Monday 8th June 2020 - Be Careful What You Wish For and What Do You Do?

Following a warm dry May, gardeners were wishing for rain. What nobody wished for was what we actually got! Starting on Friday and continuing through to Sunday, the volume of water that fell from the sky was too much for the concrete hard ground to cope with. There were pools on our lawn and patio with plenty of puddles on the roads for children to splash about in. We also had hail showers with the balls of ice pummelling our conservatory roof, high winds which brought down all the loose leaves from the trees, and it was so cold we had to have the heating on. Apart from taking Barney for a walk and visiting the shop, during the gaps between showers, there has been little to entice us outside.

So what do you when the weather is thoroughly miserable outside? For me, it provided an opportunity to start developing a new website for my books, which I market under the name of Clifftop Publishing. I am using the same site provider as Overstrand Life. Why the change? There are a couple of reasons but the main thing is to get a better site for a nominal cost and hopefully maintain the current domain name. I am very conscious of spending too much money on promoting my books, as any expenditure eats into the amount I am able to donate to charity. I have also had to republish my book of short stories, ‘Truths and Lies’, because Amazon where showing the wrong publisher. So, basically I have spent a lot of time on my laptop but at least I was doing so when the weather was unsociable and I couldn’t be tempted into the garden.

We are now wishing for some warmth, to get things growing and flowering. After the last wish, for rain, I hope this does not result in another extreme with a heatwave, drying the soil again. Referring to the noshers in my last blog, it looks as though the moth ball solution is keeping them at bay. I have continued to collect egg shells as, after so much rain the slugs and snails are bound to be more active so I will use the crushed shells round my dahlias.

Today’s photograph is not your usual June scene. Taken this morning, it is a picture full of tones of grey, and not at all inviting.