Another one of those recurrent, annual subjects. Our plum tree definitely has years off — and 2022 was one — but this year there’s going to be a decent crop. Previously I have referred to these as plumlets but for some reason ‘plumlings’ came to mind this time round, which I feel is definitive.
How many of these peas will eventually sprout edible small green products remains to be seen: getting them started by the living room window is always the easy bit, each year. But we try.
Summer fruits and rosemary. All picked from the garden just before this picture was taken: and all eaten, one way or another, within an hour afterwards. Most enjoyable.
It’s that time of year again. You buy the seeds and put them in some mulch, and await the first shoots. Eventually some of them might turn into the thing illustrated on the packet. But that remains to be seen.
Not quite Wordsworth’s multitude but there are certainly a lot of these sprouting outside the Ellen Wilkinson Building on campus at the moment, something the rather random focus point of this shot is intended to capture. This is the 700th Manchester shot to feature on here, by the way.
It’s early yet, but the world turns, and we have to start getting things ready to put into the soil. These potatoes will then sit in there for 10 months or so and, usually, we just dig up about the same number as we put in, of about the same size. So maybe we should just eat them now. But who knows, maybe this is the year they will run riot.
A new place means a new ecosystem, and new flora. I have absolutely no idea what these babies (they are about the height of my hand) will grow into — cacti perhaps, but that’s just a guess. I don’t have a garden here as such; these are growing at the top of the rocky bank at the back of my house, that currently marks one of the limits of my world. But they’re something cute to look at, all the same.
Our latest chilli plant. It was Clare who christened it ‘Tuco’, after Tuco Salamanca, the ridiculously fiery Mexican in the first couple of seasons of Breaking Bad. Only we have already eaten one of the three fruits it has produced so far, and it turned out to be very mild, so perhaps it’s misnamed. We should call it Jesse Pinkman instead, perhaps.
Everything’s growing fast. Do the weeding in the garden and three days later it all comes back, it seems. These plants — I am not botanist enough to identify them — offered a splash of colour to the mostly green landscape but it was only temporary; they are weeds, they had to go. But like everything else, they will no doubt return.
If you can’t see why it’s a good idea to put a plank of wood like this in one’s garden water butt, you’ve clearly never had to get the drowned corpse of an indeterminate creature out of one, as we once did. Anyway, over the last few months, it has been colonised. The slime came first — now, this rather more photogenic red fungus, or that is what I assume it is. Who knows, give it a couple of thousand years and we might have entire civilisations existing in this water butt universe.
Being 42 