Flowers and heat
25 May 2026 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeWhat a horrible day. So much for Bank 'Holiday'; I spent almost all of it in assorted forms of hard manual labour in conditions of searing heat, with respite in the form of a 12-mile cycle ride in the middle, which was at least reasonably breezy. (It had not occurred to me that leaving later in the day would mean that I needed to protect the *back right* portion of my legs from the burning sunlight instead of the front left, so I spent some time at traffic lights frantically wiping one calf over the back of the other and then vice versa...)
My plants, which had all collapsed when I got home yesterday at about 8pm and which I had watered again at 10am in the morning using buckets of water bailed out of the bath that I was taking at 4am this morning, had started to wilt again from 3pm and had to be watered all over again. Somewhat to my surprise, when I got home exhausted at 9.30pm they seemed to be all right -- I was expecting to have to rush up and water round.
The flax is coming into flower in all the assorted places in which it self-sowed, and we have the first opium poppies (one red, one purple) to join the sea of California poppies and red field poppies that have been coming briefly into flower all over the place. Apparently the orange long-headed poppy did throw up another flower bud, but I missed it (probably it flowered and died in the heat of Saturday); it now has two seed-heads. Some white flowers have appeared in the "purple assortment", though the short blue/purple ones that were blooming there earlier on seem to have finished. I never did get round to finding out what they were! The coloured cornflowers have buds on but haven't opened yet.
The purple spike of toadflax has been in flower for a while, as has the first of the rose campion. We also have a pink mesembryanthemum growing in what was once a strawberry pot; the strawberry plant is clearly dead, but the mesembryanthemum is looking very vigorous, even though there is only one of it. I did try scattering some more mesembryanthemum seed under the largest of the towel-tomatoes when I potted it up, but I had to top up the soil level in the pot subsequently, so any seedlings will have been buried :-(
I picked and ate my first two strawberries, but they weren't really ripe yet (although red), so it was a bit of a waste.
My plants, which had all collapsed when I got home yesterday at about 8pm and which I had watered again at 10am in the morning using buckets of water bailed out of the bath that I was taking at 4am this morning, had started to wilt again from 3pm and had to be watered all over again. Somewhat to my surprise, when I got home exhausted at 9.30pm they seemed to be all right -- I was expecting to have to rush up and water round.
The flax is coming into flower in all the assorted places in which it self-sowed, and we have the first opium poppies (one red, one purple) to join the sea of California poppies and red field poppies that have been coming briefly into flower all over the place. Apparently the orange long-headed poppy did throw up another flower bud, but I missed it (probably it flowered and died in the heat of Saturday); it now has two seed-heads. Some white flowers have appeared in the "purple assortment", though the short blue/purple ones that were blooming there earlier on seem to have finished. I never did get round to finding out what they were! The coloured cornflowers have buds on but haven't opened yet.
The purple spike of toadflax has been in flower for a while, as has the first of the rose campion. We also have a pink mesembryanthemum growing in what was once a strawberry pot; the strawberry plant is clearly dead, but the mesembryanthemum is looking very vigorous, even though there is only one of it. I did try scattering some more mesembryanthemum seed under the largest of the towel-tomatoes when I potted it up, but I had to top up the soil level in the pot subsequently, so any seedlings will have been buried :-(
I picked and ate my first two strawberries, but they weren't really ripe yet (although red), so it was a bit of a waste.