Grandmother's footsteps - or how it all creeps up on me!

Do you remember that playground game?

We went away for a week, to the AIA (Association for Industrial Archaeology) annual conference in Preston, and now I am catching up. More about that later, not to mention posting my replies to the SP11 questionnaire.

Everything in the garden romped away while my back was turned.
Yesterday between showers I tackled some of the foliage trying to make it across the pavement to the kerb.
We have a beautiful Cotinus coggygrria that puts on a lot of growth.
In the past 5 weeks it has grown over a metre in every direction.
This is how it looks from the garden side, leggy and a glorious colour:

We also have an ivy twining around the gatepost.
Two or three times a year I trim it back, but leave enough for the car to bounce off if necessary when backing on to the drive. I discovered that it is much easier to trim when it is dripping wet.
Between these two is a berberis that also sticks out, ready to poke out the eyes of passers-by.
This is how it all looks after my ministrations:

All this was after hanging out the first load of laundry.
As I went in to fetch the props for the lines, the heavens opened and it all ended up wetter than when hung out.
Today I tackled the remaining laundry, and it is all hanging outside, drying slowly.

The back garden revealed all sorts of goodies too.

A while ago, near the back door we cleared some pink geraniums away and scattered some seeds. And for a while it looked as though we might have some young hollyhocks although neither Ian nor I had knowingly sown any. Today I cleared away more creeping lengths of the geranium, and found this:

Not a hollyhock at all, but a courgette or marrow. I would have preferred hollyhocks! It takes a lot of effort to eat courgettes before they get too big. At least we won't have far to go to pick them.

Most of the other vegetables are down at the bottom of the garden. Opposite these is our plum tree. Here it is with a good crop of ripening fruit:

I've already eaten about 6 of these today.

A little closer to the house is our pear tree. When we saw the house in 1995, the previous owner proudly pointed out that it had 2 pears on it. Once we bought the house, we had his row of conifers (the dreaded leylandii) removed from alongside the pear. Now we have alternate years of enough and then glut. As you may be able to make out this is a glut year.

The big problem with the pears is that they all seem to ripen together. And even worse, they don't keep well, and they ripen from the inside out. So you can get some idea of our diet at the moment. And I never even mentioned the beans, potatoes, salad stuff and tomatos!

Plenty to share with the slugs and snails this year!