Tuesday 10 September 2019

PEOPLE'S RUDENESS NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE ME & HER .. PLUS MUCH HAPPIER NEWS!

You do someone a favour saving them quite a considerable amount of time and money and get kicked in the teeth. 

It certainly leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth especially when it means that, through no fault of your own, it ends up costing you nearly £500.00!

This happened to her this last week and why is she surprised? You may well ask. But because of the litigious nature of the person involved, she has decided to zip her mouth. Pity that, for it's a good tale!

On to happier things..

Like reporting that a lot of the vegetable beds on her plots are winding down slowly but that doesn't mean that things aren't growing. 

Beetroot are growing, as are Cucumber, Onion, Cabbage, Purple Sprouting Brocolli, Shallot, Chard and Kale and ROSES!!

The White Marseille figs have been quite the best ever and she's still harvesting them, they are like no other fig for when they're fully ripe, their flesh turn to liquid which is like honey.

Now it is the turn of the dark fig Violetta to come to the fore, she was bred in Bavaria and will take quite a degree of frost, when she comes to ripeness, if there is such a word, in September / October. This is the first year she has produced big figs and it has certainly been worth the wait!

Mama has hard pruned her from the get-go and now she is on quite a short trunk with a huge amount of branches. They say tht you should only prune fig tree in June but 'phooey to that' she says and nips out every single little growth after it has grown two leaves right up to the end of July.

If you are a professional Fig Tree grower, do not bother to cry and shout "Fig Abuse" at her, because, guess what, she's going to continue to do it!

She didn't do this to the White Marseille fig, she didn't know about pruning fig trees and look what happened to that tree! She's now over 5 metres tall and feeds all those norty Starlings who sit on the uppermost branches gobbling white figs as fast as they can and who squeak back at her when she shouts at them.

So Miss Violetta and her new Miss Brown Turkey fig tree will be pruned and loved - this is not to say that she doesn't love Miss Marseille - and taken care of and wrapped in horticultural mesh when their fruits are of a decent size and she'll tell the birds that they have to be content with white figs.

But fruit thieves are about! Two weeks ago on the Saturday night, they struck at every pear tree on all the allotments! Almost every single piece of fruit was stolen! And none of them were ripe, pears ripen later than a lot of apples and none of them were even approaching their proper picking size.

So who would want literally hundreds of unripe pears? All of the plot holders are quite mystified. But having looked at a couple of old recipe books, she's seen there's a LOT you can do with them, so they were obviously stolen by people who intend to sell them as cooked items.

Next year, she intends to net her fig and pear trees with horticultural mesh and she has been given the 'go-ahead' by the allotment site secretry to install a couple of poaching cameras, they're what farmers and gamekeepers use to monitor their lifestock.

And any member of the allotment seen on camera (or in the flesh) stealing from another persons' plot will be evicted immediately. Dennis, the site secretary, who was a magistrate for 30 years (!!) is absolutely positive it is someone who is a plot holder, for all of us holders go in and out at strange times and so someone there late at night or very early in the morning is never thought of being 'up to no good' as it were!

Sad that.. stealing.

Onto happier things. We had a brilliant day yesterday! She went through a huge amount of paperwork, magazines and other 'stuff' and threw away masses of it, the sensitive stuff she takes out to the allotment and burns in her incinerator along with dried weeds, the cooled ashes get spread onto the vegetable beds.

But everything, aka the rubbish and other things she wanted to save, was tipped onto her bed and what a fine mess it was too! Made even messier, if that was possible, by me landing down in the middle of it and tramping about seeing what I could rip or chew!

All she did was laugh.. I do hope your mother laughed when you got into her messes,

Then the bed was stripped, clean sheets and a clean bedspread were put on and lo and behold, you would have never known chaos had ever existed! The carpet was vacuumed, shelves were dusted, bedside tables sorted and cleaned.. and oh, LOOKIELOOKIE! Her second pair of reading glasses reappeared from where they had been hiding under a book!

Now she has to go to Squires of Twickenham, which is absolutely her favourite Plant and Garden centre, she has a credit note and intends to spend it on seeds. 

And on the way home she will stop in at a brilliant new food shop on King's Street in Hammersmith to purchase: 2 red onions, a bottle of Pomegranate molasses, a Pomegranate and a packet of Barberries.

She also needs a box of Black Rice, you can sometimes find this at Sainsbury's, where it's called Thai Black Rice and always at Whole Foods, which is where she will buy a packet.

Why? I'll tell you in another post as it's a surprise gift for a friend. So that's all for today, we will be back later in the week. Stay happy and healthy folks and above all.. please be kind.

GeeGee Parrot.
September 10th, 2019.

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