. In fairness to the service provider, they did follow up the previous visit with a phone call, and arranged this one.
He was mystified as to what was wrong, but replaced the socket provided by his predecessor, and disconnected extension lines we don’t use that reached most rooms in the house.
We were on line when he left, so I was able to send Paul some of the photographs I had taken at The First gallery. These will illustrate a newspaper article.
A couple of Environment Agency staff members were surveying a field at the bottom of Downton Lane when I took my Hordle Cliff walk. A card in a car parked alongside that I took to be theirs indicated that this task was something to do with water. Flies clustered on the vehicle provided evidence of the mildness of the day.
I still use cotton handkerchiefs. As I dropped one, with a thud, into the laundry basket this morning, I thought of certain saucepans, which Jackie and I had discussed recently. In order to clean them, in the 1940s, before she had any sort of washing machine, Mum had boiled up hankies in a large saucepan. In our early days Jackie, and her mother before her, had done the same thing, as had I during brief periods of living alone. Washing machines at that time were not as versatile as those of today. They probably only had one programme, with the result that, as Jackie observed, if you put the handkerchiefs in with other white items you were likely to find gobbets of snot that hadn’t been there before clinging to your clean white shirts.
A liberal sprinkling of washing powder was added to the pan of water, into which you stuffed the unsavoury items, and brought them to the boil. Keeping them bubbling and simmering until nicely cooked, it was best to give them an occasional stir with a wooden spoon, in order to dislodge the more stubborn mucus. This released a cloud of steam emitting the aroma of the detergent, which I can still smell as I write. It was best, if you could afford it, to reserve that particular pan for this process, and not be tempted to use it for porridge, otherwise coagulated residue mixed with milky oats might be imperceptible and prove rather unpleasant. Especially as you probably wouldn’t realise it.
For the fireworks party of 1st November Jackie made a delicious chilli con carne (recipe). Fortunately for us there was plenty left over with which to stock up the freezer. We dined on some of this, with superb savoury rice, this evening. Sticky toffee pudding and custard was to follow. Jackie drank Stella, and I finished the Marques de Carano.