Lemon a day

http://www.etsy.com/shop/lemonaday.   size 7.5 inx 4in 19cmx11cm

Today I recovered from the weekend; I also went round the edges of the flower beds in the front garden and excavated the mess a rat had made of my compost bin area. The wretched creature had found it difficult to get into the plastic composter so it had burrowed under the concrete pavers that it was sat on sending them squiffy and opening up cracks through which it had presumably got compost to eat. I will have to put a harder mixture under the slabs or I could coil up the remains of the boundary barbed wire to make it harder to dig out. I heard of one farmer getting desperate and making concrete full of shards of broken glass to stop rats trying to chew their way in to his feed store. There must be rats and rats because I usually do not have much trouble with the compost, ie a plastic composter bin does the job but when people start to talk about rats in places where there is a lot of food stored it’s unbelievable , they will try and chew through cans of food I am told.

While I was going round the edge of the flower bed I cut this columbine or aquilegia by mistake. They are very pretty but once you have one it’s too easy to have too many : unlike the forget-me-nots they are not easy to remove as they have a thick tap root.

If the time or energy only reaches a short way the most productive thing to do is to make all the edges look distinct and neat. Then once the grass is cut and the plants in the bed fill it well  the eye is at least 90% satisfied. Next time I should do a before and after photo and time it.

Alison

#52 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog