Rural Life

Quiet days of August

Last week was the flurry of excitement that is the annual Comice here in Baugé en Anjou, and since then, things have generally been much quieter.  Local people are either on holiday or preparing for the Rentré next week - the start of September that brings a new school year, a new year for the sports and arts clubs, people going back to work and taking things a bit more seriously, being able to get an artisan to answer the phone, the tax assessment results, getting the chimney swept and starting to think about winter heating.  It's a big thing here, probably bigger than New Year, and taken most seriously.

For us, it should mean that the holiday makers disperse, making it easier to park at the local markets, less frantic calls from people who can see weeds in their lawn or furry pears on their trees (actually known as quince, but there we go), and a slightly less fraught diary.  In fact, in previous years, September has been a month where I have had something on every weekend, and sometimes more than one thing too.  This year seems more sane - only a pig roast in a couple of weeks' time and perhaps being able to visit things for European Heritage Weekend.

The gardens are relatively quiet - chillies are ripening, as are the meagre corn cobs, borlotti beans are flowering and setting and the potatoes need to be lifted.  With August, some of the loveliest flowers arrive - cyclamen.  They are mainly pink but some are white, and over the years, the clumps get larger.  The ones in our lawn started as the odd flower here and there and now have spread.  It's the same in the One Acre Wood.  These ones are at The Studio and seemed to come up overnight.

Although the weather remains frustratingly dry, there are more clouds in the evening now, which make for colourful sunsets.  I'm never great at taking photographs of these, but I am getting better, and this one was a pleasing one.

I've not taken many photographs this week, and the trail camera was pointing at an area that looked like it was a badger playground.  Well if it was, they weren't playing last week.  The camera has moved and there are no photos to share from it, so I will have to round off with a photo of young Monsieur Clause, who is looking very sleek and pleased with himself at the moment.  I think he is having a good mousing season.

I'll take more and better photos this week - I promise.

 

Fire!

This could be yet another post about the heatwave that has dogged us since June, and with daytime high temperatures never less than 30ºC until today, it could also be quite accurate.  But no, today's edition is firmly dedicated to the real fire that has occupied most of our senses for nearly a week now. 

n Monday we went to Terra Botanica near Angers to enjoy a bit of "us" time and celebrate the day.  We got there just after opening, planning to leave at about 3pm before the heat got too much for us.  Once our noses were turned in a homeward direction (slightly North East), we thought that the sky looked a bit murky - on a day when it was pretty solidly blue!  Once off the motorway, we decided that it wasn't cloud, it was smoke and spent a happy few kilometres guessing which bit of woodland downwind from us it was.  All too soon it became clear that it was woodland to the North East of us, and that wasn't happy news!  This is our first clear view.

We could also smell it.  Once home, social media provided all the gossip we needed to know that it was a serious fire, that it was too close to some friends for comfort and that it wasn't going to be sorted quickly.  A late evening chat with the grandson of our neighbours gave a hint as to the number of fire fighters being called in and the distances.  The following morning, the house stank of smoke - the windows were open overnight to allow us to cool the house down.  The pall of smoke hung over the village and the rumour mill was running big time.  A  hairdresser's appointment was a brilliant way for me to pick up on the scale of what was going on, although very sad to hear that my hairdresser had had to send her children and animals away to stay with her parents, so that they weren't too badly affected.  The evening view of the smoke was dramatic!

There are lots of issues with social media, but in this instance, it did show its value too.  The local authority and local community group pages were kept updated on the facts, stopping rumours about masked bands of arsonists, and flights of fancy about hunters, while showing the scale of the fire and the damage.  More constructively, there were also threads on how to offer help, food, goods, the use of horse boxes and cattle trucks, and how staying away was just as useful.  A thread at 10pm on Tuesday night, asking for mattresses for the firefighters that had come vast distances to help, prompted a magnificent display, such that the 200 required were provided within half an hour.  Maps, satellite views and overlays demonstrated the scale of the problem.

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Visiting the Boys in the Country, downwind of the fire, to make sure they were OK and that they were well fed and watered brought a whole new set of panic to us.  We found a t-shirt I had left out to dry covered in ash, pieces of pine bark charred from the fire littered the Garden, and a singed oak leaf was by the building.  We had a mass of activity ensuring that combustibles were moved away from the building and put a few buckets of water on the roof in case, but fortunately no more cinder storms happened.

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We have done our bit by staying away from the fire and the exclusion zone that has been put in place around it until Tuesday next week.  We did learn a whole new jargon for wildfire fighting including the important difference between fixé, or contained and maitrisé or controlled, while that nirvana of éteint or out is still a long way off.  The fire ripped through pine forest and mixed forest, and pine is a real danger in these circumstances, with resinous cores that can keep burning quietly until an unfavourable wind hits.  Parts of the area are peat based, which also keeps burning underground unless there is a really solid dousing, and means that the fire can pop up again when it finds a nice pine root and a bit of wind.  It will be weeks until they are convinced that it is fully out.  This aerial photo from the paper shows a tiny part of the damaged area.

Overall some 1,450 hectares have burned and the perimeter of the fire is 21 kilometres.  At its height 90 people were evacuated from their homes (not including those that chose to leave in case), but thanks to amazing work by firefighters supported by some 90 farmers as well as hundreds of volunteers, the local councillors and staff, no homes or buildings were destroyed, and there were only two injuries, both to firefighters (one hurt their arm, one inhaled smoke).  A friend with bees lost only one hive out of 200 or more.  But the damage and the desolation will take a long time to repair - Mother Nature has her work cut out again.  The exclusion zone is shown here - the purple line.

While at the height of the fire there were over 100 engines, over 400 firefighters, 3 Dash aircraft (they land to refill their water tanks but can drop fire retardant products), and the local farmers with water tanks working away, numbers have reduced.  I think we are now down to 50 or so firefighters and some very fine fire engines (yesterday, parked up while people rested and had a bite to eat).  The smell of fire has gone too, damped down by last night's rain.

Thanks to all those who worked tirelessly and selflessly.  I hope their efforts are never needed again round here in this way.

 

Weather obsessions and other summer thoughts

The acquisition of a couple of beach style chairs gives us an opportunity to sit and gaze through the gap in the hedge/overgrowth/trees towards the far hill and its path, and let our minds wander.  Sitting in the shade and gazing into the distance is one way, after all, of passing time on these endless hot, sunny days.  Records are falling for heat, lack of rain, lack of water, size of cracks in the ground and buildings, crops being early and crops being poor.  While the early cereal crops exceeded expectations in quality and sometimes quantity too, the later ones will be poor, and where the farmer has followed the rules and played the game, exceptionally poor.  Any hint of rain is fallen up as a good sign, such as this week, with clouds to the west giving us a vivid sunset, hopes only to be dashed the following morning with just 0.3mm of rain in the gauge - not enough to even change the soil colour on our "lawn".  Perhaps one different signal is that while the first cyclamen flowers are coming up, they are a good three weeks later than last year!

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Even in this heat, the show must go on, particularly in the more touristy towns and villages.  This weekend, Chinon held its mediaeval fair (probably fayre, but I object to that), with some celebration of Joan of Arc, who manifested her first miracle in the chateau at Chinon.  I wouldn't have wanted to be Didier in all this finery yesterday!

Over in the Country, two of the cats momentarily decided that 31ºC was not too hot to cuddle up on one of the garden chairs, while watching me eeking out the stored rainwater on the aubergines.  I found another, probably more helpful, garden buddy, when I went walking to beat the bounds, in the form of a rather magnificent slow worm.  He (or she) was about a foot long and definitively basking in the late afternoon sun!

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The trail camera is installed at a secret location, to monitor what is making a mess of someone's garden.  In order to prepare it for a professional job, we recharged the batteries and I cleared the SD card, which hadn't been done since April.  My word there was a lot of material on there - nearly 400 videos and 400 photos.  Now while some included my fat bottom walking away after doing my WiFi checks (instantly deleted), some included John passing with various mowing machines (bizarrely I kept a couple of those), and many seem to have been triggered by a gust of wind or a fly landing on the lens, there was an awful lot that wasn't.   When I do my remote WiFi checks, I use my phone to review potentially interesting things and download them, but if the sun is in the wrong place, I don't have reading glasses with me, or there are a lot of files since my previous visit, I don't get the full richness of what has been happening.

Today I therefore offer up some links to videos that are interesting or a bit special in some way - I hope you enjoy them.

First off - there seem to be more jays around this year than previously, no idea why.  Here is a video.

I found more videos of the young wild boar, actually quite a few, but this one is rather sweet and gives a good close up of young Stripy.

Perhaps rashly, I accused the boar of attacking and knocking over the log the camera was attached to.  Reviewing one of these two videos of the pine martin, I need more evidence before deciding on the culprit.

 

I know they are small, but they have no respect!

Probably the star of the trail camera recently has been our family of deer, and in particular the one we think of as "our" faun.  Every few days, with his mother, they would spend a couple of days lurking near the camera, before moving on to find fresh grazing; then coming back.  The first video is a solo venture, the second includes Mum, while I'm not sure how many deer there are in the final one - best watched full screen and to the end!

 

 

Next weekend "they" promise rain, in which case I will sort out more gems from the deer family and the boar family and perhaps a badger or two as well.  Have a good week!

 

Change and new beginings

I'm not sure how much I am in favour of change - but I am sure it will happen whether I like it or not.  This year is one of farewells - some French friends moving south, some moving village, and British friends, tired of the challenges of Brexit, selling their second homes and settling full time (or an approximation of full time) in the UK.  They all say they will come back and visit, how many do, and how often remains to be seen. 

While the removals take place, there is the frisson of having a trailer that can be used for trips to the dump.  We also pick over the spoils of what won't be taken away, what is no longer needed or is too expensive to take "home" (there really is no Brexit benefit).  A local cat charity now has more pillows, towels and duvets than they could dream of.  Someone else has a 'new to them' sofa.  We have a bunch of things to put on sales sites to share around, and the awful process of triaging much loved libraries of second hand books to see what can be slipped into book swap kiosks, what might sell for a few centimes, what could be given to hospital libraries, and what, with the best will in the world, is best sent for pulping (Thomas Mann in the original is high on that list!).  How many copies of the RHS Encyclopaedia of Gardening does one need - purely rhetorical!

But that excitement declines very rapidly, as we try to find a bit of cupboard space for 6 tins of chickpeas, and regret the company, the laughter, the trips and events that will no longer animate the summer months.  We would prefer to keep the people to all the books, sofas, DVDs and chickpeas.

The moving stuff around this week has meant that we have also been out and about a bit.  Did you know that as well as building a tower in Paris, Eiffel also built a railway bridge in Chinon (OK it is a long way in the distance)?  You can also see that the river is chronically low.

We also visited the village church at Gée, just 15 kilometres away - it has been very well restored, presumably a nice legacy from someone.  The village also has a very good restaurant that does a very fine 15€ lunch!

I don't know if I should blame the cats for this, but I had a chance to take a very close look at one of my favourite moths - the tiger moth.  With their wings at rest, they are handsome and sober, but when they are in flight or when you look at the underside, they are the most marvellous and vibrant orange.

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It is still stinking hot and dry as a bone here - water restrictions are incredibly tight.  You can only water food plants, anything else has to take its chance unless you use grey water from doing something else.  Even watering food plants is frowned on between 8am and 8pm, and should ideally only be done with grey water or rain water that you have stored.  We are down to our last 800 litres of stored water, and while there was a promise of rain and thunder for Thursday on the weather sites yesterday, it has now been downgraded to a 20% chance of mild drizzle.  The sweetcorn hasn't worked and has been sacrificed for aubergines, butternuts and borlotti beans, while the chillies are doing well on the water that the chickens don't drink in a day.

The fact that there are cool shady corners and a bit of water/bog at the bottom of the Wildflower Meadow means that the trail camera has been working hard.  I did accuse John of knocking it over with a mower when he cleared the paths, but looking at footage from the camera, I then had to apologise.  The camera is on the move to a distant site where someone wants to know what is causing trouble, so I will be spending a lot of time clearing the SD card, but these videos were downloaded by phone and show that new beginings are possible.  I am pretty sure the faun was born in the meadow, and I may even have footage of the labour/birth when I go through the hundreds of files.  Anyway, enjoy these and see who you think pushed over the camera on its log!

Looking at that more closely, I think the young buck has a problem with one foot/leg.

This is the only time I have seen one here, and it is also surprising to see it in daylight.

He didn't really go far for a couple of weeks, and stayed with Mum in the zone in that time.

He (or she) really is rather cute!

Well, I know who my money's on!

Have a good week!

 

Surviving the heat - just about

Well, I have to say that temperatures over 40ºC are just awful.  Monday was the killer day, although Tuesday was still jolly hot.  By just after breakfast, it was already over 30ºC and just kept climbing.  We had to go out to a meeting in the afternoon (fortunately somewhere that was air conditioned), and just the few kilometres in the car (with the air con on) were nearly unbearable and with the air con, extremely expensive in fuel too.  It didn't get down to 33ºC until well after 9pm, when we sat out for a bit but not for long.  In town, the two pharmacies agreed it was over 40, but couldn't decide if it was 42, 43 or 44.  Any were too hot!

The following morning I went to The Garden to check on the boy cats and see the damage to the potagers.  The cats were fine, but very pleased to have gravy.  As for the plants?  Well I was pretty convinced we had lost at least 2 of the butternut plants, half the chillies, half of the leeks, and some of the beans.  Some plants had just rejected the fruits they were carrying, so the five set butternuts were yellow and gone, the courgettes had no viable female flowers, and the aubergines had no flowers full stop.

Nature is amazing though - among the photos below taken today, there are aubergines ready to be picked, flourishing borlotti beans, a newly set butternut, some small chard seedlings that survived and are pulling away, the parsnips that survived (2 didn't make it), and a chilli set on a different but equally abused plant.  The leeks are flourishing too.  Sadly the sweetcorn has been provoked into flowering too soon and too short to produce much of interest, but hey!

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How did the wildlife survive the heat?  OK as far as we can tell - there is evidence that the resident doe and faun made it through and in fact the faun looks pretty healthy to my eye.  The local buzzards are making a lot of noise as are the wood peckers.  There are no obvious corpses - I think they just head for cover and wait until it's over.

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It's the opera season in Baugé, so I must cut this short and do a bit of ironing before making salads for the interval picnic (it's a Glyndebourne style opera festival), but this week has seen a notable anniversary.  It is five years since Zola's Gotcha Day - to celebrate she rolled around on hedgehog pee for a happy 5 minutes.

Until next week!

 

Scorchio!

As of 30 minutes ago, it's official, here in Maine et Loire we are on red alert for high temperatures.  I won't disagree as in my office on the north side of the house, it is 29ºC and heading to 30ºC.  One thing that means is that I will not be doing battle with YouTube to load up more video, you will have to make do with stills.  If you don't believe me, see the outdoor thermometer, hanging in the shade in the garden at 2pm (so two and a half hours ago).

It has been hot, averaging 28ºC or higher for over a week now, although last weekend there was a bit of a breeze.  Even so, we have seen the ravages of relatively mild heat stroke and I can only exhort people to be careful. 

As an example of what the heat is doing, here are two photos of one of my butternut squashes - the first is in sunlight, the second this morning while still shaded.  The squash has a natural defence mechanism to allow the leaves to flop when really hot and then repump up when it cools down, however the yellow scorch marks are not part of the plan.  A couple of squash plants have set fruit, but they may well reject them if this continues.  The courgettes  have given up for the moment too - I had to buy a couple at the market yesterday!!!

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We grow potatoes under weed suppressant mat.  It keeps the awful perennial weeds at bay, saves the need for earthing up and bizarrely provides habitat for a number of useful critters - slow worms, snakes, toads.  This year the potatoes are planted in soil that is as near to clay without being able to use it on a potter's wheel as you can get.  It's really heavy and horrible when wet.  Currently the top layer resembles pusilane - the pumice-like rocks you can get as decorative mulch or for use in a septic tank filter bed, but about 4cm below the surface, there is still a hint of moisture in there.  There are also potatoes - look what we got from just one plant, noting that it has hardly rained and I do not water the spuds!  Dinner in the making.

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I have rarely had a conversation with a farmer when they didn't complain about the weather in some way.  There is chuntering going on now about drought and poor yields.  They are working day and night to get the cereal crops in, collect in straw and hay, turn the stubble so it is less likely to catch fire (although that process can also start a fire if a plough hits a flint), and get water and feed to grazing cows and goats.  This year I can understand their angst, as I watch a crop of fodder maize near us develop - it is very early, but the cobs are meagre and the leaves are now curling with the heat and lack of water.  Maize is a very greedy crop.  Sunflowers, once they germinate, need less water.  Again they are a bit early this year, and fields have gaps where germination was poor, but there is still little better than a field of sunflowers against a blue sky, even when slightly past their best.

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The local wildlife has to cope with all this too.  The southern part of the Meadow includes a small bog and three small, spring-fed ponds which means that the deer, boar, badgers and others have somewhere to go and drink.  I strongly suspect that a family of boar are actually living in the bog at the moment - they would be foolish not to - but it is off limits to us at this time of year due to scrub overgrowth.  The doe and her faun are knocking around the area, while the faun develops - they seem to come past the trail camera every couple of days.  She enjoys eating the lower leaves off the good pear tree, but fortunately not the pears (we have other plans for them...).  The faun is getting braver and larger.

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And with that, it really is too hot to sit by a computer any longer!  I'm off to watch the end of the Tour stage at Carcassone.

 

Weird weather and a garden update

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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

 

Flaming June!

Yes, June is here along with meteorological summer - the one that starts on 21st June is yet to come.  Of course as soon as we get to June, the weather starts to go funny on us.  Actually we have escaped the worst of it - the major thunderstorms around the area have produced 3 and 4cm hailstones, antediluvian rain, and odd squalls of wind.  We have amassed about 15mm rain, which has dampened things down a bit, though not as much as we might like.  The rumbles have been quite dramatic, and we now know that we have one cat who is scared of thunder!

The heat brought on the courgettes nicely - only 5th June and I can see male and female flowers developing!  It has brought out a magnificent flower head on one of the yukkas.  It also made this morning's labour possible - we did a bit of turning then pushed in 20 wiggle stakes and threaded them around with green metal grills and finally I sowed a borlotti bean for every upright wire in the fencing grill.  It looks a bit odd now, but we hope that in 8 to 12 weeks it will be covered with bean stalks and lots of pods of delicious, stripy borlotti beans.

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The trail camera has had an exciting week.  I choose not to share images or video of John doing the rounds with the big yellow beastie, keeping the paths open, but from the gallery of photos below, you can see that it has been quite busy for other things!

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And there's more!  As you might expect, there are videos to go with some of those images - baby boar really are adorable!

Mum is being quite protective.

 

And then there is badger action too.

 

All that cuteness!  Enjoy!  There won't be a blog next weekend, as I attend the Broads Festival at Beccles Quay and also go visiting the Marches Mosses on the Shropshire/Wales border, but there should be some different and interesting things to tell you about from both of those when I do my next update on the 19th June.

 

Heatwave and drought

It's broadly official now, with 40 days at over the seasonal average temperature, and pretty well no rainfall since early April - it's a heatwave and it's a drought.  There are water restrictions and even the farmers are mostly complying with them.  Lawns look parched unless overhung by willow trees, in which case they are lush and green and long.  Anywhere else and they are turning yellow or brown, apart from the weed flowers which happily rise above it all.  I think the drought conditions have really done for the bee orchids this year - there were so many rosettes in the winter and early spring, but not enough moisture to let them push up flower spikes.  Those that there are, seem a bit stunted to me too.

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Temperatures have gone over 30ºC a fair number of times in the last two weeks, and while we can strip down to shorts and skimpy t-shirts, the cats can't.  They are doing a good effort of shedding fur whenever we touch them, and actually as desert animals probably cope a bit better than us in the heat, but they are seeking comfy places to sleep this out.

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The plants are doing their best, with late evening watering for things in pots.  The butternut seedlings are ready to go out I think/hope.  They seem big enough to cope with being nibbled by any snails mad enough to break hibernation seals and come out and about.  The chilli seeds are coming up - given the weather, they might seem a bit late, but we are only 3 weeks into May and are actually on the early side.  The cheap rose I bought at Aldi shrugged off the greenfly, after judicious application of soapy water, and is now in flower, while the single red hot poker that I have nurtured in a pot, ready to plant elsewhere, is now out.  Another bit of colour, this time by the front door, comes from the pinks we got at Jacques Briant, and I finally potted on into something sensible a couple of weeks ago.

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The trail camera has moved - after getting 500 photos and 500 short videos of moving grass seed heads, it was clearly time for a change.  Currently I am trying it at a sort of crossroads between the Orchard and the Meadow, and as there are no handy trees or fencing poles there, I have it on a piece of willow log, rescued from a work site.  I only managed to check it once before today, and have evidence that it has been investigated by the badger family!

This week's blog is early.  The weather today is hot, so we aren't going to feed the cats and put water around until a bit later.  Tomorrow (Sunday) we are spending from midday or so, helping out on the beer and sandwich stand at the village trout fishing day.  Next week I hope there will be lots of jolly photos from the event, but I know I won't be in a fit condition to sit in front of a computer and write about it tomorrow evening.  I expect my ankles to be the size of footballs!

 

Blooming May

This week it's all about flowers - we've had no rain since the 24th April and while there is still a fair amount of moisture around, the forecast is for a hot 10 days, which will fry things out rather.  There are water restrictions here already, which should stop any watering between 10am and 8pm, but you still see the vast water jets on farms, which doesn't sit well when gardeners are being told that only vegetable plots can be watered and then only "reasonably".  I think if you have planted new trees during the winter, there is also generally a derogation for that, but no watering established shrubs or borders, no watering lawns, and no filling swimming pools (yeah, right, like people are going to obey that one!).

On the cultivated flower front, we are in my favourite season - irises!  The selection below are red from our garden, mauve from the Chinon garden, black and white (well, very dark purple and white) from the edge of the wildflower meadow, and Dutch irises from by The Shack.

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Then there are the things that are cultivated, or sort of cultivated, such as the campanula, the semper vivum baskets that are starting to overflow (although not strictly flowers, they are quite magnificent I think), the mix of self-seeded forget-me-knots and purple flowers which might be phacelia, and the deep red poppies that also spread themselves around from last year's display of bee-friendly flowers.

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The wildflower meadow is really getting into its stride and you can see the masses of white oxeye daisies, while around the area there are great fountains of false acacia flowers, humming with bees.  If you sit near a group of these, you can even smell the honey - acacia honey is very popular, very pale and not strongly flavoured, assuming you can find single variety honeys.  L'Or de la Ruche in St Martin d'Arcé makes a particular feature of the different types of honey based on what was flowering near the hives, be it colza, sunflowers, chestnut, acacia, meadow flowers or summer flowers.

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The first couple of bee orchids are out, and I am particularly pleased with this photo of one.

Sunny weather, flowering meadows, a feeling that summer is really on its way all add up to one thing - a need for ice cream.  This year one of the local farms has opened a creamery to sell milk, cream, cheeses, yoghurts as well as its headline product - ice cream.  It isn't cheap, but it is very good!  We are working our way through the flavours.  The vanilla is long gone, but we are currently on Rum Raisin, Pistachio, and eeking out the most amazing chocolate one.  What will I buy this week???

Have a good one!