It's not pretty

There isn't much prettiness left in my garden now. The tomatoes are hanging on, dripping with dew or rain depending on the time of day, ripening oh so slowly. The autumn raspberries are small and fidgety. Pears are full and heavy. There's a spider in his web between the fence and the bin. He has until Tuesday when the bins need to go out. He's already done some excellent running repairs, possibly even a whole new web. All those hours of work, I do hate to break a spider's web.

What can I say about this petunia?

It's called Vanilla Raspberry Star. When I bought it it had a few flowers in the deepest purple imaginable. One or two of them had tiny hint of a pale stripe, but they were mostly dark, dark, dark. Fast forward a couple of months and it's absolutely covered in these mad gaudy stripey things. Fine if that was what I had planned, but it's in a pot with a deep red dianthus and a pink geranium (photo above the chillies) and to be honest it's all a bit much. One of those gardening surprises. I'm used to it now, but it's certainly eye-catching.

I was going to do some sort of fancy collage effect to tone down the pictures a bit but it seems that Picmonkey now require money from me for such things. I shall have to look elsewhere. Any suggestions blogging friends?

I have been writing like mad this week, in fact I should really be writing now but you know how it is. The biggest boy peered over my shoulder. 'That's bad grammar, you've started the sentence with a subordinate clause.' Huh? They didn't teach that sort of thing in my day. No idea what one is. I defended myself gamely. 'I'm going for a more colloquial feel.' 'You can't, it's bad grammar. Let me just change it for you.'  Next he told me that wormeries was not a word. I googled it. 'It IS a word, look, "Wriggly wiggler wormeries, Wormeries for sale, Worms suitable for wormeries", IT'S A WORD.' I need a room of my own.

The autumn feel has kicked in properly now. It's all apple crumble, muddy football boots and a damp dog. His short legs mean that his dear little tummy (can you tell he's asleep right now?) gets soaked in the grass every time we go out. I debated putting a warm hot water bottle under his basket to dry him out. I managed not to, but once it gets properly chilly you know I will. I'd get him one of those nice plug-in heat mats if I thought he wouldn't destroy it in five minutes flat.

We are locked in battle over the pond at the moment. Did I tell you about when he fell in at 11.15pm? We'd popped out last thing to look at the grass and as usual the frogs had started plopping in the pond at the sight of us. He was intrigued and thought he'd have a look. I went into the kitchen hoping he'd follow. There was a god-almighty splash. I ran back to the garden. There he was on the grass, dripping pond weed.

It turned out when I looked the next day that in scrambling out he'd knocked some slates into the pond. While I was putting them back I thought I'd might as well clear it out. This is one of my least favourite garden jobs, what with all the Things lurking in the bottom and frogs jumping out all over the place. I took out the iris which had grown huge as well as the water lily and put back small pieces, just two little clumps of iris in fact. Ever since then he has been pulling them out of the pond about five times a day. He was banned from the garden today, but had still managed to get a clump out before 7am. I've cut all the leaves off but it doesn't deter him. He hasn't beaten me yet though. Every time he pulls them out, I put them back in. Who will win? As we used to say in the casino, place your bets please.