Every Picture: Mossy Tales

God! This daily blogging is tough. So hard to think of a fresh idea. I have been working on a post about living beside the moss but it needs a bit of research, especially as I cannot even find what the bloody place is even called. I have a faint idea I might have researched it before and that it might even be on this very blog! Time to research Nelly's Very Own Garden.

Just took a break to drink tea, eat a pear and watch Archer. But before that I researched my own blog to see if I could find out the actual name of our very own homeplace bog. Didn't find it. But I did find these pictures....

It was 2006 and I was taking a walk in the moss when I discovered a miniature rhubarb plant. I was astonished as I'd never before seen rhubarb growing there. Surely the growing medium would be far too acidic. Bert didn't believe me so next time we were in Drumkeeran we went searching for it.

Bert has a little nibble. Definitely rhubarb. I never saw it again and it remained a puzzle until, six years later, I met Bobby.

Bobby is Lord O'Neill's man on the ground, the mossy ground, to be precise. The day I met him he was admiring a patch of narcissi that he'd planted the previous autumn. He told me that his wife was throwing the bulbs out so he thought he'd plant them in the moss to see how they'd do. Now, as far as I know, he just got the one year out of them as I never saw them again. I did ask him If he'd ever tried rhubarb and he said he had but it hadn't made much of a plant. The mystery solved!

The next picture has absolutely nothing to do with horticultural experiments in peat bogs but it was taken in the moss, not Lord O'Neill's side but Paddy Heffron's.

Kerry, a sweet little dog that belonged to our friend John F. She's long gone now for this photo was taken in 2004. It was one of a number of pictures taken around that time that disappeared in a computer crash. I'd forgotten it was stored on my blog.

Here's another that I saved taken that same day.

Kerry and Paddy, Heffron's Moss, 2004. Kerry was such a lively little thing.

Update

So there was Nelly, wondering if she could get away with not cleaning the curtains before the wake, and there was Pearlie, off her meds and existing on a few sips of water a day. Then on Saturday night she asks for a cup of water. This is a woman who hasn't willingly touched water since the last day she worked in the moss, probably about a quarter of a century ago. It was a tradition among the Orrs to quaff large quantities of sweet spring water on the return from a day working with turf. T'was handy that they had their own spring. You'd be thinking about that first drink of water the whole way home from Craig's Moss.

So, she asks for a cup of water,

....and a cup of warm tea. And apple juice and Lucozade. Have you any orange squash? And if there's anything else you have about you.

Since then she has been drinking well. And do you know what? I think she might be on the mend.