Flooding in Stirling

But, d’you know something? I am so disappointed I wasn’t in Stirling at the time of the thunderstorm, because I simply just love thunderstorms! My heart goes out to the businesses affected by the water though, particularly those on Port Street! I hope the council finally realises that planting more trees and shrubs and keeping the drains empty are the way to prevent this from happening again and again. It’s not the first time this has happened, either - a while back during another particularly heavy rainfall, Stuart and I happened to look out of the shop’s window in time to see a lady wading through ankle deep water, struggling to get into her car (in fact, we took a picture of it and there she is on the right. Hope she didn’t mind!).

We had flooding once as well in Glendevon. The river Devon burst its banks and several cabins close to the river were flooded. If memory serves, that was back in the winter 2011 - the heavy snow we had, melted because of a spell of heavy rain, so we were hit with a double whammy of water! That was years ago and lots of trees have been planted on the hills since then - and the river has never been as high as it was at that time. Thankfully our cottage has never been affected by water, it runs past our house, but we do need to be wary of high winds, especially ones from the west. We’ve had several constructions (including a greenhouse!) blown away by strong winds since we moved there, but you live and learn; our chicken house has been built at the side of our house, safe and sheltered from the wind.

The vegetable garden seems to be slow this year and it’s going to be a disastrous year for root vegetables. In my first lot of carrots only one germinated! I have sown them again, but I’m going to have to be patient to see if these will germinate and if they will grow at all. The parsnips are the same; only a few came up and even the radishes haven’t done much.

Something that is growing though, are the leafy vegetables! I don’t think I’ve ever had this many salads, and the white and red cabbages are on a roll too. I can even start harvesting kale, in the middle of summer! Mind you, kale is not solely a winter vegetable, it grows all year round (like carrots) but because it is a hardy, leafy vegetable we tend to eat it only during winter time.

Unfortunately the runner beans and French beans are not doing much outside, either. Something’s been munching on the shoots; the weather’s been too cold for them and now I’m left with only a couple of plants of each of them.

Good job I can still go to the supermarket for my veggies, something our ancestors couldn’t!

My husband insisted to include ‘Pepe’ the pigeon in the blog, so here goes:

About a week ago, our cat found a racing pigeon sitting in the garden, budging to fly. Thankfully I noticed it too and rescued it from the cat. But because it was a ringed racing pigeon I kept it in a little box with some grains (from the chickens) and water until it was fit enough to fly off again, which it did late at night. I really wanted to keep it, not for racing of course, but because it was such a cute little thing! However, I reported it to the ‘lost racing pigeon’ website and someone phoned me to tell it came from Newcastle, but probably flew from either France or Brighton and got blown too far north! Poor thing....