Garden at the beginning of August

I'm a week late this time, which is what comes of 1st August being a Monday and then going out several nights last week. I didn't go online much last week as I was out three evenings so am now frantically trying to get caught up with emails, blogs etc.

In the big picture I don't think the garden has changed that much. I've pulled up the sweet peas as I didn't keep on top of dead-heading them so they went to seed, plus looked rather manky! But the sunflowers are now in flower.

They're not huge ones, but it's probably the rocky start they had in life with very hot temperatures early on in the year. We've also had some beautiful gladioli come up - these were from a free offer in the paper.

And a bit of a squirrel problem. There is a huge walnut tree in the garden that backs onto ours and the squirrels have been assaulting it much earlier this year than last. If you go outside all you can hear is loud chomping noises from high up in the tree.

 And, as squirrels have no table manners whatsoever, bits of half-eaten walnut come raining down and end up all over the lawn, where they have to be raked up, else they clog up the lawn mower. Of course, the squirrels are also too thick to realise that they've now eaten most of next winter's food supply...

One of my evenings out last week was a trip over to ShinyNewThing who wanted to swop some of her sock yarn. I was keen on it as it's solid or semi-solid which should show up some stitch patterns nicely, so swopped it for a couple of balls of variegated sock yarn in my stash.

This is a skein of I knit or dye superwash merino sock and a skein of Natural Dye Studio Nymph (70% British Blue faced Leicester, 20% silk, 10% cashmere).

I had a great evening looking at her dollshouses (which were really cool, I should have taken some photos!) and she also gave me some windfall apples from her garden.

Combined with some rhubarb and raspberries from our garden, I made some of them into a crumble:

That's all for now. I've only got 2 evenings out next week so might get more time to catch up on blog reading soon...