My gardening companions

That's me above taking a creative break,

and that's Dad below, busy as always!

It is just my second day of "work" and I have already dug a plot as big as most people’s whole garden, ibut this is but a drop in the ocean here at home with my Dad.

But every little helps and as the Indian summer continues the drop in the ocean will get bigger.

Dad, who turned eighty=three last week, is in his old railway overalls somewhere else in the garden. I haven’t been able to find him for a while now, I think he is up one of my childhood apple-tree hideaways.

He isn’t actually hiding, he is picking apples with the help of the net on a stick that I brought him from Germany. There is a bumper crop this year with eaters big enough to eat and bramleys that are huge and taste delicious stuffed with sultanas and popped in the microwave for a few minutes.

Yes, as you may have guessed my wish came true. I got my Indian Summer and my holiday, I think. I have been working quite hard since I arrived but I am loving it.

It makes a nice change to go to bed with a tiredness caused through hours of digging and weeding and working in the garden alongside my Dad, rather than a tiredness caused by thinking and talking and shifting cumbersome wooden furniture. And what I find even better is to be so dirty at the end of the day that all the clothes go in the washing machine while I wallow in the bath.

Apart from my Dad my garden companions are lots and lots of the ladybirds that are out in large numbers basking in the sunshine. A butterfly sometimes flutters by, a one-legged grasshopper tried his hardest to hop along the way, and there is occasionally a buzz of a huge bumble bee inspecting my work, but it is the ladybirds, really out in force, and dozing off between the weeds, that keep catching my attention and distracting me from the digging!