Garden of Galadriel

The power cord on my laptop got slightly damaged at the plug; it got to the point where I had to hold it bent in a certain way for it to feed power in to my computer. I looked it up on the internet to see if it could be fixed and got all sorts of advice about it; one person suggested that a new cord should be wrapped in electrical tape immediately upon purchase so as to avoid this problem altogether (which turns out to be a very common one). Another suggested replacing the straight head with an L-shaped one, for more stability. I personally wondered why laptops are even sold with straight heads when they are obviously so flimsy. So I described to Partner all that I had learned and I left him alone with it for half an hour, and he fixed it. I now have an L-shaped head and a cord that is reinforced with several layers of electrical tape. And it required no purchases; he already had the L head laying about somewhere and with surgical precision severed the old one and grafted the new one in its place. I think anyone could have done it--even me--it was so easy.

I went for a walk in the local forest a few days ago. It is, in fact, a very small forest, but nice enough to have all sorts of little woodland flowers. My favorites were the tiny violets, but I was also happy to see the bluebells just beginning to flower. The hawthorns also were flowering in profusion: all covered in white. I have a couple of them in my back yard but mine aren't in flower yet. I got very tired on the way home, but I think it'd be nice to go back in a few weeks when the bluebells are really on a roll.

On the whole it has been a very dry April so far here. I'm actually hoping for plenty of rain for the rest of the month, so my plants get the headstart they need. Being a very rainy nation in general, I have been surprised how nonwet this spring has been. I've actually had to water my veg a few times already this month. Though I shouldn't be too surprised. For the last several years, it has been dry in the spring and wet in the summer--hence my failure at growing tomatoes: when they needed water it wasn't there, and when they needed sun they got rain. Last night we got a bit of precipitation; I can only hope it leads to more. Below are my tray of rainbow chard seedlings, and my latest batch of broad beans. I have taken to planting beans in rolled up newspaper tubes--easy and biodegradable.