Before we get onto that, a word on chickens. Muck left us for the chicken run in the sky - brown chickens never seem as robust as other types, so we watch Brass with a certain concern. Currently we are home to 7 fowl - Delenn the Doyenne shown below, demonstrating that you don't have to be young and agile to get to roost on the high perch, old, creaky and fat can do it too. Then there is Brass, and Mac and Jak the newbies for this year, Bridie the freeloading bantam, and The Asylum Seeker from next door. I was a bit concerned to find another of next door's marching around the garden just now when I popped out for some bay leaves - we are not going to be a sanctuary for discontented chickens!
British visitors are starting to turn up in the Pays de la Loire, as restrictions ease and a pent up need to visit their properties becomes overwhelming. It is lovely to see them, although we panic about getting gardens just so in the days before they arrive. I was doing one garden, and had time to stop to admire a bank of some sort of pea flower along the side of a lake, and a yellow wagtail marching up and down the landing stage (believe me, that is what it is, the photo is just fuzzy). Monday night the President will make announcements and that may stop the tide again - and not exactly a tide, just a few more faces in the area!
We've found evidence of very welcome visitors to The Garden in the past week. I do not see them when I visit, well I make a noise and am generally accompanied by cats, so have to find other ways to know they are there. In the photos below are two different thrush anvils and the shells of the snails they have beaten out of them. It is so great to see that, as I've not seen a real live thrush for ages, and they are such beautiful and useful birds.
The promise of good things to come includes something else I've never seen before. The sweet chestnuts are in flower and normally the flowers are high up so you see the long tails of essentially male flowers with their fluffy petals, and if you are a hayfever sufferer with a problem with tree pollen, you tend to suffer too. But get up close and personal, and you can also see the female flowers, miniature spiny cocoons where the nuts will form during the next three months. The first sweetcorn are also starting to produce male flowers (round here castrating maize is a thing, but I'm not going to bother), and signs of where the cobs will start forming very soon - that makes me hungry and yearn for them to get on with it!! Finally the sweet peppers (or bell peppers) are in flower and I've spotted some tiny fruits too, so that will be something else yummy soon. Ideally a bit of sun and the tomatoes will start to ripen too!
We've been working on a flower border in the garden, filling it mainly with things we have rescued from compost heaps or have been sitting in pots for ages or packets of seeds that seemed like a good idea at the time, with the honourable exception of the Fergus Memorial Rose. On the left is an early shot, on the right, how it is looking today - full of flowers for bees and insects and full and blousy.
Finally a gratuitous photo of one man and his favourite machine making a noise this morning during the window of opportunity for using loud machines. Useless scrub has been pushed back for a day or two.
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