Start the week

Who’d have thought it? The Premiership season started at the weekend and Wolves came out of it with a win. We are third in the table, on alphabetical order only, behind Man Utd. I bet I could get good odds from the bookies on that still being the case next May.

We can but dream. I think 15th is a more realistic finishing place, provided we can play 90 minute games instead of our customary 85…

Around half an hour before the season kicked off (how’s that for timing?) England were confirmed as the world ranked number 1 Test Team in cricket, having comprehensively ground India’s solidly underperforming World Champions into the ground. Considering cricket is the national game on the sub continent, it is a shame how little interest their cricket board seems to have in test series since they started their very lucrative cricket league. As ever, money talks and I suspect that while they will continue to be a force in many competitions, sheer weight of games will ensure that come the next round of international games, the Indian players will be too jaded to show off their undoubted abilities.

Of course, that’s not to say that England haven’t thoroughly deserved their series win and elevation in the world rankings, but it would have been sweeter if India had made a decent fist of defending their position. As it was, we only got the briefest glimpses of their cricketing ability as they spent most of the time going listlessly through the motions.

In other news, I have new shoes and it is the last week at work before our fortnight’s holiday. Mentally I’m already there, but it will take until Friday evening for the rest of me to catch up.

Horticultural Homily

We appear to have grown a huge amount of cherry tomatoes. I like cherry tomatoes, but there is a limit to the amount I feel the need to eat. This should be contrasted with the amount the tomato plants are putting out. They appear to have no limit.

Our cucumbers are heading the same way. To begin with we weren’t sure the cucumber plant was going to take. Now we are not sure it isn’t going to take the entire upper bed. We have already had to cut it back several times to let the other plants in there get some sunlight. In the meantime, quite apart from the widely spreading leaves, the little jungle below them is filling with small and rather prickly cucumbers. They taste very nice (insofar as cucumbers taste of anything), but they are relatively small and rather prickly. Rather more like Roald Dahl’s snozzcumbers than the things you find in the supermarket. Either way they, together with the tomatoes and before them the mange tout peas have become the very definition of the word fecund.

With the possible exception of the sweet corn, which is growing but not necessarily producing edible cobs (time yet for them to prove me wrong) and the lettuces, which start off well and then disappear, probably due to the attentions of their sluggy nemeses anything we plant in the top bed seems to just sprout. I wouldn’t be surprised to find leaves sprouting from the bamboo canes we use to provide support to our more gangly plants. We have a couple of lilies that can’t quite get going, but that is the fault of the bloody beetles we found on them. It’s probably best to forget them until next year or the year after in the hopes the insects will move on to pastures new and then try again.

Right at the bottom of the garden we have what ought to be a plum tree. It’s more of a plum bush spread as it is, across the trellis, instead of doing proper, treeish things. That has unexpectedly produced a crop of plums that have found their way into a cake and our tums. It wasn’t supposed to produce anything on account of the relative shade down there, but…

All this horticultural fertility is rather upset by the behaviour of the middle bed. It was, we thought, an ideal place for pumpkins and courgettes. Well, we had a couple of courgettes, but the rest seem to have disappeared though they may yet grow back. The pumpkins are equally uncertain. Next year I think we will just go for beans and pulses in general. I don’t care if they refuse to grow, can’t stand the brutes myself, but Furtle is keen and I suppose they will look nice while they are actually growing. There are other things we have planted in the middle bed, such as the raspberry, which seem merely to be existing rather than positively growing. I am hopeful that they will pick up next year and that they are simply just bedding in like my climbing rose did.

The buddleia just is.