A mixed bag

I’m typing these words with the delicious scent of nicotiana flowers wafting all over the living room.  I must remember to cut some of these flowers for myself in the house.  The ones in the vase are destined for Christine at Vernoux tomorrow. Lucky woman.

I do love the Thursday ritual of taking flowers up to my friends at the market.  And as it’s sunflower season, I have quite a mixed bag of goodies.

But I’m not that thrilled with my colour choices today. Too bitty for my taste. But they are dramatic and that ought to be good enough.

If I look in my folder of photos for today it’s definitely a mixed bag. And that is how the day felt.  I dabbled at things.

Picking flowers takes a bit of time; and I had a lovely visit from my neighbour Daniele. We sat in the potting shed and Artur couldn’t believe his luck. Two laps. And his two favourite humans no less.  So I’m all caught up on news.

And then I seem to recall I needed to pick an awful lot of jostaberries so I would have something to do while I watched the last bit of the Tour de France cycle race.

And before I reached the jostas, it was another two casualties of fennel to pull up and shake my fist at the mole rat.

I’ve never seen it at work as it lives underground. And as it’s dark under there, it probably does its best munching at night.  An internet image search reveals the most revolting pictures of these dreadful little creatures. We don’t have the African mole rat, but the European one which has the same big teeth, but does have hair.

And if I had an African mole rat I would be onto a winner. They are actually the only creatures known to scientists which don’t get cancer. So it is widely studied in labs.  Catch one and you can donate it to medical research.

Oh that mine had any good qualities. It just gets my blood boiling as I see the carnage it wreaks every morning in the potager.

Luckily a few more kilos of jostaberries calmed me down. And a handful of lovely green beans. I’ve already composed my evening meal – new potatoes, green beans, fresh dill, salad and peas. 

And I might sprinkle a few dried jostaberries into the mix.  Here they are dried and frozen and going into their jars for the freezer. I’ll just pull out a few spoonfuls for each dish. I dont’ think I dried them well enough to risk just keeping them in a jar in the pantry. All that work would go to waste if they started to rot.

My main job for the day (apart from planting up the central barrel in the potager) was a big session of mowing.

I need the grass cuttings for mulch.  And things needed a bit of a tidy.  We still have a rather drought stricken farm so the images aren’t very pretty.  But I managed three bags of mulch which I put around the newly planted up eragrostis grasses.

I don’t have a thick layer down, but it’s a start.