The Lost Weekend
A Lost Weekend! Not a XXX-rated episode of Desperate Gardeners, but a journal in crisis! Due to a technological gardener error, two whole days of journal writings are lost somewhere in the cosmos (nothing to do with the flowering annual, by the way). Forty-eight hours of real-time ramblings of the inner Moosey mind - lost in web-space!
What Happened on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th August?
'Don't worry - everything you do and say is really repetitive anyway' said the helpful Moosey House Guest. 'Just look up the same weekend five years ago - and copy it...' Humph! Obviously he has no appreciation of the finer details of garden life, and the subtle influences that determine what a world-wide-web-famous gardener does during her first weekend of August!
Lone Blue Pansy
So I decided I'd just rewrite the journal. Oops. I was totally stumped. It's a mature mind that can exactly remember the planting hole dug for the first ever Othello rose planted (that's well over twenty years ago) and not have a clue what happened in the weekend!
Weeding? Mulching?
Since the web was obviously to blame, I tried a kind of mental Google search through the Moosey mind, concentrating hard on the keyword 'weeding'. Humph. No matches were found - did I mean to search for 'wedding'? There was a similar lack of success for the word 'mulch'. Funny - I thought that's all I usually did in August.
The New Mulched Willow Tree Garden
But suddenly - a flash of light, and the feeling of potting mix underneath the fingernails - of course! My mail order roses arrived in the post on the morning of Saturday! I photographed them (you can see the evidence), then spent the next three hours at the back of the glass-house potting them up very carefully into roomy plastic pots. I also potted up the Hebes rescued from the Hump, and I remember throwing bucketloads of old mix onto the nearby garden.
Ha! the word 'weeding' then struck gold - well, actually it struck pale lilac. My pesty lilac phloxes, which I thought I had removed, were showing alarming re-growth, and so indeed I certainly did weed! I also pulled out some lilac flowering Lamium - it was trying to be a nice ground-cover by the Camellias at the end of the glass-house and not succeeding. It isn't a very good month for the colour lilac...
Yippee! My New Roses
On Sunday I can remember sulking because we lost the rugby, but I know I wouldn't have mentioned it - after all, the public deserves the positive! The Moosey House Guest wanted (oddly) to take photographs of gardener-at-work-burning, so I did put on my nice new sage green apres-gardening shirt and artistically twirled the rake above the flames... I must have been burning rubbish cleared from the Wattle Woods at the time...
Vote For Your Favourite Pet - Please Not the Rooster
I'm sure I would have moaned about the ridiculous Most Valuable Pet Competition. It doesn't seem fair to me that whenever, for example, I mention puppy, he automatically gets a competition point. He could have been eating something disgusting, or doing something disgraceful. And if animals get points merely for being mentioned, the deceased don't get much of a chance! Unless I say hello on every journal page to Jeremy the fluffy, old Ginger Puss, Lucky Puss who wasn't very lucky, dear old Taj-Dog, and little Smoocher whom I still miss so much. See what I mean?
I've done it! Not exactly total recall, but enough - and in the future I promise faithfully to back-up the back-ups! But no long term harm has been done - the Lost Gardening Weekend has been reclaimed.