Solar Eclipse fun

Excitement reached it's peak at Windy Acre this morning as the day of the Solar Eclipse dawned - worryingly with a hazy covering of cloud!

School has been gearing up for this over the last few days, with plans for the children to all observe the event by each class having it's own whiteboard outside with a large card and pinhole to project the image safely.  I found this brilliant and reassuring - there has been news that many schools in the country were instead intending to purposefully keep the children inside, as they were worried about the risks of them not doing as they were told, and looking at the sun with the naked eye.  Whilst I can appreciate their concerns and care, I still feel that this event is far too good an opportunity to miss - especially as a fitting finale to Science Week, which the school has also been really exploring in different and stimulating ways, judging by the reactions my own children have been bringing home all week.

First Contact happened shortly before we had to go to school, and the Engineer was suitably inspired enough to work from home today in order to enjoy the event himself...needless to say, before school he had already erected his Eclipse Viewing Station! However the cloud thickness was too much for our domestic viewing equipment - it was so thick that I was able to get a very sneaky quick glimpse with the naked eye (extremely naughty mummy - but the children didn't know I was doing it) and saw that first thrilling 'chunk' missing at about 8.45am.

Fortunately at 9.15 miraculously the clouds thinned - it was still quite hazy but at last enough to use our 'equipment'!!!

Professor engineer with his Solar Eclipse laboratory weapon of choice - the old pair of binoculars - which certainly gave us the largest and clearest image, without having to squint into a pinhole camera.  The mass of masking tape was the result of him trying to attach the binoculars to his camera tripod, in order to set up a hands-free system...but of course there was no successful way for us to line everything up - without looking at it with the naked eye!

Naturally, I got to use the less technical version...homemade pinhole camera made out of a cereal box...

...but it still worked really well!

Once the excitement was over, of course all his 'equipment' got dumped on the kitchen table for me to work around/tidy away.  Walking back into the room, seeing all this scattered across the table just made me think of a favourite film when I was younger - Short Circuit... "NO, no dis-assemble!!! Number 5 is ALIVE!!!"

No dis-assemble! A sorry end for the solar eclipse 

 But all good things must come to an end.  So back to the business of the day:

Eclipse over - I'm off out to carry on the rose pruning marathon.  Though perhaps I ought to change my weapon of choice?

Having 'got my eye in' over the last couple of days tackling the 'Paul's Scarlet Rambler' (well, I think that's what it is, anyway) which Grandma saw fit, in one of her moments of gardening insanity, to plant at the foot of the Magnolia "to brighten it up in the summer"...hmmm..., and also the Oldest Rose In The Garden, which I believe by a process of elimination, serious googling and general commonsense to be a Rosa 'Goldfinch', I gritted my teeth and took a slow and careful approach to pruning the climber on the archway.  A seriously prickly customer, hence the 'careful', but also quite precious to my heart.  And as it had flowered beautifully from May to November last year without hint of secateurs even having been waved near it last winter, I was a bit concerned that my attentions might possibly do more harm than good.  If in doubt, I turn to my ever reliable source of common sense advice: Helen Yemm, who told me to simply prune back all the flowered lateral shoots (eg the ones which were still showing hips, or the tattered remnants of them) back to 3-4 buds/or about 6 inches.  So that's what I did.  And nipped of a few dead tatty bits, though really there wasn't too much of that.  I did look carefully for the 'sucker-like new strong growth' which a healthy climber is supposed to produce from near it's base, and which we eager gardeners are to tie in lovingly to the support in order that it may replace an older stem which we can then gleefully remove...but I didn't find one. Horrors! Does this mean my lovely rosy pink wedding rose is not growing happily and healthily enough to want to produce one??? Must feed and nurture and generally adore it more obviously to make it feel loved and appreciated.

It was heartbreaking finally having to cut off all those fantastic hips.  Although, the birds never did seem to want to eat them, so either the winter hasn't been as bad as it seemed, or they are ridiculously spoiled by the smorgasbord of sunflower kernels, fat balls, peanuts and niger seed which I dilligently top up for them every week!

The rosy pink rose finally pruned, looking more like a bony catwalk model than her normal voluptuous self

 On this Spring Equinox day, I couldn't resist a quick picture of my spring tub just waiting to burst forth - I walk past it outside the kitchen door so many times every day - and I can't wait for those fat narcissi buds to open!

One of the half barrels planted up with rescued mixed narcissi I 'acidentally' dug up from the flower borders during last summer, along with a couple of feeble looking Primrose Bedder wallflowers and the forget-me-nots I scavenged from Hil's garden in the autumn - I had no annual forget-me-nots here a Windy Acre, can you believe that? Almost an impossibility, surely?  But no, Grandma's zero tolerance of 'weeds' had resulted very successfully in a total eradication.  So I begged for some from Hil - and hopefully from this year I will find them popping up all over the place here too, in the future.

Although the Primrose Bedder wallflowers I sowed in the veg patch seed bed germinated well, they haven't made terribly impressive looking plants.  I'm not sure what sort of a show we will get from them.  In contrast, the leftovers of the packet of Wallflower 'Vulcan' which came free with Gardens Illustrated a few years ago, germinated very patchily and I only got 3 plants to transplant in the autumn.  Fortunately I gave over the big barrel to them along with a couple of my honesty plants - which is lucky as they are now enormous, in rude health and the flower buds look extremely promising!

Wallflower 'Vulcan' looking delightfully promising

I shall round off with a couple of pictures of the ladies enjoying their afternoon constitutional in the warm sunshine, having recovered from the peculiar astronomical occurrences of this morning.  They were a bit perplexed by the dimming light, they all resorted to their late afternoon preening behaviour and huddled together inside Sandringham, although it didn't go dark enough here to send them to roost.

"Eclipse? What nonsense...Just an extra opportunity for a little late morning snooze"

 Well, I'm off to put all the cereals back into their boxes again...xxx