Tool Envy

Last week, after a disaster with a pair of loppers bought cheaply at the flower show which broke after only three go's! I treated myself to a shiny new pair of Felco ones, mouth puckeringly expensive admittedly but they should give me a lifetimes worth of service. I proudly took them along to Norton yesterday for their first outing and having earned admiring glances from Giles and Alyson they were soon cutting through a gnarly old grape vine as if it were butter. Giles was even heard to mutter that maybe he ought to get a new pair, there's nothing like tool envy between gardeners! After lunch we pinched out and stopped the tomatoes also taking off the lower leaves so all the plants energy goes into ripening the fruit, it looks like we will have a bumper crop this year. Not so the onions I'm afraid as when we started harvesting them it became apparent that many had rotted off, they were not a very uniform crop either, some reaching a decent size but looking unlikely to store well due to them having thick necks, whilst the rest were only disappointingly small. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

"Man is a tool using animal.......Nowhere do you find him without tools, without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all" Thomas Carlyle

A bumper harvest on the way

Cinnabar moth caterpillar spotted (or should that be striped) on common ragwort . It becomes a red and charcoal grey moth which flies from May to July.