You've been googled ...

A couple of weeks ago, Robin of A Bumble Bee Garden suggested that people post about the weird and wonderful queries that people enter into Google to end up on their blogs. I've had a look at mine and most of them are a bit predictable - balcony garden or balcony gardening obviously tops the list, with balkony plants as a variation. On Google that would have merited a snooty Do you mean ...? but in fact it came from Yahoo! who have obviously just given up on expecting the world to spell correctly and simply sigh resignedly as they tell you We have included balcony plants results ...

Some of the queries did link straight to posts I could identify. A lot of people seem to be searching for the book Curious Incidents in the Garden at Night-Time at the moment, which I wrote about last January. (A super book - put it on your wish list for Christmas if you've not already read it.) I was also pleased to be able to help the person who googled What would bury a chicken egg in my garden? I know that one - it's a fox.

Not surprisingly, given the time of year, a lot of people are currently searching for Christmas Quiz, and ending up at the quiz I did last year. I was slightly puzzled by the person who wanted a Christmas Quiz for Older People. Since then I've been racking my brains to try and think of suitable Christmas questions for the over fifties. What's the worst weather for Father Christmas' arthritis? perhaps. Rain, dear. ... And talking of Christmas Quizzes, I've decided that the Balcony Garden Christmas Quiz should become a tradition, so watch this space. But don't think you're going to get away with the easy-peasey questions we had last year. I've got some goodies up my sleeve for this one ...

Back to the search engines. Without doubt the best query of all was from someone who wanted Sex in the beatiful grden (sic). Whaat? if you tried having sex on my balcony you'd find yourself performing to an audience of the three hundred or so people who live in the block directly opposite. I puzzled about this one for a bit - but yes, I then realised I had written about sex. I wonder if the person who googled was really interested in the mating habits of the leopard slug ...

Weird weather we've been having...

As I said in my last post, marigolds blooming in December is a sure sign that the weather must be mild, though it's hard to be sure as I can't find a complete list of temperatures for this month so that I can compare them with official averages. It's not been all warm weather though - there was one day when it plunged about ten degrees overnight - just the sort of drop that plants don't like. And we also had three days of torrential rain - not unusual for Milan in November. It never drizzles here. We go for months without a drop, and then when it does come it just pours and pours, so that roads flood, cellars flood and occasionally so does the underground, causing chaos everywhere.

But the strangest event this month was towards the middle of the month when the foehn suddenly hit. The foehn is a warm wind that comes across the mountains - warm because as the air drops down the side of the mountain, the increasing atmospheric pressure heats it up. It produces gusts of wind than can get quite strong. this time it got up to around 90km per hour in some places, and was about 80 when it hit Milan.


It had been fine when I went to work in the morning - but when I came out at lunchtime I had to fight my way through it to get home to my son, who was home from school sick that day. The wind had blown away all the smog, so there was a bright blue sky, warm sunshine and in the background you could see the Alps - something which only happens when it's windy enough to clear the pollution. The strongest of the winds happened just after I got home. The trees in the garden had just reached the peak of their autumn colours, so of course the leaves were ready to come off, and there was what would have been a wonderful photo of trees bent double and the air full of a stream of leaves blowing from left to right across the garden. Needless to say, the batteries in my camera were dead.


When I next went out on the balcony it was ankle deep in leaves, and I'm still finding them tucked behind the occasional pot.


Will the warm weather go on? The forecasts say no and that we're not going to have a mild winter again like last year. We'll see. The temperature has dropped, but it was still nine degrees out there this morning. If we do get normal temperatures, I should need to cover everything with fleece in about ten days. last year I didn't really need to at all, and although I did cover things as a precaution while I was away for Christmas, the fleece came off pretty soon afterwards. This year who knows. We shall see.