Standing in the Fyne Place veggie patch early one morning, I wondered if the sun would ever rise again.
Then it dawned on me. It’s November, so chances of those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer returning for a pre-winter reprise are remote.
Until recently, we were worrying about our water supplies. Passing Loch Glascarnoch, between Ullapool and Garve, ironically in a downpour, low water levels revealed the old road and fields where they’d usually be under water.
Those doing energetic rain dances then might be regretting their over-enthusiastic tap-dancing now. This week’s deluges have turned our productive patch into a vegetable soup of mud and puddles. Runner beans are run down, kale keeled over, tatties tatty, chard anything but charred, onions obliterated and French beans now has-beens.
Sprouts and the plumber’s favourite, leeks, are thriving though, and our dual-cabbageway wouldn’t attract any environmental objections.
Scots have a great word for the mess, glaur, which matches the perfect word to describe the weather – dreich. No wonder David Shiach could be on to a winner with his new Green House garden centre at Aberdeen’s Bon Accord shopping mall, believed to be the first of its kind in the country.
Browsing plants indoors when on a shopping trip to the city is a blooming good idea, especially at this time of year, and given the growing interest in gardening he could soon, if you’ll pardon the pun, be raking it in.
I like the late autumn with its amazing colours, gin-clear skies, migrating geese overhead and cosy evenings indoors watching TV programmes about the outdoors. During one, my mind wandered and I unwisely opined on an unrelated conundrum that suddenly struck me. How did American Football get its name when of the 45 players ready to play in each team, only one guy actually gets to kick the ball? The rest just chuck it around and bash into each other. Shouldn’t it therefore be called American Handball?
My irrelevant intervention was predictably unwelcome so I retreated quietly to contemplate it elsewhere.
My enjoyment of the pre-winter period is, however, tempered by the explosion of Christmas advertising from mid-October. It’s almost too much to bear.
In one shop Noddy Holder was already belting out “It’s Chriiiistmaaaas” over the loudspeaker system. My temptation to scream “Noooo, it (expletive deleted) isn’t” in retaliation was so overwhelming that I left before being asked to do so.
The first political party to pledge a manifesto ban on annual Christmas promotions until December 1 will get my vote. Perhaps.
Barely have the last bangs and flashes of this weekend’s firework displays left animals everywhere shaking in fright, it’s full ahead to advent. We haven’t had fireworks at Fyne Place, though, except when Mrs F discovered I’d failed to remove my glaur-caked wellies when popping indoors for a quick warming coffee.
The footprints were undeniable. No, not those on the carpet from my clarty wellies but those from the impact of her seemingly steel toe-capped slip-ons on my posterior.
I was going to show her the marks but she wisely decided that was one flash too many. Who chose light-coloured carpets anyway? A clue – it wisnae me.
Despite the weather, it was exciting to see the formal opening this week of the new community garden in Stonehaven’s Market Square. I love seeing new green spaces being created, no matter how small.
Gardens do us all good, and the climate, too. I just hope the vacuous vandals who seem to reside in every community leave it alone and allow folk to enjoy the space and the lovely plants. If not, the garden’s creators should also build a set of stocks in the Square into which perpetrators could be locked. Then everyone could bring their rotting and decaying waterlogged veg and hurl it at them. I’ll be first in the queue.
The subsequent residue could then be collected and converted into valuable compost for local gardens. Brilliant. Eat your heart out, Greta, an innovative and growing green revolution is alive and thriving in north Scotland.
OK, wellies on again, I’m heading outside to spread wonderful homemade organic compost on our Fyne Place soil. Yes, I’m doing my bit for global worming, too.