The last week and a half  covered three of the four seasons: Fall was left out. It was close to freezing at night, so I covered my three rows of potatoes with more earth - good for them anyway, encouraging more potatoes. I covered the tomato plants with fleece. Other things: they could live or they could die, up to them.

I had planted seeds in the greenhouse and had little plants: all dead. I went to my favorite garden shop and bought six different kinds of tomatoes, which I put out, and an assortment of squash and pumpkins. They stayed in the greenhouse until yesterday, when I put them out on the allotment.

Suddenly, it’s summer.

I've got a vase full of bearded iris upstairs; a pale mauve iris, not my favorite but I only had two of the purple ones. Several years ago, I had purple, mauve, yellow, white. Somehow, the mauve now dominate.

Raspberries are full of weeks but they can handle it. The onions and shallots are also full of weeds, and they can't.

Along the edges of the allotment and the back garden, I've left blooming wild flowers. For the bees. This includes stinging nettles at one place on the allotment - I hate them but some butterfly or moth requires them. I'm giving away rhubarb; too much for us to eat and I don't have time to cook anyway.

I just watered the back garden. The backgarden is full of things in bloom and bud. One section has one of my favorite roses, a species rose, Rosa Glauca rubrifolia. It has reddish grey stems, small greyish green leaves and star like tiny blossoms. It's grown for its stems - arching, graceful. I've had it years and it's lived in different places, including a pot. Now it's got assorted geraniums - some with small black flowers, others white, around it. The geranium (which is not the perlargonium whose popular name is geranium) are tough shade-tolerant plants that tolerate poor soil, abuse, lack of sun. If they are treated with a modicum of care, they are good ground cover for a shady spot. While I was watering that section of garden, the bit had half a dozen bees, very interested in the geraniums. There are two blooming lilac bushes next to them, and they ignored the lilac. I'd think they'd prefer lilac - so many tiny blooms so close together.

Bees do what bees do.

The cherry tree is full of cherries. So is the area under it. Green, half developed cherries - the birds, I think. Every year, we have two wood doves that live near by. They spend a lot of time visiting my back garden, and the territorial asserting coos of the wood dove is part of the scene. Then the cherries ripen. Masses of starlings swoop in, devour every cherry in an afternoon. The doves complain but numbers defeat mass.

It's very untidy, but I rather like that. I've got one small patch of grass.

If I can figure out how to post pictures, I will.

So it's all a question of priorities, and currently the garden and allotment are demanding. The house is filthy. The floor can be vacuumed tomorrow; the garden won't wait. I'm living on tinned soup for lunch and cold cereal for breakfast. We're having sausages, boiled potatoes and tinned beans for supper. Cooking, too, is a low priority.

It's been a very satisfactory day.