Here we are home. Good week – although not much knitting, despite resolutions, and the garden is far too dry.

Funny, because Perthshire had newsworthy flash floods the day before we drove up. We passed sandbags in Milnathort (which had featured in the television news), and in Strathardle itself (a short strath, as straths go) there was a “Police Slow” sign followed by 100 yards of streaks of mud on the road. But we were, and are, bone dry, and the burn is very low. The weather kept promising rain during the week, and then wandering off and forgetting to do it. It was only on Friday that I really hunkered down and started carrying gallons of the stuff to my poor vegetables. It’s heavy.

Freed of grass-cutting (at an expense which continues to horrify my husband) I find plenty of strength for vegetable-growing, and again spent the time digging weeds out of long-neglected corners and edges and reveling in the tidiness of the result.

There is still much disappointment – a row of carrots and another of beets so sparse (thanks to the slugs, I’m sure) that neither will produce even a plateful. And, of course, no salsola soda whatsoever. I re-sowed, although experience teaches that seeds-in-July rarely if ever succeed.

On the very substantial other hand, the garden is on stream. We’re eating. The lettuces I bought in last time have flourished. We had daily salads, augmented with my own rocket/arugula. We had another sorrel soup. We had two meals with mange-tout peas. Next weekend, when the Greeks are here, we should have real peas, and will certainly have the wherewithal to attempt a summer pudding. (Recipes are all like the one in the link – but my husband is adamant that the fruit should be red currants only.)

The climbing beans are climbing – and the runner beans are in bloom. Surely there will be some beans by Games Day? I usually enter the “collection of four vegetables” class (took a Second, once) and the object is to be able to do it without including potatoes. That I rarely achieve, but with runner beans I might make it.

Knitting

Despite sloth, I am well advanced with the second sleeve of the Child’s Cardigan, and should advance still further today. I must have knit most of the Princess under the influence of cider, but don’t feel that lace grafting is compatible with it now. That’s for tomorrow.

I was touched to find how many people have been following her progress. I don’t feel any exultation in having nearly-finished. I miss her. Those last few repeats were like coming to the end of a book – my first reading of “Brideshead Revisited” is the example I can think of – which you want to go on reading forever.

I must have some lace, and I think James’s jabot is the direction to go. The cashsilk is here. Far too busy a week looms to think of going to Leith and looking at jabots at Kinloch Anderson, but I could try charting a Christine Duchrow jabot in modern terms and having a wee shot at it.