Missed a Visitor

As it is a beautiful day, when I got home from work, I started to potter around in the garden.

After a bit of digging and planting out the courgette (zucchini) plants, and getting things sprayed, watered and tidied up, I got bored. Well not so much bored as getting hit with the desire for company. There was nobody here to talk to while I forked over the dirt. Julio who is usually so helpful was nowhere to be found.

I came in the house to see who had posted what, check on e-mail and other computer intensive distractions from gardening. When I got up from the computer desk, I noticed that the highchair I had loaned to my friend Helen had miraculously appeared by the back door.She had also left some flowers in my looks-like-a-hurricane-hit-it kitchen.
This meant that I had missed a visit from my friend. I didn't even hear her knock. NUTS! Had a stuck with the digging, I would have eventually had company.

Years ago, I had a whole lot of black currant bushes at Whitelees. If my memory serves, there were 24 blackcurrant bushes here. They all ended up getting grubbed up to make way for the front lawn. I don't miss them all that often because it seems that when we had them, it meant that dealing with the harvest of all those blackcurrants kept me busy through the entire month of July. One of the things left over from the days when we had blackcurrants are the flowers that I had planted underneath them.
I read a book by UK gardening guru Bob Flowerdew about companion planting. The basis behind companion planting is that two different kinds of plants grow better together than they would on their own. Poached egg flower limnathes douglasii planted underneath blackcurrant bushes attract beneficial insects such as the hoverfly that eat aphids that spread diseases. Poached egg flower is an annual that self seeds very effectively, so I just let it do just that. This means that I have loads of sunny flowers at the end of May.
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Hen on duck eggs update: She is still sitting tight on those eggs. We've had them under her one week now. Three more weeks to go. (There is an official count down at the bottom of this blog.)