Summer in the cut flower patch

I blame two weekends in a row away from my real life.  I was fast asleep last night (exhausted from driving all the way back from the Alps) when I heard a rumble and a loud boom.  I checked my clock – a few minutes past 1am.  And then another boom and flash and I suddenly realized it was a storm.

That was about a second after I asked ‘Who am I? Where am I?’ And realized I still had the phone and modem plugged in.

So I lay there a bit dazed and confused before I adopted the correct pose of a French rural resident under the barrage of a lightning storm. I raced, fleetfooted, to the kitchen and unplugged all devices.

Phew. And then staggered back to bed listening for the crashes and claps of close lightning and smiling at the sound of driving rain.

This morning I had the tense wait to see if the power lines had delivered a surge of power taking out the internet – another phew- and then twinkled out in the downpour to the rain gauge.

An inch! 25mm of rain. I would do a hop and a skip if I could. But I’m still stiff as a board and listing to one side. With pinging pulses of pain thrown in.  But I am not to be brought low by anything today.  I have rain. I’m back home. And I have almost a week of work that is wholly garden and farm centric.

Hurrah.

So to celebrate, here is a damp twinkle through the cutting patch.  I know that the idea of a cut flower garden has you thinking of rows and rows of perfect blooms in a flat field (floaty skirt and sunhat optional).  But what I have is one long row in the far end of the vegetable garden.

And any self sown flowers muscling their way in between the dwarf French beans, the broad beans, the lettuce and the toms.

Great for pollation, and great for distracting your eye from the bolting lettuce and the rather parched kale.

Pause. The sun is out. I need to get going. We haven’t had rain for weeks and the soil will be blissfully soft and easy to work for the rest of the day. I don’t want to tarry indoors. I have an orchard to landscape.