Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

Huh, season of cobwebs, slugs, and wet toes, more like!

Here are some of the cobwebs I found the other morning, on my "nursery" plants in the front yard:

Look at that! Layers of them!

What a lovely corner web - I have some of those in my hallway, ha ha!

Here's another lot, on a half-full tray of Fragaria -  layers and layers of them, all highlighted in the
morning mists.











Honestly, it made me feel such a lazy housekeeper... but a day or two later, they were all gone. Presumably destroyed by heavy rain, wind, and the general action of me tidying up the trays, moving plants around and so on.

As for the slugs, is it me, or are there more of them around than in previous years? I've been finding some monstrous orange ones lately, which I assume are too big for my garden's resident frog to get his chops around. He takes good care of all the little slugs, but this year I'm finding quite a few of the orange giants have made their way into my front yard.

And as for the wet toes: *sigh*, yes, it's that time of year again when I start complaining about the water from wet grass working through the toes of my leather work boots, and soaking my socks.

I've tried Dubbin, nikwax, beeswax, vaseline (I was desperate, ok?!) that stuff you get from Gore-Tex, and saddle-soap, and nothing keeps out the water. I just have to have a lot of pairs of boots on the go, so that I can change into dry socks and boots each lunchtime, stuffing newspaper into the wet pairs to help them dry out before the next day.

My latest hope is shoe polish - a kind person has just put a comment on my Dubbin post from October of last year, pointing out that dubbin is a leather conditioner and is not supposed to be a waterproofer, and suggesting that after dubbin or saddle-soap to clean and condition the boots, I should use a wax-based shoe polish on top, for waterproofing.

So I'll give that a go, and will report back in due course. In the meantime, if you have any further suggestions, do please add a comment! 

 

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!