This Tuesday morning and bits from last week

There was an egg on top of the box, for the second time since I put a nest box into the duck shed, one of the girls obviously considers it HER place.







For some reason all ducks and drakes stayed around this morning, I can't imagine why.... unless they were too full to move after snaffling up all the cucumber and courgette bits I'd put there for them -

- it was a similar picture after friends Pat and Graham brought them loads of overgrown and yellowed cucumbers last week:

Because tomorrow we're likely to spend most of the day in hospital for John's third chemotherapy I thought I'd better do a bit of gardening while the weather was holding, and was soon surrounded by ducks and drakes - as long as you don't go towards them they come very close to see what you're up to.
 

Tuts and his gang, that's Dotty looking up.  She goes further and further, last night I had to fetch her out of the formal garden.  She didn't like being carried in, and tonight she was already in her hut at 8!

Anke, Dash and Winnie at the water bucket opposite to where I was weeding, and below Honey disappearing into her hidey hole under the juniper:

I notice that most of the photos above look quite bright and sunny, but we did get some rain recently after 3 weeks of hot and dry weather:

The little wallflowers in the grey box which John grew from seed I've planted at the top of the front garden among lots of bulbs, there were 42 of them.  If they all survive they'll look nice in Spring!

I've done quite a lot of jobs in the front garden during last week, it looks a lot tidier now:

This blackbird made me smile, it was sitting on the fence opposite my bedroom
window for ages, singing and preening, and didn't seem to mind my taking pictures,

 ... and our former neighbour Gladys's bungalow is being converted into a 4-bedroom house.

I'm doing the best I can sharing out flowers, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers etc from the garden among friends and family and people at the Luncheon Club.

The grapes in the upper greenhouse are just too tempting - the shiny marks were made by my fingers as I can't resist picking off a few big grapes every time I go in there!


In the right hand corner of the lower greenhouse is a right green jungle, a cucumber, tomato and cucamelon plant are all going mad together.

John has been feeling well enough in the last few days to go out into the garden for short periods of time.  He's been tying up his chrysanthemums, tidying in the garage and greenhouses and he harvested the largest garlic cloves I've seen: