The 6am Garden

One cloudless day has led to another and then another.  The forecast is for this pattern to fade and for more unsettled weather towards the end of the week, with rain over the weekend.  We need it, and local farmers too are anxious.  We have had no rain for about three weeks but the old lane alongside the house, overgrown with ferns, grasses and wild flowers, is heavy with dew all the time.  Weather 'patterns' are a beautiful, poetic idea; I love the idea of the weather being 'unsettled' too, as if something so vast, so indifferent, could be uncertain or indecisive.  

We managed to have a couple of hours in the garden last night, planting basil and salads, getting in the last of the tomatoes and peppers.  A beautiful warm evening, an explosion of purples and deep pinks in the sunset over the Radnor Forest.  

I was up early this morning and took a walk around the garden.  Lots of swallows over the church, collared doves calling somewhere, the hedges alive with birds.   Yesterday there was a troop of swifts screaming around the church and over the lower village first thing in the morning; I watched their shadows on the old stone wall.  Swifts feed at different places at different times of the day, following the insects.  We see them here in the evening and the early morning, if we are up early enough.  

Still no sign of the camera - but I will find pictures soon!