In hot weather don't forget to put some water out for Bees

weather confuses nature

The terrible storms and ensuing heavy rain have left floods, yet again throughout the Var, the South-East of France and into Italy.

It has also been incredibly mild and I saw these unpruned vines sprouting new leaves :



And I couldn’t resist the colours of the last few leaves and stems of this Parthenocissus tricuspidata

auprès de mon arbre …

Another day picking olives yesterday. It was about 3°C but no wind and the sound carried through from the neighbouring olive grove where there were a couple of other people, up ladders and heads among the olives.

One of the pickers sang a beautiful rendition of this Georges Brassens song : Aupès de mon Arbre





(if you would like to see the words, go to YouTube & click on the name of the person who uploaded the video)


This is always an odd sight : an olive tree (with olives) covered in snow !


You can see more pictures here of last year’s harvest at Celia’s

saffron

In May I went to the salon des roses in a nearby wine chateau and I met a saffron (Crocus sativus) grower.

Entranced by the idea of growing my own saffron I bought ten bulbs which I duly planted on 15 August. The leaflet that came with the fat, healthy bulbs said that they would flower over a two week period around the end of October.

By early November we had had very little rain and I kept looking to see if there was any evidence of growth. Sure enough, there were at least ten spiky leaves but no sign of any flowers. Then it rained and within a few days the familiar lilac crocus shape emerged.

Every time I walked past them I checked on their progress – the growers explained that the flower lasts a mere 24 hours and they are up at 04:00 in the morning to pick their precious crop. As it was, my flowers lasted two to three days and because there were so few of them I was able to pick the three red stigmata from each, leaving a rather unseasonally pretty patch of spring-like flowers.

As I write this, there is a very late bloomer, which I will denude before it is dashed to the ground by all the rain. In all, from the ten bulbs I have had 16 flowers. I am planning something special for my 48 strands !
Here is a directory of saffron growers in France.

crop circles

I came across this YouTube video on crop circles that I wanted to share. Click on the video at the end to see others by the same person.

They’re astonishing …

Violet Time

I’ve wizzed around some blogs and everyone seems to be wishing Spring was here – Winter has been so long this year for everyone – and talking about almond blossom, which is one of the earliest.

Officially, it’s Spring and we’ve had two false starts – one about three weeks ago and then earlier last week, when it was a balmy 17°C and up to 26°C in the sun. It’s suddenly got really cold again in the last 24 hours with snow flurries this afternoon and the promise of the same tomorrow with a maximum temperature of +1°C !

It has been unusual to see Mimosalia in Bormes-les-Mimosas, Carnival in Nice and the Menton Lemon Festival with everyone wrapped up against the cold. This weekend it was the Fête des Violettes in Tourettes-sur-Loup. I was wondering how they could have flowered in the conditions we have had – I still have a romantic idea that they’re grown in fields …

However, at Nicola’s the other day I saw two small patches of violets in one corner of her ‘lawn’ – she had no idea where they had come from. Mine haven’t made an appearance as yet.

snowdrops

My RHS magazine arrived today with a picture of snowdrops on the front cover.

A year last autumn I planted ten little snowdrop bulbs, bought from a UK supermarket, as an experiment, in four different places in the garden. It is not, you might think, a plant that you would expect to see in this part of the world, but I love them so much that I thought it was worth a try. I put masses of leaf mould around them in the hope that they wouldn’t dessicate during our blistering summers. They’re planted in our ‘dingly dell’ – a mix of white and evergreen oaks and the ubiqitous pines, that almost grow like weeds here, creating a shady area – a perfect cool spot in the summer.

There are apparently 19 species of Galanthus – and I think mine are possibly G elwesii var. elwesii, as the green marks appear to merge to form an‘X’ and bloom from January to March – and “are native to central and southern Europe and parts of western Asia, where they flourish in cool woodlands and other shady habitats from sea level to around 2,000m (6,500ft). Snowdrops like deep, fertile, well-drained soil, moist in the growing season, but not waterlogged during their summer dormancy.” No chance of that here !

Last spring, all ten bulbs flowered. I searched and searched for signs of them and suddenly spotted them in two of the four locations – and they have obviously multiplied. A gardening friend who belongs to the MGS said that she had helped someone plant a thousand Spanish bluebells. I wonder …

olive growing in west sussex !

A short clip of a report (made by my cousin’s husband) about the first olive crop in West Sussex. They picked 200 kilos and they are curing them to be eaten …

garden group blog

I belong to three different gardening groups. One of the groups is comprised of ladies from the International Women’s Club Provence.
We are English, Dutch, Danish & French in the gardening group and we meet once a month at someone’s house over coffee and biscuits and discuss (mainly) things to do with gardening !

We have a couple of ladies who tirelessly research and organise trips for us to make throughout the year and we have visited some beautiful gardens and met some extremely knowledgeable and kind gardeners. What we don’t have, as yet, is a way of sharing not just the information but pictures of the places and plants we have seen. To date this has been sent as a round-robin email which I don’t believe does justice to the time and effort that has gone into its composition. I am suggesting that we should have a blog so that we can have a visual record for always of what we have done, where we have been and what we have seen. To this end, I thought I would make a first post for our new blog – as yet to be designed and agreed upon – in my own blog, so that the ‘powers that be’ can see what it could look like …

The following arrived as an email this morning and is just the sort of information that I think could appear in our blog, so :

“First of all a very happy & healthy New Year to you all.

On return from our trip to the UK I found a seed catalogue in the post, from which I’ve ordered seeds for more than ten years. I’ve always been most impressed with the selection of seeds they have on offer and thought I’ll pass their website on to you so you can browse through it. Beside their selection of seeds, they have a few pages on how to grow from seed. Under the subject : information, select : cultivation leaflet.

Just when you look at basil, they have 23 varieties, six varieties of parsley, a coriander that is a ‘slow bolt’, bolting is always the problem with coriander. Last year I tried out of packet of tomato seeds that I bought in the shop, Aldi. They were supposed to be trailing tomatoes, I have a stand with nine windowboxes and I planted the young shoots in there. They grew so profusely and cropped so well. The only problem was they were not really trailing tomatoes and I had to contrive all sorts of structures to make them stand up in the end. This year I’ll select one of the trailing tomato plant suggestion in this seed catalogue, they have a choice of at least three. Interesting Chilli varieties, one that could look very nice in a pot with upturned chillies. Lots of other herbs if that’s where your interest lies.

Plants that I’ve tried out myself here that they have seeds for are : Caesalpinia, Cistus, Lagerstroemia, Monardas, selection of Penstemons, lots of Salvias, Salvia patens being a favourite of mine. This year I’m going to try the seeds for Albizzia julibrissin (Persian Silk Tree).

Years ago when I still lived in Belgium, I tried out the seeds for an umbrella pine, Pinus pinea, it went very well, grew to more than 1.5m but then, unfortunately, a very wet winter killed it off in the end. Still it was a nice try and if it fails it has not cost you too much.

The company is called Chiltern Seeds based in the UK. They are very reliable and post to Europe. They charge £2.50 for the postage. They accept visa and other credit cards.

Their website is: www.chilternseeds.co.uk (the different-coloured text is a live link – all you need to do is to click on it and it will automatically take you to the website, opening another window in your browser. b-fg)

January being more or less a dead month in the garden, hope this will keep your gardening spirits going.

Regards,
Saskia”

So, hopefully this will be the beginning of our new blog. Any constructive comments are obviously gratefully received !

Keep warm everyone !

image :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottzona/ / CC BY 2.0

happy new year

It’s a busy time in Mediterranean countries – the olive harvest, mostly for oil in this area. I spent some time picking at friends’ and took pictures which I put into this wonderful Smilebox greeting.

A Peaceful, healthy and happy New Year to us all !

Make a Smilebox greeting

ray of sunshine

Busy doing other things at the moment, but I had to post this …



Happy Monday, everyone !

happy easter

Make a Smilebox greeting

sad seeds

I now soak all my seeds in warm water overnight to see if they are still viable – those that sink should be good, those that float probably have nothing living left in them.

I am very sad to see that some Salvia candelabrum seeds – 14 in all – are all floating on the surface, even 24 hours later. A dissection of two of them shows that the inside of one has totally shrivelled up whilst the other looks like a fuzzy sunflower seed.


I am upset because they are unusual (and I can find very few pictures of them on the web – the one from the Telegraph article seems to have disappeared since the last time I saw it). I gathered them from a garden of salvias in October last year. Perhaps I should have sown them straight away instead of storing them. Perhaps I should have stored them in an airtight container instead of a seed packet with the others.

sweet violet guilt

Here I am feeling guilty again …

I had a quick google to see how to preserve flowers, which I thought I’d do for Easter and the simnel cake that’s in the planning. This year we have had a lot of viola odorata – I have a few in my garden, but there are very many along the banks of the canal, not carpets of them but far more than I remember from last year and they have lasted for much longer. That’s because of all the rain we’ve had.

So following through on candied flowers, someone suggested freezing individual flowers into icecubes. Hmmm. ? Then I noticed something that suggested making sweet violet syrup – and I visualised a delicate violet syrup being topped up with something sparkling. The recipe suggested two cups of violets. So I set off with LB, bag in hand and knife in my pocket and denuded every violet I could see for two kilometres. I then felt extremely guilty that I was robbing others of the lovely sight of these harbingers of Spring. However, I reasoned that at least it was towards the end of the season and now they were being replaced by the muscari popping up like little blue traffic lights, so I picked and then the next day the few I had missed.



I had more than two cups so put them into one and a half cups of filtered water and boiled for 15 minutes before straining through the built-in filter of my coffee machine. I then decided not to add quite the equivalent weight in sugar to make the syrup – it seemed like an awful lot of sugar – and boiled again until it looked syrupy. By this time it was also a rather unappetising greeny colour. The only food colouring I have is blue, so having filled an empty vinegar bottle with my syrup, I put the remaining drops into a glass of water to take to bed with me. It looks like an intergalactic drink from the Starship Enterprise and you have to really use your imagination to get the taste of violets.

I suppose, though, with a touch of red colouring and the story of picking the violets to make the syrup, the romance of it will will be charming enough when served to friends at Easter !

[ As a post sriptum : I use Reader’s Digest Word Power Dictionary which also gives the origins of words. It says : “The word harbinger came into English via Old French from a Germanic root.
The Old German word heriberga meant ‘shelter or lodging for an army’. In Old French herberge – ‘lodging’ – gave rise to the verb herbergier – ‘to provide lodgings’ – and the noun herbergere – ‘one who provides lodgings’. This entered Middle English as herberger or herbenger with the meanings ‘one who provides lodgings’ and ‘a host or entertainer’.
Later it came to denote a person sent ahead to find lodgings for troops or more generally, a pioneer who prepares the way for others. By the end of the 16th century the modern sense, with its broad figurative use, had become established.” ]

wellworths ! well done !!

I hate that I’m not posting at the minute, but there’s other stuff going on that I’m not going to record here.

I had to post this though – well done Claire Robertson, manager of the Woolworths shop in Dorchester that was closed in December when they went into administration. She is renting the premises, employing many of the original staff and re-opened it today as == Wellworths == She got Chris Evans (not a fan personally, but good publicity) to open it and I gather Dorchester was heaving. This is the BBC’s reporting of it.

I hope that everyone continues to support their independent traders, wherever you live – their livelihoods depend on it. If you’re visiting Dorchester and Wellworths, do stop and have some of possibly the best coffee in Dorset, served in the coffeeshop in Tudor Arcade, next to Waitrose – we’d appreciate your custom ! (Below is a local person’s view – NisbetMedia – on YouTube. Check out the Snowman’s Dance.)

australian bushfires

We’ve been watching the horrific news of the Australian bushfires in
Victoria with such devastating loss of life and reflecting on the kind
of person who becomes an arsonist. There’s a headline currently on
Google news from Reuters saying that the arsonists are likely to be young males. Oh really ? !! I’m sure that most people would not be surprised by that !

We too suffer from fires that sweep through the hillsides, many started deliberately when the mistral is blowing, to spread the flames and destruction further and faster. I’ve just noticed on my Feedjit that someone who has visited my blog is north-west of Melbourne, in Healesville, which is currently encircled by fire. I do hope you are alright …

This is a link to BBC News eye-witness accounts.

This video was sent to us by a friend whose daughter lives in Australia. It’s a small story with a happy ending and our hearts go out to all those who have lost loved ones, property and pets and to all firefighters everywhere – you are so brave …

a day in history …

I just wanted to record on my blog, for me, myself, I : what an amazing day in history to see a black American become President yesterday and just one day after Martin Luther King day !

I missed the live inauguration speech but watched the procession to the White House and the Obama family going into the viewing area. On French radio today I caught the end of an interview of people’s reaction here and a young (sounding) girl sobbing into the microphone, saying how happy she was and what changes it was going to make in the world.

He has such a tough job ahead of him but there’s so much hope now for a brighter future with this young president. I hope he is advised well and he keeps to the courage of his convictions, but I can’t help thinking about a caller on BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers who said that history would truly be made when a native Red Indian becomes President. (Actually, taken out of context).

If you have the time and you’re not sick to death of all the media hype. I can’t copy the link to the iplayer, but it is the 16 January show which will be available to listen to until 23 January, when the new program is aired. Listen to Any Questions first – about 50 minutes and then the listeners’ views in Any Answers – about 30 minutes. There is also a transcript of the show.


Whilst in the middle of this post my friend Claire rang from London and said that she had heard another viewpoint by Nick Abbot of LBC (20 Jan). He wonders what all the euphoria is about : nobody knows very much about Obama … Sadly, LBC feel that they need to charge to listen to their podcasts.

Claire also pointed out that Obama is not Black he is Mixed Race. He happens to have darkish skin and brown eyes. Would you call a Mixed Race person who has a fair skin and blue eyes, White or Black and
why ?

Not wanting to get controversial and seeing that this could turn into quite another debate, I will leave it at that for now …

I’m so cross …

I’m so cross with myself.

For lots of reasons … mostly that I haven’t made a post since 9 October because I’ve been so distracted reading other people’s and generally spending too much time surfing. In my head, I have written a post almost every day but haven’t physically done so and it makes me so angry with myself because this was meant to be like a diary : capturing a record of things I’ve seen and done, mostly for my own benefit and enjoyment.

I’ve so enjoyed everything I’ve written up till now and when I take LB for his daily walk I’m planning the next post; but then guilt takes over and I don’t write anything at all because I can’t just write a few words – it becomes an essay, as Lucy Corrander knows ! She sent me a quick email and my response to her was almost a post in itself.

Another reason I’m cross is that I forgot to take my camera with me the other day and missed three ‘photo’ opportunities. It had been raining hard for 46 hours and within twenty minutes of it stopping I went out with the Tibetan Terror. The mass of water was rushing along the irrigation canal and at one point I could hear some 200 metres away the sound of water falling – impressive and slightly scary to see. Later, I missed being able to capture the golden watery sun on an old building, the grey rain clouds in the background. Doesn’t sound half as interesting to just describe !

And then, when I have had my camera, missing an opportunity. I’ve seen something interesting (but that’s subjective anyway !), gone past it, thought ‘damn’ and instead of turning round (assuming the opportunity was still present) carrying on, cursing myself for being so useless.

So, having scolded myself thoroughly, I’m hoping to do some back dating of a few things : quite a bit of cooking, so a few recipes perhaps and a fairly epic (for me) removal and replanting of some olive trees for a job. Now – get over being cross and get on with it !

love thursday : friends

I was starting to write this post for my Love Thursday offering before I realised that the Shutter Sisters had called this week’s post ‘Friends’.

I have just driven Petunia and her other half to the station to start their journey home to England. We’ve had a lovely ten days together and Petunia and I have caught up on each other’s news and spent last night with a couple of glasses of sparkling wine setting up a blog for her : Panglossian Prose. Just before we got into the car she asked for a photo be taken of the two of us and I realised that we hadn’t taken photos of just the two of us this trip. Her other half obliged by taking at least three, because we both blinked at the wrong time, and it set me thinking about how negligent I have been towards keeping in touch with my friends. We all know that the sign of true, long-standing friends is that it takes but moments to catch up where we left off, but I wanted to use this opportunity to apologise (yet again, but publicly this time !) to all the people I know who may be thinking of giving up on me …

Most of my girl friends go back quite a long way and I started counting the years we had known each other :
Claire – 47 (gulp !); Zoë – 41; Phillippa – 37; Petunia – 35; Louise – 28 (I’ll have been in contact with you before you read this !); Di – 27; Sandie – 26; Emma – 25; Melanie – 25; and many more since. Now I risk offending people I may have forgotten, so I really just wanted to say to you all : “You’re all so special to me. Thank you for being my friend”


This is a picture of a more recent special friend

happy birthday, Lucy !

Happy Birthday, Lucy. I was reading Esther’s blog and so happy to hear she is back on Earth and writing about her new life and adventures. She mentioned that she had a strong feeling that it is your birthday today and then later on your Loose and Leafy blog that your brother was holding a pot (with the new bamboo?).

I went to some friends for dinner last night and there were two cakes that I was going to take a picture of to post as a birthday cake for you, but they got sliced up and divided before I had chance. So I took a picture of the portions (oh yes, I had a piece of each) on my plate, they were a sponge with chestnut purée and cream and the other was a prune tart with a filo pastry topping. Unfortunately the photographs made it look a mess – but they tasted wonderful. Everyone at dinner sends their best wishes – they sat for nearly ten minutes whilst I (bored) enthralled them with the tales of my blog and my loyal follower and other sweet people such as Barbee, who have left kind comments on my posts.


So, I’m posting a picture of a giant birthday cake and some sunflowers and hope you have a lovely day in delightful Dorchester.


Happy Birthday, Lucy. I hope you sort out your annoying feed problems with Pictures Just Pictures and wish you a wonderful year to come.