Giving nature a helping hand

Today’s guest picture comes from our daughter who was walking in the Devon hills when she came upon these two nice young men who were wandering the hills looking for the internet – literally.  She thought that I should put a picture on the internet of people looking for the internet.  They work for a firm called Exmoor Technology  which tries to find good connections for people who live out in the country.

It was another day when we woke to strong winds and rain and owing to sitting up late again following the twists and turns in the political situation both here and abroad, I was glad of an excuse to spend a very quiet morning reading the papers and doing nothing.

We roused ourselves enough to go shopping at Gretna and we had a healthy lunch of egg and chips at my favourite cafe when we got there.

We both made judicious purchases and were pleased to find that the rain had stopped in Langholm by the time that we got home.

We had a cup of tea and when I looked out, there was even a glimpse of sunshine

This gave me the chance to get out in the garden to take a picture or two.

The peonies are wonderful.

 

However, the wind was so strong that if you look carefully in the bottom left hand corner of the coral peony picture, you might just be able to see my hand in my cycling mitt holding onto the stem to steady it.

I took a few more flower pictures and they gave a whole new meaning to the phrase hand held photography.

By coincidence, I glanced at a gardening programme on the TV while I was drinking my tea and saw one of Mrs Tootlepedal buttercuppy things so I know that it is a troilus now.

Considering how much rain there has been over the past few days….

Our scientific rain gauge is almost full

…the garden is looking remarkably cheerful.

The cardoon is going well….

…and the first of the pinks has come out.

I am very fond of geometrically neat flowers but I also love the wild anarchic exuberance of the pinks.

I had my cycling mitts on because I was about to go cycling and in the end, I stopped pestering the flowers and set off to face the strong wind.  I think that it was stronger today than it has been recently so once more I hugged the valley floor and managed to get 20  miles in before I ran out of steam.

I was wearing new cycling shoes that I had bought at Gretna but they had very little effect on my speed sadly.

Taking pictures of roadside wild flowers wasn’t a possibility because of the wind so I stuck to more static things like the Glencorf Burn.

Looking upstream…

..and downstream

This is one of Mrs Tootlepedal’s  favourite little corners on the Cleuchfoot road.

As I passed through the town at the end of my first lap, I kept an eye out for waterside birds.  There was a small family of oyster catchers beside the river Esk and although it came out rather fuzzily, I still liked this picture of unison beak work.

I got the feeling that those were the two youngster and that these…

…were the grown ups.

Today’s answer to the question of where all the rain goes…..

..is over the caul at Pool Corner.

If it hadn’t been for the wind, it would have been a nice evening for cycling as it was pleasantly warm and the the roads had dried out after the morning rain.

I had a look round the vegetable garden when I got home.  That tempting strawberry is sill not quite fully ripe so I left it for another day.   The potatoes are looking very promising…

…and there are so many apples on the espaliers that they will need thinning out unless we get a sudden attack of ‘June drop’.

The beans are flourishing and gratifyingly, the first flowers are showing in Mrs Tootlepedal’s pea fortress.

Oddly enough, the most colourful flower corner in the garden at the moment is in a small bed at the end of the veg garden where peonies and lupins are growing.

I passed a dozy hoverfly on a daisy….

…and went in to enjoy a beef stew for my tea. I had made it in the slow cooker this morning.

The political situation continues to engage our attention and we very much enjoyed a voter in the American Midwest telling an interviewer on CNN that he had always thought that Trump was an idiot but he very much liked his policies so he had voted for him.   Food for thought there for those who like cut and dried positions

We are also enjoying the sight of Mrs May, who was part of a campaign in the 2015 election which vehemently warned of the dangers of a coalition between Labour and the Scottish nationalists, making herself busy today cobbling up a coalition between the Conservatives and the Irish Unionists.   In the 2017 campaign, she had been very vocal again about the possibility that voting Labour might bring a ‘coalition of chaos’ and we can only say that it is lucky that she doesn’t seem to have much sense of irony or her head might explode.

I did get a picture of a flying bird today and as a bonus, it contains two of them…

…though one might be more ‘jumping’ than ‘flying’.