Rural Life

Normal service is resumed

In fact, as I really need to cover two weeks of excitement and rural stuff, this could be a bit longer than normal!

The week Huguette died and the week after were mostly lovely autumn weather.  This meant I could do a few useful autumn things like make jam.  My Mum's tree was about the only peach tree with much fruit on it, and as they are very dark fruited peaches (almost black if you get a good one), the resulting jam was a rich, dark pink colour.  We got 12 and two half pots of jam, both half pots have already been eaten, plus five jars of quince jelly from the tree in the garden (no photos of the jelly though).

Today has been spent gathering in excess of 150 kilos of juicing apples for our appointment at the fruit press tomorrow.  We could have gathered more, but a couple of years ago we discovered the joys of single variety apple juice - pretentious, nous?  Anyway, we wanted to do that again, as the juice from these apples (probably Canada variety or similar) is not as sweet as a mixed variety juice can be.  You know what next week's blog is going to be about therefore, but here is a tree before it was picked, and here is our helper.

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Huguette wasn't the only one to leave us in September, with a close neighbour also bowing out.  His house is now shut up while the family wait for the French equivalent of probate to be sorted out, but the geraniums he tended outside his house are still going strong and a lovely memory of him.

September is a good month for views if the weather is suitable.  We had a run of magnificent sunsets, so after a bit of fiddling, I managed to get my camera phone to get this image, which is pretty dramatic I think.  Morning views of the church are much easier, although the angles are wrong to avoid the neighbour's laundry.  Why not wait for a day with no laundry?  They don't exist, even when it is raining.  I think they don't have wardrobes, so the clothes line is a place to store clothes they aren't wearing.

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The badgers at the Wildflower Meadow are getting prepared for winter.  They have cleaned out tunnels and done a bit more excavating - probably without planning permission.  As the ground where they live is pretty chalky, it isn't subtle when they decide that set maintenance is what needs to be done.  If you look closely at the second photo, you can see paw prints in the excavations too.  

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As the fruit comes to an end, nuts start to catch our attention.  At the Garden, we have three big trees, then there are another four in the Orchard, and a couple more on the edge of the Wildflower Meadow.  We suspect that if we stopped doing any maintenance, the whole area would be taken over by elderberry, walnut, bramble and old man's beard.  Anyway, the area below the good two trees in the Garden has been close mown to make it easier to collect them, while it is possible to see them starting to emerge from their cases on the low branches.  I picked up 5 nice clean nuts this afternoon, but that is just the start!

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The weather has now turned, after the amazing sunshine and clear skies.  Soon I will be ripping up the sweetcorn and the faded tomato plants, trying to ripen off the small butternut squashes and thinking about sowing broad beans for next year.  It feels like we haven't really had a summer this year, and that autumn has been with us for a couple of months now, with cyclamen in the lawn, and falling leaves.  The rewards of autumn are of course sweet chestnuts, fresh walnuts, mushrooms and preparing for the year end festivities.  I expect to be making Christmas puddings next weekend - watch this space!

 

 

Chickens and sun worshipping

Apologies for the delay and also, in advance, for the somewhat light nature of this update.  They are related I guess, as yesterday there was a Birthday Event, which took some managing and also most of yesterday.  When you are 90/91, a year makes a huge difference, plus Covid makes everything so much more special.  In August 2020, you could have 10 round a dining table at a restaurant, while the Birthday Girl was also able to walk a bit.  Not a vast distance, so she was driven down to the restaurant 250m away from her front door, but she could make it the 30m to the dining table, and remembered to wear a mask on the way in (not so much on the way out).  Then it was warm and sunny enough to sit in the garden, partake of more fizz and cake and carry on having fun.

This year we have Pass Sanitaire, and I think restaurant tables are still limited to 6 places.  More importantly, home has changed and the rules around entering a nursing home are strict and include the Passe Sanitaire.  Mobility has decreased, while the capacity of my car has not increased, so a restaurant or a picnic was not possible (the latter also as it was rather cool and windy).  Instead there were four of us round a bed, slurping the finest fizzy rosé Saumur (Ackermann) can produce, while scoffing a range of patisseries and talking about old times. 

Anyway, what else has been going on?  Two different forms of sun worshipping were spotted during the week.  The pears at Chinon really are not nice, they don't cook well, they don't make good eau de vie (the distiller spotted their overtones one year and told us not to do that again), they really aren't nice raw either.  I'm guessing they might have made good pig food at one stage, as the tree is very old, and the house has outbuildings.  Their only fans this year seem to be bees - I think possibly ground dwelling solitary bees, but I may well be wrong - who love sucking out the sweet juices from where they split when they fall.

The other sun worshipper is my feral sunflower - we didn't sow it, it just started growing out of the bin of compost we had some strawberries in.  It has grown to nearly 6 foot tall, and because it is on a plinth, I can't look it in the face.  It is very well placed to worship the rising sun in the morning, while the less open faces, follow the sun during the day (tournesol or tourne au sol - clever, huh?).  I take a photo or two each day to keep a ray of sunshine for winter.

On the chicken front, Auntie Mo is settling in quite well, although we still get some aggression from Mac and Jak.  She went up in the pecking order a bit when Bridie the Freeloading Bantam started to moult.

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Sometimes I spot things out of the corner of my eye and they are interesting.  Two examples to end with.  I was at The Garden, watering some things and carrying on with the potato harvest.  As I went to get the fork from the store, I spotted some movement in the grass and closer inspection showed it to be a small frog or toad - not warty enough for a toad, but too far from water to be a frog.  Whatever, he/she is very useful and welcome.  Yesterday evening, sitting in the garden, recovering from an overdose of patisseries (helped with a gin and tonic) I spotted another crop in the overgrown border - hops!  And quite a lot of them too, some looking really beautiful at the moment.  I'm not sure there are enough for beer making, and we don't do that sort of home brew anyway, but good for hop pillows perhaps.  I'll think on it!

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I promise I will try for Sunday next week!

 

 

Apologies for the delay

Yesterday was a birthday - not mine - and meant a bit of celebrating, a bit of exercise, and by the time we were done with that, I could not face being near the computer (actually I was tied to the juice pot, as we had 4 pounds of elderberries doing their thing).

The weather has not been inspiring once again, which has resulted in two cats finding their inner kitten/getting stir crazy and needing to run around like crazy.  Normally the lizard population provides summer entertainment, but this year we have needed the help of the mouse on a long string, a piece of rolled up newspaper and the Red Dot.  "They say" that summer will restart this week, but first it was today, then tomorrow, now Wednesday seems to be Summer - we'll see!

There have been two flower events this week worthy of note.  During the week the final bud opened on the large red orchid I bought from Aldi - this is much bigger than my other orchids, so is having to live on the kitchen window sill for the moment.  I have bought another like this one, but it was half price as the flowers had finished and the shop (not Aldi) didn't want the ugly thing sitting around.  We'll see what happens with that one too.  The other flower event is the first flower on one of the many chilli plants we have knocking around the garden out of the range of chicken beaks.  What these plants really need is heat and sun, so fingers crossed from Wednesday (bit of a theme developing here).

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The potato harvest is in full swing at the plot, and as I moved the weed suppressant matting that makes potato crops possible, I found another of my little garden helpers - a rather fine baby slow worm (less scary than the sloughed snake skin I found last week).  The first sweetcorn - the six or so that came from the first sowing of 51 seeds - are starting to look promising.  I think they may be ready before the end of the month.  The second sowing are starting to show their male flowers and there are hints of the female flowers (the tassels and the cobs).  They won't be ready until September, unless the weather really bucks its ideas up.

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We have been joined by yet another chicken this week.  Following our purchase of Mac and Jak in the Spring, and being invaded by the Economic Migrant in July, we have been prevailed upon to provide shelter to an old girl who was left on her own when her chums died off (after a suitable quarantine period).  She needs company, we were told, she is pining for the company of other chickens we were told.  Meet Auntie Mo, the chicken that walks by herself.

The Birthday Weekend started with a tasting at a craft brewery in Chinon on Friday night, on Saturday we went shoe shopping and won (well, found two pairs that were considered acceptable), and Sunday was lunch at Buffalo Grill.  They are formulaic, but the meat is good quality, the chips are very nice, they have a full range of steak sauces, and the puddings are magnificent.  Of course after that lot, you then need exercise, so we walked round the wildlife sanctuary lake at la Monnerai, which was new to us.  Using the free telescopes, we could admire egrets and cormorants on an island in the middle of the lake.  The wildlife lake is also less visited, and there were mobs of people around the leisure lake, as you would expect on a Sunday afternoon in August!

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So apologies for the delay, and until next Sunday, which should be Summer!

 

 

Struggling against the elements

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.

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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).

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The tomato news, a pretty vile weather forecast for the next week and a wet weekend drove us to drink.  Tant pis!

 

A promise of things to come

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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

Brutal weather and projects

I stupidly mentioned kindly weather last time round - well that will teach me!  Last Sunday was hot and the temperatures just kept rising on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  I was on mowing duty on Monday and had to do that in the morning to keep it reasonable.  Tuesday evening aperos were in the garden and 31ºC at 7pm, so of course when it broke on Wednesday, it went with a bang!  There were reports of tornados, hours of sheet lightening and heavy rain Wednesday to Thursday, and I saw the damage as I drove the roads round Rillé on Friday.  It was still hot and sticky though, so more showers, more storms, more humidity.  Yesterday that culminated in a storm front that went across France causing havoc.  We were lucky, but St Nicholas de Bourgeuil lost its church spire to a tornado, while the floods in Saumur and towns near Paris and Reims were extraordinary.

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Yesterday was market day, and as I had company and the terraces are open, we took the opportunity to stop at one of the cafés around the market to have a drink and watch the world go by.  I am used to watching sparrows scavenge around under tables, but it was the first time I've seen a chaffinch do that.  If you are reading this on a computer or tablet, it is worth looking closely at the third photo - I'm rather proud of that one!

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This morning, after paying homage to the Cats in the Country, we went to the open day at l'Or de la Ruche - a professional bee keeper and purveyor of honey, where there was also an exhibition on Asian hornets and how to trap them, and a bit of a producers' market too.  It was a lovely little event, no face masks as there was plenty of space to spread out, and yet enough people to let you think life might return to normal one day.

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This afternoon we went out to a Brocante - O, how daring and how wonderful!  We were on a mission as the Chinon One would like a footstool for his birthday next week, and this seemed a likely place - a huge warehouse at Beaufort en Vallée.  Bizarrely, footstools were not plentiful.  There were bar stools, milking stools, coffee tables and a camel saddle, but just one footstool - rather modern and with a not very nice cover, but at 10€, something of a bargain, even if we are going to recover it.  It seems to do what was required anyway.  We did find another option as well - an old barley twist chair that has certainly seen better days, and the back struts are badly split.  But take off the back, cover the sawn off bits with a bit of foam and new fabric, add the missing stretcher, give it a good polish, and the chair will make a rather fine and unique foot stool as well.

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Until next week!

 

Orchids, roses and vegetables

The first half of the week passed in a blur of reading reports, analysing numbers and trying to get it all down in a logical way and make some sense of it all.  By Wednesday evening, when the first draft of the report was sent, my mind was mush.  Thursday I must have done something useful - but it is hard to remember what.  Ah yes, new cylinder for the sodastream, visiting a couple of clients, feeding cats and sewing labels into summer shirts - clearly I did quite a bit that was useful!!

After the usual Friday visits, the new normal allowed us to go to the pub, sit out on the terrace and enjoy being around people, while taking on a glass or two of something cold.  It is so good to start the old normal experiences.  Tomorrow should have seen a bit of yoga too, but local elections mean the large village hall wasn't available, while the room offered as a substitute, as well as having a huge framed photo of the President, was not really conducive to socially distanced yoga for seniors.  So we are cancelled until September, which is a shame.

Today we were out and about before the temperatures got too hot to do anything other than wilt.  As well as productive things (more later), I spotted three different types of orchid out - two in the Orchard, and one in the One Acre Wood.  Here are a bee, a lizard and a birds nest!

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The roses are also coming on nicely at The Shack.  There is a splendid white climbing rose with a delicate scent by one of the outbuildings, which is putting on a great display - next week will be all about dead heading I guess.  The Fergus Memorial Rose, or Orange King as the label more officially calls it, has also put out its first flower.  I photographed it both yesterday and today, but today's photo was after there had been a lot of strimming, so there were bits of shredded weed in the flower.  I've not included that one!

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The vegetables are coming on.  Today I picked all remaining broad beans, and also lifted one of the main crop garlic to see what was going on, as the leaves and stems looked like they had been ravaged by rust, but there was a nice bulb and later on we will eat it to check on flavour!  The sweetcorn I sowed last Saturday ALL came up, so I had to spend time thinning out the excess plants, which really, really hurt.  I also planted out three more butternut squashes and four Bright Lights chard, the latter hidden among the shallots to get a bit of shelter while they establish themselves.  The shallots will be lifted in about a month at which point the chard can do what it likes.  Getting rid of the broad bean plants will give the peppers, aubergines and tomatoes more light, which will be good.

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There is also a lot of wildlife around.  Yesterday we visited a friend so John could do his Lawnmower Repair Man act (not totally successfully, but there is a deeper seated problem than he can get at).  She has swallows nesting in her stables and while the parents were out gathering beakfuls of insects for the offspring, I was able to look in and catch a photo.  Today, after I had toiled and done hammock time as a reward, I did my nature walk around the Orchard and the Wildlife Meadow.  The wild scabious is coming out which means an explosion of marbled white butterflies, which are just lovely to watch and occasionally take a photo of too!

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Next week's episode may be a bit late, but should have more exciting things to discuss, assuming the weather is a bit kind.

 

 

It's starting to get seriously nice finally

The weather has mostly perked up nicely, but we did have a blip between Wednesday and Friday, first with storms and lots of rain (26mm over three days here, a bit more at The Shack as it was in the path of a big storm) and then a really nasty, cold, wet Friday, before picking up again yesterday.  If Meteo France are to be believed, we now have a clear run of fine and hot weather (over 25ºC apparently is the definition they use for hot) for the next 15 days.  We'll see!

Friday was a day for a bit of private contemplation and a vigil on the way to Chinon and Azay - the weather was "ideal", or at least reflected my mood.  At la Chapelle sur Loire you can get down the river, where there are benches, picnic tables and bike racks, as well as a slipway into the river.  It was peaceful, despite the traffic on the levee road, and I was on my own, but entertained by swallows and sand martins skimming the river for bugs, egrets doing what egrets do, and things that looked like plovers, but probably weren't, out on the sandbanks.  The river took a reed down to the sea with my blessing.

Cats have been relatively disgraceful during the warmer weather (during the cold wet weather, they got wet and smelly).  Zola and Nibbles demonstrate their personal preferences for drink, while if Donald spots anyone in the hammock, he launches himself on them and has a wiggly love-in!  All very cute.

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The vegetable plots are looking more lush, or overgrown, which ever you prefer.  The tomatoes are climbing up their supports, while the shallots are starting to sag as the bulbs start to swell.  I had to resow sweetcorn yesterday, as 7/51 is a pretty poor germination rate.  Checking the seed packets, they recommend sowing 4 or 5 seeds per station and then thinning out any stragglers - well I resowed at 3 per station as I cannot abide the thought that I might be throwing out so many plants.  Although I might have got the maths wrong...  Anyway, once they were all in and the bed tamped down, Clause launched himself onto it, rolled across the whole area and dug two test pits before finding the one that deserved his poo.  The seedbed is now covered in cut branches of leylandii.  Meanwhile I picked more broad beans and dug up another feral garlic for supper.

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While I tended to the plants that will feed us, John struggled with strimmer and mower to cut paths through overly lush grass and brambles to enable us to walk around the Orchard and wildflower meadow and admire wildlife and flowers.  Particularly in the orchard, this makes a lovely walk and provides enticing views that might make you think this was a serious bit of garden design (and of course, you would be right).  Following the paths cleared for me, I admired many bee orchids (but only so many photos of those today), and spotted that the badgers had been doing a bit of spring cleaning.

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At home, we have slightly less tasteful flowers to admire, but the bumble bee I spotted seemed very happy to work her way over the red hot pokers.

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So, have a lovely week, enjoy the weather, and look out for happy bumble bees and discrete bee orchids.

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - jaunting!

Because I can't work Fridays, as they are devoted to the needs of the Azay One, Saturdays are the new Sundays, and I toil in the vegetable patches on a Sunday morning and in front of a computer on a Sunday afternoon - it sort of makes sense.  Anyway, with the patchy weather we have at the moment, plus we used up the last bottle of tender winning celebration fizz, we decided it was time to go south of the river (la Loire) and stock up again.  We haven't been down there since before Christmas 2019!.  I put the laundry out, just to draw in clouds and rain (it worked - 2.5mm while we were out), and then we jaunted down to Ackermans at St Hilaire-St Florent, just by Saumur.  The buildings are rather magnificent and they are the front for miles of tunnels into the rock where millions of bottles of rather good fizz are stashed.

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We invested in 6 bottles each of Cuvée Privé Blanc and Rosé - hopefully they will last the year, but hopefully not all of them assuming we have things to celebrate!  We also got a worryingly cheap 10 litre wine box of red.  We may survive.

On the way home, we stopped in on the cats at The Shack and fed them and admired the growth on the potatoes above ground.

In the garden at home, we have the next colour irises coming out - a nice pale lilac colour.  We don't have many and they get frightfully abused, but they are pretty.

And a final note of "isn't nature wonderful?" if you like that sort of thing.  I was wandering back down the garden last night having locked up the chickens, and spotted the unmistakable yellow blob that is a spider nest erupting with lots of little spiders.  By this morning they were gone, dispersed naturally or eaten by the wildlife that lives in the garden.  For the squeamish, the photo is deliberately out of focus!! 

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - bits and bobs

As I've been being a good girl today and working hard, and not getting distracted by "stuff", I've had to resort in the main to photos taken a while ago but not shared yet, but it's a good way of making sure I've not missed anything too important!  Curfew is at 7pm, but sunset isn't until gone 9pm so it is very difficult to get good evening photos due to the monstrous blob built in between us and our views to the west, however this evening sky was good in any direction (this one is due South), and worked well on my phone.

A few years ago, Aldi did a nice line in flower pots that are fixed to down pipes.  I've grown all sorts in them, from bulbs to lobelia (which worked really well), but following an impulse purchase at a car boot sale of a number of house leeks, they have been home to semper vivums for about 4 years now.  I took a whole load of sets off them last year, but clearly will need to do the same again this year.  But they look pretty good I think!

After yesterday's single asparagus as part of lunch (chopped up fine in baked eggs), today I went for a more classic approach as Mac and Jak are laying just the right sort of eggs at the moment.  So today's lunch was poached eggs with asparagus and mayonnaise (just a little) and jolly good it was too.  There is a mix of our home grown asparagus (fat) and the last bits from the market last week (small and weedy or in technical terms, sprue).

Finally, I was reminded yesterday by Mr S Clause that he hasn't been seen on a blog post for a while and really he is totally gorgeous and people will miss him!  So here he is.