Last Saturday the weather changed, and summer arrived very quickly and very firmly. No rain and temperatures up to 30ºC by Sunday and through the week, so much so in fact, that I had to mow a lawn in the morning, as while there was still some dew, it would be too hot to mow in the afternoon, when shade temperatures reached 34ºC, and you aren't always in the shade when mowing. The farmers also took advantage of the window of hot, sunny weather to get the wheat, barley, oat and colza crops in and the straw baled. As Benoit, purveyor of fine milk, butter and cream pointed out, once bailed, the straw was safe. Our weird garden cactus decided it was time to flower and the Poundshop Lily finally bloomed - all very beautiful (and smelly in the case of the lily). The blue hibiscus at Chinon was also looking very glamorous.
The hot weather coincided with Mac going broody - I've never had a black chicken do that before! Bridie does it at least twice a year, but she is a freeloading bantam, Mac is one of my good chickens, or so I thought. Actually she is nicer than Dummer used to be, so while I wear gauntlets to lift her out of the coop, she isn't so savage in her attacks. She wanders around the garden looking for bugs, and aggressively preening her wing feathers at us, while making the chuntering sounds you hear from velociraptors in Jurassic Park films. Her eye might look odd in the photo, but it is totally fine, she was just caught badly and I didn't get another picture as good.
Anyway, one chicken broody means one less egg each day, and having to fight for those there are, so it is a pain. Sudden heat means the weather isn't totally stable, and of course on Friday evening it broke. The gusts of wind knocked over the lily, breaking off one of the flower stems - that is now in a beer bottle on the outside kitchen window ledge (we couldn't have it indoors as it smelt so strong, and lily pollen can be fatal to cats). Since Saturday morning we have had another 9mm of rain, and that is before counting how much fell this afternoon during the monsoon between 3pm and 5pm. All that makes the following comments and photo inevitable - blight! The tomato plants are laden with fruit, but how much will ripen before the plants succumb completely remains to be seen. I've picked two near ripe tomatoes and more are colouring up, but these two are nearly ripe, and yet riddled with blight and inedible and can't even be added to the compost or they will spread the disease. I could be making an awful lot of chutney, except that you need other ingredients and I am not going to waste my shallots on jars of chutney that won't get eaten.
Once I had removed most of the affected leaves and fruit, I took a few more photos of the vegetable plots to try to inspire myself again. Here is the sweetcorn looking impressive and with climbing beans planted among them as recommended by the Radio 2 gardeners, the butternut squashes that survived the snails starting to look business-like and the big square with newly planted brassicas, the tomatoes, peppers and aubergines (the latter two hidden in the main by tomatoes).
The tomato news, a pretty vile weather forecast for the next week and a wet weekend drove us to drink. Tant pis!
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