I’m tired and I ache all over, especially my back, shoulders and neck 
I spent about six hours working in the greenhouse and garden today and my poor (almost-fifty year old) body has been grumbling and groaning since I came indoors at 6.30pm.
It’s my own fault – I should know better than to drag a whopping great big pallet across the grass when I know such a foolish action could set off my sciatica. Why did I need the pallet? Well, I have mealy bugs on my Christmas and Easter cacti and I bought some Ultimate Bug Killer spray yesterday so I could DEAL with them – nasty little blighters! It comes in a bright yellow spray bottle and the precautions are fairly stringent. So I had to line the cacti up on the wooden pallet and wait until early evening when the wildlife was trundling off home before I could blast the mealybugs lurking in the nooks and crannies of the plants with the death-dealing liquid.
I’ve also sowed seeds of basil and parsley to keep in pots in the greenhouse for winter herbs, taken lots of cuttings of geraniums (zonal pelargoniums) including one of my favourites, Frank Headley, with its silver-edged green leaves and single soft salmon pink blooms, potted up all the hyacinth bulbs that flowered last year as well as three prepared white ones (which have been relegated to a cupboard in the shed), untangled/pruned/tied in and tamed two jasmine polyanthum that were attempting to take over the far end of the greenhouse, lopped off and ditched huge chunks of some of the rather tatty ‘motherplant’ zonal pelargoniums, and evicted about a dozen caterpillars in shades of green, khaki, brown and silver which were chewing holes in said pelargoniums.
Every time I walk past our two pear trees, one a Conference and one a Concorde (but don’t ask me which is which) there is a great kerfuffle as up to a dozen starlings take wing in fright. The bl**dy birds are eating the pears off the branches … well, the ones they can reach anyway, and leaving just the stalk and empty skin. Even worse, they are shi**ing all over the pears below the ones they are eating … URGH!!! I hurl colourful invectives at them, I stamp, I wave my arms and even run around the trees but they come back as soon as I go away. I know there are enough pears to go round, I know they can only eat the pears that they can reach by sitting on a branches, I know that the pears aren’t even properly ripe yet, but the sight of the birds in the trees makes me really cross.
Our house could be called ‘Starling Towers’ because we have nests in three out of four corners of the roof and the resident flock of starlings is just that – resident. They don’t leave in the autumn and return in the spring, they are here all year round. Mind you, they are glorious to watch when they do their ’swooping-as-one’ performance over the beach in the evening, silhouetted against the pale blue, grey and pink evening sky.
The House Martins have been very active again today, feeding and flying, occasionally sitting on the telephone wires and twittering excitedly to each other and the time approaches for the big departure.
Now I think I shall hobble off to bed doing a very good ‘hunchback’ impression … goodnight all.
