Ravendale House

Today we had a parcel delivered. Nothing very unusual in that I hear you say, but we also had a parcel delivered yesterday, and if all goes well there should be another one coming tomorrow. In fact since the beginning of the year we have had 7 parcels delivered, which for us must be a bit of a record.

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We have quite a large vegetable garden which is made up of several individual beds separated by grass paths. This means that there is a minimum amount of wading around in mud when weeding or the like in wet weather.

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Today I decided to check on the leek seeds that I sowed on the 7th. The packet said if sown outside they would need 14 – 21 days, but I hoped on top of the central heating boiler they might be a bit quicker, and guess what? They were.

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Well here it is, the first Friday the 13th of 2009. Did you know the fear of Friday the 13th is called ‘paraskavedekatriaphobia’, well maybe you did, but I bet you didn’t know that my dad was born on Friday July 13th in 1917, he’s approaching his 92nd birthday so it hasn’t been bad luck for him so far.

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We awoke this morning to find the drive and several of the flower beds with puddles of standing water. Nothing like as bad as the floods of 2007, but at least then it had been raining! We don’t seem to have had that much rain so far this year and if it did rain last night I never heard it.

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How are you supposed to get anything done in these temperatures? It’s freezing, and that’s during the day, I shudder to think what it’s like in the middle of the night. Thank goodness for central heating!

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Today I put the seed potatoes in the conservatory to sprout or ‘chit’ as it is known in gardening circles. However, it is rather cold at the moment, particularly at night and I don’t want them to freeze, so I will cover them with newspaper each evening as the temperature drops.

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Today I received an acknowledgement from Suttons Seeds for my plant order, so that’s OK. In fact it’s even better than OK, as they don’t appear to have charged me for p&p!

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Yesterday we bought our seed potatoes and onion sets. This is an annual ritual which for me represents the start of the gardening year.

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My first job every morning is to put the bird food out onto the feeder. I do this even before I have my own breakfast. It’s a fairly short and well ordered routine that takes me a couple of minutes.

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