Spiky is a rescue lemon, transplanted in 2017 from friends M & A’s garden to make way for a kitchen renovation.  Rather than see him relegated to the compost, we thought we’d try relocating him. For more, see Spiky the rescue lemon.

I’m enjoying friend M’s daily recounting of life in Covid-19 lockdown at Lockdown Wellington 2020. It’s such strange times. No point in me recounting my days. There’s very little variation from one day to the next to life in the bubble.  It’s a matter of hunkering down and getting through. Daily walks were a bit thin on the ground for me for the first couple of weeks or so, but now (because I have a step counter) I’m trying to get an average of 10,000 steps a day. Not too difficult. Even today, when I didn’t go for a walk, I managed over 6000 steps. And that’s because I spent a fair bit of the day in the garden, digging, lifting, shifting in my version of garden musical chairs.

I’m walking rather like tin woman tonight – a combination of today’s gardening on top of a bit of an overstretch (for me) of more than 14,000 steps on Wednesday (though I know that’s chicken feed to my cyclist and serious walker friends). But it wasn’t the step count, per se, that caused the aches but rather the endless steps down from Amritsar to Rangiora Street. I knew it would be tough on the knee but wasn’t quite so prepared for the effect on the calf muscles. Still, I’m grateful I could do it. If you want the details about the gardening musical chairs, check out Haphazard Gardener.

A day of remembrance tomorrow with Anzac Day. Among those we’re remembering is great Uncle George, my grandad’s brother who died in first world war. We have a memorial medallion with his name on it, as was given to all next of kin of service personnel who were killed in the first world war. So young.

Keep safe, everyone, and be kind.

 

 

My purple salvia is a star plant in the autumn garden. The bees, honey and bumble, are loving it. As soon as the sun’s out, they get busy. Impossible to get a photo that shows how many, but on a warm day like today, there’s at least thirty at any one time.

The salvia is crowding the path but I don’t want to cut it back while it has so many bees. This salvia (actually, there are a couple planted together) was transplanted to this sheltered position against the sunroom in spring 2018 and it has bloomed continuously since summer 2018/19. It didn’t take long to reach the eaves. It gets trimmed regularly to make the path useable, and it bounces back quickly. It’s easy to strike cuttings from the prunings. My guess is the parent salvia will be short-lived given its vigour, but hopefully I’ll have replacements growing elsewhere.