BRIGGS & STRATTON.. NOW HERE'S A TALE OF AN AMAZING MACHINE BUILT BY THIS GREAT COMPANY.

In the summer of 2003 she purchased a lawn mower, the chassis was by Mountfields and the engine by Briggs & Stratton. 

What with being ill and the rubbish that was going on in her life at that time, at the end of the summer of 2006 it was put away under a tarpaulin into Big Shed and, I regret to say, forgotten about.

Until this past month when she got into Big Shed and emptied it in order to drag out the rotten floor and renovated it with pallets for supports and thick slabs of marine plyboard for flooring.

And there, hidden away under a sun lounger and the tarp, was the lawn mower.

Not looking its' best, I must say. The paint's flaking in places, there are areas where it's a bit rusty, well, it looked very much like we would if we had gone through the life this poor machine has led for the past twelve years!

She dragged it out and put it in front of the Shack under a huge waterproof bag.

Yesterday, she spoke with Stuart, he is our opposite plot neighbor and asked him if he knew of a local company who would service it.

No, he didn't know of anyone but said that he would look at it for her. 

He took the top of the oil tank and looked at the dipstick, there was a minute amount of oil in the tank, then he looked at the spark plug and gave that a good rub on his jeans, he took the top of the fuel tank and asked her for paper towel.

Luckily, the Shack runs as a fully equipped kitchen and she had two rolls of it, he pulled some off, twisted it and put it into the tank to take up as much petrol as he could.

Having poured in a good amount of engine oil, a litre or so of fresh petrol and replaced the spark plug, he asked her to hold the cut-out handle whilst he primed the engine and pulled the cord.

It coughed twice, belched blue smoke and started.

To be truthful neither Stuart nor she could believe what they were hearing.. but it was true.. it was the noise of a Briggs & Stratton engine purring away happily.. having not turned over for twelve years.

She is going to send them an email tomorrow to congratulate them on this extraordinary machine. Yes, she's a bit rusty and her flakey paint work isn't as pretty and shiny as when she was new but everything works and having adjusted the height, off she trundled cutting the grass as she went.

Wasn't that a happy thing! Especially as the weather is dry and she is absolutely on target for getting all the plots ready for winter.

She's trundled up and down the track with many, many barrow loads of both manure and wood chippings, so there is now a huge amount of well rotted manure on almost all of the beds, the tall raised beds will be topped up with a mix of both manure and wood chippings, which is also what she will put onto the strawberry beds. 

She cut all the leaves down to a height of about 2" just after they produced the last flush of fruit in early August.

The garlic, onions, shallots will go in this week as well as flowering bulbs, she'll do a light prune on all the roses and cut back the vines who have raced each other up into cherry and plum trees.. silly grapes!

When she's finished planting and covering the beds, all she'll need to do is.. mow the grass.

Isn't that a happy tale.. and we had a very happy day today with a bbq. That will be in another post.

It's now bed time, she's having breakfast with Pat at Wetherspoons in Fulham at 10.30am tomorrow so chirps to you all.

GeeGee Parrot.

September 30th, 2018.

WELL! THAT STORMY WEATHER CERTAINLY GAVE OUR TOWN A GOOD 'SCRUB'.

Today has dawned bright, clear and dry! And we are off to the plots to work, she'll work whilst I sit in  what looks to be glorious sunlight.

The courgette and cucumber beds have to be turned over and manure and wood chippings piled up on top to get them ready for winter. She just cuts the bean and pea plants down and puts on manure and chippings, their roots will break down and, in doing so add, nitrogen to the soil.

Two of the Bokaski bins, which are already out there, are now ready to be emptied, she has already dug the trench into which the fermented food waste will go and in a months time, all there will be is soil, it's a great system and she wishes that more people did it, food waste that goes to landfill just encourages rats. When, if treated properly, it enriches the soil from which the plants grew.

It makes her cross when estate agents are idiots! Her much beloved Godfather was the head of the College of Estate Management and in those days, estate agents were trained in the profession of taking care of properties and land, nowadays, well, it isn't 'quite' the same!

A charming family who were going to move into one of the flats in our house have called it a day and asked for their deposit to be returned.. the estate agents kept 'faffing' about and wanting more details..  you would have thought they would have asked all the relevant questions before taking the first three months rent, wouldn't you! But apparently not.

Ahhh.. these companies are enough to drive you potty! It's a good thing we have somewhere to escape to and do sensible stuff in sunlight, isn't it?

So off we go..

GeeGee Parrot.
September 25th, 2018.

SPLISH SPLOSH, OUR STREETS ARE AWASH!

Rain! Vast amounts of huge buckets of lubbly-jubbly rain are falling.

Now, you would think that as she had a bbq planned for today that she would be as mad as a wet hen but no.

Why not? I hear you say to yourselves, well, she looked at the weather forecast earlier this week and notified all the guests that it was being postponed until next Summer.

The rain started to spit and pitter-patter on Friday in the early afternoon and the pavements got a bit of a lick and a promise of lots more to come.

And early on morning Saturday in it came but after we had eaten our eggs and fruit, she said "I've got to go out GeeGee, I've library books to exchange and those empty buckets, plus one full of IshPol, to collect from Bartek in Streatham".

So, she thought, quite sensibly, I cannot go out wearing sandals and went looking in her shoe cupboard for her largest pair of ankle boots.

And prayed and they were answered. Her left little toe went happily into a sock and boot without a squeak or a twinge and she slipped an extra sole into her right boot and trod down hard on it.. NO pain. Yippee. Little toe mended and verruca on its' way out.

She blew me a kiss, turned on the radio, loaded up WW with library books, put on a jacket with a hood, picked up her keys and left for the Kings Road.

It was very quiet.. there was almost no one in sight, only a few brave souls with an urgent need to be out and about were on the streets, the ground in St.Luke's gardens were covered in twigs and leaves. The wind was certainly a'blowing, that was for sure and the rain was absolutely tipping down. 

Any thoughts of going out to the allotments were dismissed immediately but she smiled and was thankful for the rain, for although the grass is green again, the ground is still rock hard and October is just around the corner, this is the month that she plants bulbs of all sorts, flowers, broad beans, garlic, onions.

There is a lot to do before Autumn really sets in and if you want good things to eat next year, you start off now.

The RHS Autumn Show will be held at Vincent Square in London on the 2nd and 3rd of October,
she goes every year to buy good quality vegetable seeds and to see Selina, do you remember her, from Marylebone Farmer's Market?

She makes those Malaysian dumplings and will be in the Great Hall, two words to describe them are slurpicious and scrummydumptious. Yes, they're really that good!

Now it's Sunday morning and it is a very wet day indeed, but she is thinking of her soil going glug glug glug and is very happy and those autumn raspberries will be very happy indeed. 

Mr. & Mrs. Worm will be ecstatic, this summer has been bad for worms and thousands of animals of all breeds have died through lack of water.

Yes, she could get up and start working on the sitting room but no, she isn't going to. She did our bedroom one day this week, it is now a calm, clean and immaculately tidy room.

Tomorrow she's having breakfast with Pat at Wetherspoons at Fulham Broadway, they have much to talk about and are meeting at 10.30am.

So the sorting out, cleaning and tidying of the poor sitting room will start on Wednesday. Tuesday she will go out to the allotments to see how they fared with the rain and the wind and to cut Brian's grass.

He is film set designer.. an Oscar winner no less and is very busy, so she's offered to cut his grass for him. It means that it won't go to seed and they won't blow all over her plots.. method in her generosity! 

There's food in chilly white larger and vegetable baskets, she's books to read, me to cuddle, sees no point in going out there and I've got a huge chunk of ripe SpinyApple to munch.

PipPip.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 23rd, 2018.  

EASYLIFE GROUP (UK) STILL HAVEN'T BOTHERED TO CONTACT HER NOR HAVE THEY DELIVERED THE ORDER..

If ParcelForce, Royal Mail, UPS, Fedex, DPD and Uber can all find our house.. why can't that useless delivery company Yodel?

Well, I don't have the answer to that but I guess it is because they are as bad as the catalogue company, EasyLife Group, who employ them.

They take your money, oh yes, they're quick to do that but packing and sending out your order and getting it delivered to the correct address? 

Well, they're not very good at that, which might explain why, if you telephone their customer service line on the dot of 9am, you will be told that you are number 25 or higher in the queue waiting to speak to an advisor!

And no, they haven't refunded her money.

So yes, she is going to complain about them verbally, on-line and to the Citizens Advice Bureau because it isn't legal to take money but fail to deliver goods.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 22nd, 2018.

STAN SMITH ISN'T A SHOE..

Living in London and being a member of the British Library, the English Speaking Union, the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum means that she has lots of things to do when the weather is dire or when they have something fun / interesting to watch or listen to.

On Wednesday off she went to the V&A to listen to a talk being given by Stan Smith.

No, she isn't dotty because he isn't just a name that Addidas puts on a white leather shoe, for those of a certain age, he is the young American who won the 1972 Wimbledon singles title and lots of other titles as well.

He's the man who married the first woman to wear a white sweater with the orange P, the P stands for Princeton. Margory Gengler was a phenomenal tennis player who swapped tennis for marrying Stan and having their four children.

When she saw the talk advertised in the Autumn programme of the V&A, memories flooded into her mind, memories of Andalucia in the '70s.

I have written before about her friend, his name was Lee Setomer. Lee had been a civil engineer who settled in the very early '50s in southern Spain buying a vast acreage of land to the back of Torremolinos.

His hospitality was legendary and there were always people staying and coming and going. 

And that is where she met this couple, they were engaged to be married, Margy gave her parents' address in Locust Valley but time moves on and she never did call or write to get in contact with her. 

And forty five years later.. they were going to be here in London at the V&A and he was going to talk about 'How people think I'm a shoe'.

She was early and first in line, behind her came a couple who introduced themselves, they were brother and sister, her name was Charlotte and his was John Beddington,.

When she asked them if they knew the Smiths, he smiled and said he had played tennis with Stan two weeks ago and when he asked her if she knew the Smiths she laughed and said "this will be the first time I've seen them in 45 years" and told them about meeting them all those years ago.

They were let into the museum and guided to the lecture hall, suddenly Margy was there and greeted the couple with whom she was walking and John said "And here is someone whom you haven't seen for a very long time.." 

And my mama shook her hand and said "Andalucia, the summer of 1973, Louise, your mother and you were staying with a friend of mine".. and Margy smiled and said "Yes, indeed we were, with Lee Setomer".

The lecture hall was packed.. full to the brim.. of all different ages, to listen to a man talk of his life. A man who has led a 'good' life. A man who has never disgraced his family.

She left the lecture hall and smiled as she walked home. How very pleasant to hear a talk of good and happy things that people have done with their families and for other people, for there are tennis players whose lives are train wrecks and whose behavior on and off the court leaves a great deal to be desired. 

So, take our word for it.. Stan Smith ain't just a shoe.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 21st, 2018. 

THE EASYLIFEGROUP CATALOGUE.. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME & MONEY.

Sometimes you should realise that some deals are too good to true and sadly, after paying quite a bit of money on the 5th September to the EasyLifeGroup catalogue for four items to be delivered, she realises this is true.

After waiting for over a week, she had to call them and ask "Where is my order?" A customer service representative told her that Yodel had been unable to deliver the items as the address didn't exist.. she told them in a rather sarcastic tome of voice that as DPD, ParcelForce, the Royal Mail and Uber all find this house with no problem whatsoever on a regular basis she found that really hard to believe or understand.

The EasyLifeGroup customer service woman said that the order would be delivered on Monday, 17th of September. So she put a large note on the door but guess what? Despite the large note, despite her being in ALL day and Yodel having her mobile number they failed, yet again, in the simple task of delivering this order.

And despite multiple calls and emails to the EasyLife Group customer service department on Tuesday, 18th September no one had the courtesy to respond explaining why the goods did not arrive on Monday.

So having checked to see if there were any emails from this company this morning, she gave up.. she telephoned their customer service department, there is absolutely no point in emailing them as they never respond, and waited in line on the telehone for eleven minutes and told a man that she wanted a full refund.

He said it would take at least two weeks for this to be activated.. when she asked why it would take so long, his response was it has to be sanctioned and then to go through our banking system.

You know what?

She has had it with these online virtual 'shops', their delivery company are usually rubbish, they don't deliver on time which is a waste of time and so she's going to go to WILCO - bless their hearts - on Fulham Broadway, she will look at their catalogue, place an order and get the order delivered to the shop.

Job done.. yes, she may pay pay a fraction more BUT.. she won't have to wait for over two weeks and still not have the goods for which she paid .. she'll get the goods within two days with no delivery fee.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 20th, 2018.

EVEN GREENER.. WHISTL & HERMES.. THREE COMPANIES THAT ARE A NIGHTMARE TO DEAL WITH..

Regular readers of my blog will know that she works a couple of allotments on which she grows most of what we eat in the way of fruit and vegetables. She is constantly adding things to improve and replenish the soil by way of compost, horse manure and wood chippings and recently, she has added / introduced Bokashi bins to the set-up as well.

Bokashi works on all food waste by way of fermentation and it is speedy! So she contacted a company called Even Greener who supply Bokashi bins and the fermented bran which does the fermenting process.

The two pairs of bins arrived but they were incomplete. Each pair of bins is supposed to have an two inner trays, two taps, two lids, a bag of bran, a scoop and a padle with which to flatten down the food waste. She was missing a lot of these items and complained to their customer service.

They said replacement items would be sent out. Then she got an email saying that the goods were delivered two Saturdays ago.. to which she replied "Not possible, there wasn't anyone here at the house. Send me my goods for which I have paid".

So they agreed to send another delivery, she received an email from Even Greener this morning saying delivery would be attempted today.. so she took a book, a cushion, a mug of coffee and went upstairs to wait for the delivery. Then she was told at 15.00 that the delivery would be between 16.00 & 20.00 hours, so she stayed upstairs reading her book on the steps until 20.30.

Havin received no delivery, she contacted Whistl on their Chat line and was told that they had subcontracted the delivery out and that the item had been delivered.. by an Hermes courier.. oh groan.. for they are renowned for being the worlds worst possible courier company and there on the Hermes website it said.. 'delivered to recption at 18.26'.

What a load of crap.. we don't live in an office block or a hotel or a block of flats.. the driver has either ditched the package or delivered it to a wrong address.. go and have a look at what customers write on Facebook about Hermes as a delivery company, I promise you it will make your hair turn white instantly.. forget about over night!

So she took photographic evidence of her 'Chats' with Whistl who suddenly said "we can only talk with the account holders and not the person to whom the delivery is going to.." so she has sent these photos back to customer service dept at Even Greener and wonders if they will repay her some money.. for she will never ever do business with them again and neither will she ever buy anything from a company who use Whistl or Hermes as their delivery agents.

ParcelForce.. how she lurves these guys and girls.. you pay your money and the goods arrive.. always on time and.. sometimes before the due time.. sigh.

But at least it was a good book.. it was the latest Quentin Jardine 'Bob Skinner' thriller. Pity he doesn't write faster..

GeeGee Parrot.
September 13th, 2018.

SPINYAPPLES AKA PINEAPPLES ARE BACK.

Oh.. the joy! She went and had her new tooth fitted yesterday.. it isn't great. Her old dentist Doctor George Taylor would be horrified by it and so too would Doctor Crease, who did all the dental work when she was a child, but these two lovely men who were brilliant dentists are now both dead and she cannot go around just with that ugly stump for ever, can she?

So put up with it, she must.

However, her day got considerably better when she walked up the North End Road and came across Geoff and Sally's fruit and veg stall selling the most gloriously ripe spinyapples - you know them as Pineapples - at two for £1.50!

So she spent the huge sum of £4.00 and left with three ruby grapefruits, a huge bowl of bananas and two spiny jobs.

On up the road she went to see and talk to David, he always has fresh beetroot, so she slid £2.00 into his hand and he slid a bowl of small beetroot and six lemons into her basket. For a total of £6.00 she now had lots of fresh fruit and beetroots.

Off up the road she continued. Only to see something sad on the side of the road by St.John's church. It was a beautifully marked pigeon lying on its' back with not a trace of blood, the body was still warm and soft. She put her bags down and picked the body up, walked into the churchyard and laid it down on its tummy underneath a tree.

And her thoughts flashed back of holding Dagga as he died in her hands.. Poor pigeon. We know that people don't like them but we do and having had Tumbling Doves when she was a child and Peter-the-Pigeon for seven years, she knows how funny and intelligent they are.

Oi vey..

Next into Holland & Barrett which is a health food store, only to discover that they didn't stock pure Vit C, their products had all manner of evil fillers and, God forbid, sweetners in them! No wonder people are obese and overweight. These wretched manuafacturers slip ghastly things into everything.. fillers made of corn and wheat. Both of which trip off hives and sore swollen joints within half an hour of her ingesting them.

Up onto the Broadway to catch a bus home, stopping off at our Lebanese friends house to have a coffee and show them the new tooth, they were polite but Myra rolled her eyes.. which said it all.

Next stop home.. I was waiting for her on the top of our bedroom door and she reached up to stroke me and said that we had a huge treat for tea. Tea? We never have tea, I thought, I wonder what she has brought home.

She took off her jacket and shoes and went into yumyum taking the big bag with her. There was the sound of chopping and then I smelt.. SPINYAPPLE! Oh, yum.. we haven't had a fresh and properly ripe ones for ages.. WHAT A TREAT!

Peeled and chopped into bite sized pieces she brought the big plate into the bedroom and we both slid up onto the bed. She had the wisdom to bring a towel and she draped it over her left shoulder whereupon up I hopped and we settled down to eat this, one of the most delicious of all fruits, it was truly delicious and tasty.. Scrummydumptious.. and Slurpicious in fact.

And so we say "Thank you Geoff for running such a great fruit and veg stall".

GeeGee Parrot.
September 13th, 2018.

FRIDGE PICKERS WEAR BIGGER KNICKERS..

Yes, they do! So it's a good thing that I don't know how to open chilly white larder, isn't it? For it always has got something tasty tucked away inside, she eats twice a day, we share our morning fast breaking meal.. you know this as breakfast.. it is always features boiled eggs, sometimes cheese if she has any of our own cucumbers or fruit.

But before this, when she first wakes up at some hideous hour, she makes a mug of LapySang tea and so that's what she starts her day with. She'll have been into the bathroom and put in her first lot of eye drops. They make her eyesight a bit 'dodgy' for a while so she has trained herself to wake up early in order to take this medication and then she goes back to bed with her tea and lies still whilst her eyes absorb the liquid.

I get up much later.. I don't like waking up early, we parrots like a full twelve hours sleep and get grumpy if we don't get it! I wake up to the sounds of activity in yumyum hq, water being boiled, the rattle of eggs boiling in a pan, chilly larder's door being opened, cutlery on china, all good sounds I'm sure that you'll agree.

She's trim to the point of being slim but not thin, she has too much muscle to be thin. You cannot work as physically hard as she does for the hours that she does if you are unfit or fat. Surprisingly for other people but not for her, she finds her body works best in hot weather, really hot weather!

This summer was perfect! She made new vegetable beds, cleared the terrace of invasive herbs and yes, it wasn't glamourous to have sweat dripping off her nose but she did a huge amount of work.

Then she comes home and we eat our supper together, I may, of course, been with her and she always makes sure that I have a full bowl of delicious things but she only eats apples and drinks water whilst she works at the plots, sometimes she'll make a pot of coffee if Joska or Corinne are there but usually she works all through the day without a break.

Supper is usually some meat or fish with whatever she has picked from the allotment. A courgette, a lettuce, chard, spinach, chicory and sometimes it is just vegetable, a huge bowl of steamed vegetables ith olive oil and herbs with garlic and maybe an apple with a sliver of cheese and a piece of dark chocolate as a HUGE treat.

Which brings me back to the title of this post.. she doesn't ever pick at what's in the fridge but she did find a breathtakingly wondrously good treat in the store cupboard last week!

You may well be aware of the way that some companies have changed the size of their packaging so that the contents are smaller .. with the prices remaining the same.. so about a year ago there was great excitement in a shop called PoundWorld, sadly no longer in operation, because it had the DARK chocolate Toblerones.. IN THE BIG BAR SIZE for £1.00!

She couldn't remember when she had last seen the dark edition of this chocolate on sale anywhere, so went 'Banco' and bought several bars and carried these treasures home. She ate one.. not all in one go I hasten to add.. and put the others most carefully away up high on a shelf in the store room well out of the reach of Mr. Mouse.. And forgot about them!

So you can imagine the surprise and pleasure she experienced when she went into the storeroom last Saturday to get a bottle of her favourite herb mix which she gets from The Spice Maker and to tidy and dust shelves and lookie lookie, she came across her stash of chocolate!

I don't know if Toblerone make the dark chocolate edition throughout the year or if it is a special edition but it's certainly a special treat for her. I am never given chocolate as it is poisonous for all animals and birds, she only eats one piece at a time.. very slowly and licks her lips.

And this is why she only wears a size 10 UK - USA 6 jeans!

GeeGee Parrot.
September 12th, 2018.

9.11.. DAGGA DIED 14 YEARS AGO.

9.11 is a dreadful date.. One that invokes anger, disbelief, horror and great sadness. It is also the date that Dagga-the-Parrot died.

So it was a quiet morning here in deepest Knightsbridge, she spoke with a couple of friends and then asked me if I wanted to go to the allotments. "Neh" I said and flew off speedily in the opposite direction.

So off she trudged to catch several buses and to wreck havoc on an unsuspecting clematis which had gobbled up a plum tree.

Poor little plum tree, an evil blackberry shoot which had shot up and grown through the tree had enabled the clematis to climb up and twist itself all through the upper branches. The growth was so thick that you couldn't see daylight if you stood at the base of the tree.

But strong hands, a good pair of secaturs and two hours later little tree was free and naughty clematis clippings were in the incinerator and she had pruned the tree at the same time.

She then sat at the table and looked at where she buried her most beloved bird.. wrapped in a shroud of red felt, his body had been placed into the grave that Stephen, a fellow plot holder and parrot lover who had Douglas, an Orange Winged Amazon, had dug for her.

There aren't any words to describe how you feel when a much beloved animal dies.. they had been together for sixteen years. Yes, your maths are correct, she has had African Greys aka CAG (Congolese African Grey) parrots in her life for over thirty years.

Today she has an appointment to have her new crown fitted.. she hopes for her dentists sake that it fits and looks better than the last one he made for her which was dreadful. So dreadful that the Senior Consultant at Guys Dental Hospital was visibly appalled at the shoddy work and she wrote a very strongly worded letter to her dentist, a copy of which she received.

It is a dull day here, the sky is the colour of dirty dishwater with not a trace of sunlight to be seen. She will come back home after the dental appointment as there is housework to be done and it looks as if the skies could open at any minute and pour buckets of rain down.

Tomorrows post will be more cheerful.. it will be about food and fridges.. nope, Beaky is shut, you'll have to read the blog tomorrow to know what I'm talking about. PipPip.

GeeGee parrot.
September 12th, 2018.

HER LEFT SMALL TOE IS BROKEN, SHE'S GOT A VERRUCA & THERE ARE APPLE TREES TO ORDER & PLANT..

Grrrr.. Ouch.. That hurt breaking her little toe. In fact both of her feet were mighty painful for three weeks but now the swelling has gone down from around her broken toe, life is not quite so gruesome.

You can't put a small toe into plaster, what they did was strap it to her next toe and recommend that she take Knitbone, a proven Homeopathic remedy which assists in the healing of broken bones.

And as if not to be left out, underneath her right foot, absolutely in the middle of the ball of her foot, is a verruca! The first one she has ever had and she is at a complete loss as to how she got it. 

But.. however she got it.. it's mighty sore. She has to treat it twice a day and wear a pad to prevent the bandage being rubbed.

This makes wearing either her gardening boots or shoes absolutely impossible, she's only able to wear sandals and with the departure of summer, the weather is becoming cooler and it's rained a few times..  so grrr is her favourite expression at the moment!  

Never mind, it hasn't stopped her from 'cracking on' with her intensive plans for changing plots number 35 and 37.

She cut back two of her oldest roses, they had grown too leggy and a couple of blackberries had grown up through them, so as soon as the fruit ripened, she cut the roses down by two thirds.

In the long bed in front of these roses she plans to plant a couple of Apple trees. One will certainly be a Russet but which variety of russet is what she has to decide.

There are two apple trees at the entrance to the plots, one is Temptation, which is a late variety and the other has two varieties on the same tree, one of which is a variety of russet, but which russet is it? 

She thinks it could be an Egremont Russet as the skin is entirely 'khaki' coloured and rough to touch, the flesh is dense, creamy coloured and it tastes divine but she has noticed that it sometimes has a disease called Bitter Pit.

However, she has come across a website called Garden Focus and this gives good, very detailed information upon the care and prevention of this and other apple tree diseases.

The other variety will be a James Grieve, one of which she already has, it's partially self-fertile, as is Egremont Russet and they'll be each others' pollination partners.

She will order these two bare rooted trees from a company called Victoriana Nursery Garden, they will be delivered in October / November time, so she had better shake a leg and get the ground ready to receive these two new babies. 

In the meantime, she's lots to do before it gets to be real autumnal weather, multiple barrowloads of manure have to be carted down the track and put around all the existing fruit trees as a mulch.

More barrowloads of manure has to go onto all the raised beds mixed together with huge amounts of wood chippings. Mr. & Mrs.Worm love this, it makes their home very snug and they repay her by turning both into excellent top soil.

All the fruit trees and bushes have to be pruned, it is a massive job but if you want a more than just a decent crop of fruit it has to be done! 

And she hard prunes her roses each time a flower dies, she always has glorious roses well into December, Compassion, Pristine, Royal William  and Savoy Hotel being four varieties that respond incredibly well to being treated in this fashion.

Fashion! Huh.. we aren't very fashionable! She has to get rid of this evil thing, it is a virus and her much beloved Homeopath, Maggie Dixon, told her how to treat it. 

So off we go.. I want an egg and hummus and she want eggs, cheese and coffee.. pip pip.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 8th, 2018.
PostScript: 
Victoriana Nursery Gardens.
www.victoriananursery.co.uk
Tel # 01233 740529.