Jean taking a well earned rest from plumbing after his idiot wife put a pickaxe through a waterline - apologies to our British neighbours who must have heard a bit of unexpected Anglo Saxon coming over the hedge!
Two days ago, I spent ages sieving heaps of topsoil and mixing it with heaps of sieved compost into which had been lovingly mixed the correct amount of grass seed. Looking like something biblical, I marched up and down the back garden broadcasting the mixture and then spent another half an hour dutifully watering it in. Now all I had to do was to stand back and watch the grass grow.
Forget it! Today I happened to take a close look at the row of nasturtium seeds that I had planted a week or two back along the front edge of the new lawn, and low and behold, all I could see were tidy mounds of grass seed where my new nasturtiums should have been starting to show. Not only were there tidy mounds of seed, but they were being added to by a positive army of ants, each one carting yet another seed on his tiny back. Piece by tiny piece, this well trained battalion were moving my carefully spread seed clear across the expanse of freshly smoothed ground and delivering it to a hole, into which it was fast disappearing.
'Bring the packet" I yelled to my trusty compatriot, and Jean dropped his power drill, put down his coil of wire, stuffed his pliers into his back pocket and raced for the poison shelf in the garage. This was no time for worrying about the environment and caring for little creatures. Sorry - "you pincha my seed, I blowa your head off". We didn't spend five years in Miami without getting street wise!
Just in case my sweet peas felt like poking their heads above the rather chilly surface of the soil, I have installed a row of gleaming wiggly poles for them to twine up. We have installed some more for our newly planted jasmine to twine along, and the birthday strawberry plants have been put into the wildflower bank (which at this financially worrying time, seemed like the safest place to put them).
Tonight we are resting up. A friend suggested that I spend the evening soaking my feet in a salt solution. Why? You might well ask. Tomorrow we are embarking on a 12 km walk with the hiking club from Saussines. Up until now, our experience of distance walking has been a regular 3 mile march around the Country Club Drive walking track in Florida. I have the feeling that tomorrow we are going to see significantly fewer designer shorts, poodles on luminous pink leashes and blondes on roller blades. If you hear nothing further from me, I am somewhere in a quarry in the Beaulieu district learning how to be a troglodyte.
Meantime, for any of my readers who are British and who qualify, a Very Happy Mothering Sunday. For the rest of my readers, you probably have to work out if, like me, you qualify or need to remember Australian, South African, American or French Mothers Day.
For any Irish readers, I hope you have plenty of aspirin handy. After that amazingly exciting Six Nations rugby win today, you deserve a rip-roaring party. Congratulations!
