June was a month of rain and storms here. This year brought it home to me that the hot, sunny weather of summer tends to happen in late spring (or early autumn) here in northern Scotland. It never got much above 18 degrees Celsius last month. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not complaining about the temps, they were quite nice for doing manual labour – not too hot and sticky after a few swings of the hoe-pick! But, I’m coming to accept that these are the usual summery temperatures of northern Scotland and that three months of above-22-degree temperatures really isn’t going to happen. In fact, when there are more than a couple of days of 22 degree weather here it’s termed a heatwave! I have to smile at that. My mental space still considers anything over 37 degrees a heatwave!
Clearly, I’m still adjusting! I do need to manage my expectations for ‘summer weather’ though. Bit by bit. Every year my mindset adapts a little.
I didn’t want to, but yesterday I went and did quite a bit of digging and wild grass uprooting with my hoe-pick. It had been raining for some days and, while it was dry yesterday, the ground was muddy, slippery and just awkward overall. My mood matched.
I mainly focused on the front corner-garden project. I’m doing some of the utterly necessary, and totally unglamorous, groundwork (pun intended) on the flower bed areas to two sides of the looping pathway, required at the moment.
Really, I’m thinking ahead on this one and trying to outwit nature. That’s never going to really happen, but if I can just outwit the weeds I will be utterly happy. Of course, that’s never totally going to happen either; but I’m going to do what I can to put a real dent into the upkeep needed in this area.
As I was digging into the ever-shifting mudscape, I started thinking back to the initiation of this project. I think I started this last year on the Easter holiday weekend. This means that already I’ve worked on it for two spring seasons, and by August (eep! Next month!) I’ll have worked on it for two spring seasons and two summer seasons. Oh dear. This does indeed require my smarts to ensure that this space is as low maintenance as it can possibly be. I can’t see myself returning to do heavy manual labour in this front corner-garden area year after year. It wouldn’t be nice for the stone pathway to be messed up with clumps of soil and mud during any hefty maintenance or stormy weather either.
To that end, I’ve decided to put some landscaping fabric down to the back of the two sides of the path that I was working on yesterday. There is only a wire fence dividing this area from the rest of the croft that often hosts marauding sheep, so I might try extending this landscaping fabric up the wire fence by about 10 inches or so. Hopefully this will seal this area off from the cheeky spread of rushes and unwanted wild grass. The locals say that sheep’s breath on a plant in more than small doses will kill the plant. I’m not too sure about this, and most certainly I can’t find anything on the internet to support this. Also, there seems to be a lot of flora in the glens and hillsides where sheep reside; so maybe I’ve misunderstood this warning. In any case, I’m hoping this landscape fabric barrier is useful all around.
So, today I’m off to see what bulky, yet nice looking, objects I can find around the croft to anchor the landscape fabric the way I want it. I’m really hoping there’s a log or something out there because I don’t want to start hauling a lot of rocks again! Also, I will admit that it’s cold outside and I don’t really want to do much out there today (although I had a whole list of things planned). It’s 14 degrees, but feels like 12. Welcome to summer. Hello July. Ugh. I will force myself to do more than just look for bulky things though, maybe I’ll do some more grass cutting. Weeding, that’s a good one to do as well. Oh yes, I need to earth up the potatoes one more time before harvest. I’ll need some fortifying cocoa first though!
As pictures of mud won’t be very interesting I’ve included some pictures of the loch that’s on my usual walk with the pups. Do you remember that a lot of leaves had started to open and I had been wondering if water lilies would appear? Well, here are some pictures of what some recent walks have revealed about June on the Scottish Moor.
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