Prodigious Amount of Poop

Baby starlings produce a prodigious amount of poop.  And they don't appear to be too discriminate about where they deposit it.  The bird feeders are in need of daily cleaning at present, lest they become encased in a quantity of guano that we could mine for fertilizer.

Railways are on strike and F is working from home.  That meant I was forgiven for waking her up at 0530; she could get in three hours of allotment digging before logging onto her computer and doing some work she gets paid for.

Yam-Aunty's photos of the allotment only served to highlight how many pernicious weeds had grown on the site in the two weeks the humans were away.  F is a little (only a little mind) discouraged by the density of infestation of bind weed.  The cooch is manageable; the bind weed less so.  She is also somewhat discouraged to find that all the desirable plants are yellowing - the soil has probably not been fed any compost for decades.  Most of our fellow allotmenteers are not into applying any quantity (let alone significant quantity) of organic material to feed the soil microbes.  We hope that is all that the problem is and that it is not something more toxic (like spray residues).

Next year will be better.  This year energy is being focussed on applying FYM, raked up grass mowings from the common, seaweed, leaf mould, and as much household fruit and veg waste as F can get her hands on.  The neighbours might get roped into contributing to this project yet.

I am supervising office work.

We should contribute to Nature Friday - so I sent F out into that 'nature' front yard of hers and instructed her to photograph flowers.

Her response to that has been geraniums - the storksbill kind that are beloved by bumblebees.  We have lots of these blue ones and they are all grown from one little bit filched out of a garden in Southampton when we lived there about 15 years ago.  It is unfortunate that they don't flower all summer, but they do survive the 'drying out' that is a feature of our front yard when the combination of lime tree in full leaf and summer heat really kicks in, and they come back year after year (and the patches gets bigger and bigger).

The bees don't mind.

You also get a bonus couple of wild aquilegias that were growing on the embankment beside the drive.  F would like more of them but they don't seem to be all that keen on proliferating.

Smaller, pink, storksbill geraniums.

Tomorrow is the first Saturday of the month - that means Repair Cafe for F.  We have been discussing whether I might be invited to supervise but F thinks too many people will want to touch me and that I would probably be happier home alone.  I am not keen on home alone, but I guess there are worse things.