Well my relief at my healed pressure was short lived – as a few weeks later the skin broke down again and I was back on bed rest. I wasn’t doing too much and I was really looking after my skin but, it did what it did. It is soooo frustrating. My fixed wheelchair was dropped off on the 15th October (finally!!) so now I have to wait to be ‘pressure mapped’ to see if my wheelchair cushion is actually doing the job of relieving pressure on my butt, or maybe the wheelchair is not quite set up right for me.
Harry did the vine weevil nematode application and I now have Amy (gardener) to help with the garden. Hopefully my skin will toughen up soon and I can get back outside again. All I have managed to do these last few months is keep the patio watered and the houseplants alive. I did have time when I was up to pot-up some crocus and narcissi.
At the end of September I noticed in the pond some weird looking thing so I fished it out to see what it was. It turned out to be a fruiting body of a water lily. I have never seen one before so I chopped it off and brought it into the conservatory and kept it under water. It turned into a gelatinous mass within the red casing the gel dissolved away to reveal the seeds. It was very smell so I just threw it out (I don’t need any more water lilies anyway).
Back in March this year I went along to a talk about ferns by Heather McHaffie and she very kindly gave out a few cuttings from a hare’s foot fern. I got a couple of cuttings and only now has one of them started to grow fronds. Boy do you have to be patient with these things. I do have a more dainty version of hare’s foot fern so I am so pleased that this is growing quite happily now.
There is still plenty of colour in the garden: still flowering are the Japanese anemones, verbena, geranium (Rosanne), persicaria, guara, fuchsia, cyclamen, erigeron, a few roses, viburnum, and even a few verbascum.
There are loads of pink berries on the rowan (Pink pagoda), bright orange crab apples (Everest), and the deep purples of the acer and heucheras are looking great and the red seed heads of the miscanthus (Red chief).
Some gold foliage of some ferns and the hakenechloa grass bring some bright as well as the silvery foliage of the snow in summer. On the patio the marigolds are still flowering and the pink buds are developing on the skimmia (Rubella) although the leaves are looking a bit yellow so probably needs an ericaceous feed.
Storm Amy came along and happily only one large branch crashed down and flew over the garden up to the end of the patio but nothing was squashed. The top part of the clematis support came down but the clematis itself clung on so another job to sort out.