It has been a beautiful Autumn weekend. We slept well in the cool night, enjoyed the first Sugar Baby watermelon with grapes and zucchini fritters for lunch, and felt very lucky to be here. Monarch butterflies are floating around and the bees are enjoying the late summer flowers. The vegetable garden is doing as well as can be expected, so I concentrated on planting the first of my bulb orders in this perfect sunny weather.
100 fragrant mixed daffodil bulbs, 20 Pheasant’s Eye daffs (daffodil recurvus), and 50 Ixias were planted close to the house in the lime tree garden yesterday. We expanded this garden last month by spreading a thick layer of compost over the grass. It takes regular weeding to get rid of the buttercup and weedy grasses, so the planting involved lots of digging out of weeds, but I don’t want to kill the grass by spraying and the weeds are much easier to remove after they grow into the compost.
Today I had freesias and some more scented daffodils, ‘Grand Monarch’ to plant in the Coral Garden. I decided to renovate the stone path at the same time and add some new rocks, since I now have a nice large pile of them. 
This went well until the last stone, which fell the wrong way and a bit too close to the one next to it, trapping my middle finger in between. Luckily I was wearing leather gloves, so although I have spent the rest of the afternoon with my arm in the air clutching an ice pack, and my finger is going to be black and bloody looking for a while, we didn’t have to do a sudden decamp to the hospital.
My Bionic Woman gloves definitely saved the day. These are my favourite gloves and I love the name too, although I actually have to buy the men’s size to get a pair that fits my fairly average fingers. (The women’s sizes have shorter fingers, no matter what size you get.) I’m always mystified when I hear people asserting that they never wear gloves when gardening. I love messing around in mud with my bare hands but even run of the mill scratches and thorns can make the week uncomfortable.
In this case we were all thankful that I was wearing them.
Mac the dog is concerned. I think he is thinking though, that if I had spent some time thinking about him this afternoon, instead of digging up rocks that were already perfectly well buried, he wouldn’t have had to dig up the raised bed himself so that he could eat the yummy purple cabbages which were just sitting there being wasted.
Left handed packdown has been slow, instead of the usual breakneck pace and actually kind of enjoyable.
I’m sorry the images will be a bit slow to load, downsizing them requires too many fingers for right now. 🙂
Absent Gardener 
Poor you; I hope your fingers recover soon. I usually wear gloves but my hands still seem to get very dirty!!!!
Yes I am forever trying to get dirt from under my nails. These gloves do up tightly at the wrist, so my hands stay cleanish until I forget to put them on or wear holes by scratching away at the dirt. What I really need is some kind of instant clawed hands… 🙂
Oh, major ouch! I hope you heal quickly, Cath. Let’s hope the new design is worth the price paid. 🙂 I’m a big fan of good gloves, as they keep the worst off my skin.
Mac is a cutie!
He is cute 🙂 I couldn’t believe he got up in the raised beds to snack on the old cabbages. I usually give him the stems of broccoli and cabbage and he treats them like a bone, but I’m not sure about him helping himself. Thank you, I hope it will be better soon too. Not hurting much so that’s hopeful.
Bad luck with the rock. Mac does look concerned and probably feels he could do a better job giving it a good lick rather than using the strange smelling human bandages. Amelia
True, he would. He often tries to remove my earrings, getting his little front teeth right underneath both sides.
I love those gloves as well and have destroyed numerous pairs, my dog likes to take the gloves on trips round and round the back yard, I have to be careful he doesn’t grab them off my hands. Your fruit looks magnificent.
Haha Mac is the same. He loves to steal either gloves or socks where they’ve been shed at the door and runs around the yard tossing them in the air and growling before settling down and pretending to chew them. (Or really chewing them if he is being naughty)
I wish they sold single Right hand gloves, I have so many orphaned Lefts. I try to remember to use a trowel but fingers are often so much better.
Same here and I will be finding gloves buried around for years to come.
The opening of your post was idyllic, fruits sound wonderful. Then bulb planting and dreams of scented daffodils then wham squashed finger, ouch! I felt your pain. I never garden without gloves, too much of a softy. Hope the finger is better soon!
Thank you for the good wishes. It is healing amazingly quickly, which is lucky since 2 more orders of bulbs have arrived this week 🙂