The rain held off this morning so we were able to get to the kitchen garden at the Shack to do some essential work. I cleared out the broad beans - I've got a bag full of beans to pod and turn into old bean and garlic purée. A couple of the garlic were innocent bystanders in last week's digging event, and need to be used, so it will be all home grown bar the oil. I also planted yet another butternut squash, as one potato did not come up - presumably got eaten by mice. I also started to set up the bean frame for borlotti beans and sowed 8 stations. Not the easiest bean poles to get into place - the bamboos themselves have been "harvested" from clients who have bamboo growing at theirs - there is an art to drying bamboo, particularly the thick ones, and we haven't yet mastered it. Then there is the soil - clay with builders' rubble from over the past 200 years - not easy to bang poles into, not easy to sow into and full of cracks, fissures, tile and brick fragments and the odd fossilised oyster. Hopefully the beans will like it though.
Donald tried to help, but the siren call of cuddles with John was too much for him - it's a lurve thing!
Clause, on the other hand, is in disgrace. After John had done more mowing, and I had put him down twice, once after cuddles sitting on a chair, once with him riding around on my back while I cut down beanstalks, like some maharajah on an elephant, he went off in a huff. The next thing I know, he has pounced on something and is playing with it. I went to see what he had found and had to shoo him off another large green lizard. He was distracted by the still thrashing and separate tail for long enough for me to photograph the main bit of lizard, find a trowel, scoop the poor thing up and fling it into the scrub. Lizards are not good cat food. I suspect that he was guilty of the other one too. He had a long lecture on not eating endangered or rare species, and certainly not eating a (potentially) breeding pair. He ignored me.
Finally, before going home for a well earned and late lunch, we went to check out another client's garden. There I got mesmerised by the most beautiful demoiselle I've ever seen - cobalt blue for most of its body length with a blob of bright cerulean blue at the end of its tail. This is the best photo I managed and doesn't do it justice.
Yoga restarts tomorrow, in the open air (!), so the blog will be late or non-existent, depending on how well I manage to recover from trying to force my body into positions it is not lithe and slim enough to achieve.
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