Nathalie doing well

No! She is not a riding cow, just pretending...

 Butternut took a couple of weeks to accept her feeding without driving her off. It was a relief when she did as we had plans to go to Scotland and that couldn't happen with a little cow needing feeding everyday. It is nice how the frequent contact makes her so friendly, I expect as she lives with the cows more she will get a bit less so. We shall see.

Seville Orange Pickle

Like lime pickle for eating with curry, but with seville orange instead of lime. I left it rather longer than maybe I should have, but I put it in the fridge after a few weeks and it is great.

Beer, dog, flower

Celebrating the nice weather with a beer. The sweetpeas have flowered and the dog is enjoying the sun too.

Enough raspberries for jam. Hurrah!

First time ever that we have had enough raspberries and strawberries to make jam.
Only a couple of jars of each, but still, exciting!.

Camomile

I didn't plant them, but they self seed from year to year and did really well this year. The main issue was the boredom of picking and drying enough to see us through. I suspect I didn't do quite enough.

Yummy meal out

Lovely meal at the Auberge Le Buoic for a friends birthday.

Vertical gardening

Although we have quite a lot of space for plants I decided to try growing more of them up things this year in the hope it would make it easier to weed round them and also keep things like squashes a bit more away from the mice that want to eat them.

There are squash planted at the top of this frame in those little grey things - which are cement blocks which will hopefully make strimming round them easier.

This is peas - obviously they always need to grow up things but before I have grown them on A frames, the idea of these vertical ones is that they will be easier to weed between.

Runner beans on the teepee and mange tout on the vertical frames as above

On the left there are tomatoes in spirals as well as cucumber and a melon. I grow a melon every year but we have never had fruit (yet!)

I will update on how this goes...