Last Saturday, the temperature in our garden in the shade reached 44ºC - unbearable was one way to describe it! By 11:15am, when I would normally be turning up at the market in Baugé, people had mostly left and some stall holders were preparing to pack up and go home. It was suffocatingly hot. Overnight, it started to cool down, but (perhaps fortunately for us) we didn't get the big storms other areas suffered. Stories of golf and tennis ball size hail stones are becoming ordinary, although the damage they inflict on crops, buildings and cars remain traumatic for those impacted. We got our big(-ish) storm on Thursday evening. Enough thunder to worry one of the cats (a scaredy cat), lots of lovely rain and a weird coloured sky and sunset. You can see how much rain we got at home, but at The Shack, where we really needed water, just 5mm!
To keep flowers out of the reach of the beaks of the Garden Vandals and away from kitty bottoms, we grow a lot of our ornamental flowers in pots. For some things it works really well, other things suffer a bit. The giant Poundshop lily I bought last year (before Brexit restrictions) is doing well again, with the first flower now out. The agapanthus, probably my favourite flower of all, even more than orchids, have also been doing well, as they seem to love abuse! We have three pots of agapanthus, this is the middle flowering one.
The vegetable plots are starting to pull away now. I've started to lift odd potatoes - here is the booty from one, but I didn't dig it up, just robbed what I could find easily. The handful of mangetout pea seeds have produced several handfuls of mangetout pods already. The first aubergine has set and should be edible in a week or two. We have now had 5 courgettes, which is the same as we had all season last year, and the French beans will come on stream next week I think. The borlotti beans I sowed three weeks ago are now about a foot high, and there are about a dozen parsnips coming up which I sowed as an experiment. There are also plums and pears developing, as well as walnuts, so things are looking good, as long as we can avoid the killer hail.
While we no longer have an apricot tree, it is apparently a good year for the fruit, so yesterday I bought a tray of 5 kilos and made 22 pots of jam, or sunshine in a jar as some refer to it!
The trail camera was very quiet this week after all the visitors last week, with only one image captured and no video, so today I moved it on to a new position which may or may not be interesting. After that, it is going visiting at a friend's house, but I'll give it a couple of weeks on the new site first.
Anyway, that's the lot for today, more in July!
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