When I came back from the last fair, the garden greeted me with lots of beautiful flowers, and it's Friday, and I think you might enjoy some garden pics too, so here you go:



Tulips!



Even more tulips!



Still more tulips! Can you tell I really like these flowers? Also, they don't need much care and come back every year, so... the perfect thing for my not very consistent gardening approach.

The cherry tree is also in full bloom:



It's a very small, shrub-like morello cherry tree, and if the amount of blossoms is a hint on how many fruit it will have, we'll be in for a treat this summer. Maybe a lovely cherry cake?

I definitely need more hours in a day. Or more nights that miraculously turn out to be working nights, yet still deliver rest. Or something like that.

Yesterday, for instance, was totally gobbled up by work on the Textile Forum site (and no, it's not visible yet, I am working on a local copy of the page to make it into a nicer and more functional thing).

So somehow, all the small things that need to be done teamed up with the bigger things and ate the day. Again. It's not the first time this has happened to me, but I had only wanted to spend the morning on that page work, and do something else the rest of the day. Like planning for a possible kickstarter campaign (which is thoroughly scary), and doing some more archaeology-related writing, and some translating.

Sigh. At least I did manage to snap a photo of the nicely blooming hellebore out in the garden, which I can now share with you:

Actually, this title is half a lie, because only one picture is an actual garden pic - this one:


It's a surprise gladiolus that one day just turned up here, and now it's blooming brightly red and standing tall. Well, with a little help - the flower stalk actually had grown so tall that a heavy rain flattened it down to the ground, and it needed a support to keep it upright after that.

The other one is of a plant that resides in our wintergarden - sea kale.


This is a plant grown from seeds that I took from actual wild sea kale on one of our trips to Britain (so it's a pre-Brexit-Britain-exiter!). Sea kale doesn't grow easily from seeds, and it took about 20 of them to get me one single plant, which I then tried to coddle and coax into growing.

It was... rather uncooperative, languishing with only two or three small leaves... not very promising at all. So I kept it in the protective wintergarden environment, and then it got its very own nice large pot with water reservoir, and still... nothing.

I did know that sea kale is a halophyte, but as I also knew that it had been grown inland in former times, I had not added salt to its diet straight away. (The German wikipedia article about halophytes is much more elaborate than the English one, by the way, so if you read German, it's the better choice.) Then, finally, I started watering it with the water we had boiled our pasta in. Salty water. With lovely sea salt. And slowly, this little plant started to grow a few more leaves, and to get a little larger. It's still not very large - especially not compared to the huge, huge sea kale plants growing on the British Coast - but it might just need more salt, and I'm sort of afraid to overdo it, so I'm upping the dosage only slowly and slightly.

Moral of the story: there are plants that can tolerate salt, and plants that actually need salt, and the latter will not do well without it, even though they might survive (if barely) in normal soil. Salting the earth, in that case, is actually helpful!

Oh, and bonus proof it is a cabbage species:


The little yellow dots are cabbage white butterfly eggs.

While I was away having fun, things were going on back home. Garden things, mostly - the lawn growing like crazy, just like the willow fence. But also nicer, more edible ones:


The beef tomatoes (a variety I've had not much success with these past years) actually resulted in one plant with a decent yield. The seeds will be taken today, and I hope that there will be more of the same huge things in the future (note the rather large peanut included for something like a scale...)

Also, the peach tree is actually growing peaches this year, and most of them are still there, and growing. They will be ripe enough for harvest in a few days, I think - the first one has already fallen down, and it was still rather firm but already edible.


The other usual accumulated stuff? I'm still catching up on the last bits of it. Some of it was easy, like deleting a gazillion of emails from various social platforms and clearing out the junk folder; some were, as usual, quick to deal with through a short reply, and some need more work, so they are still sitting there, making the inbox a bit fatter than I like to have it.

There was also a rather large post-office run:


for which the Beach Rolly (originally bought for its primary* original purpose, which is canoe portaging) proved to be very helpful. Yay for multi-purpose tools!

*It actually has three original purposes as intended by the manufacturer: canoe portaging, hauling other stuff as a sack barrow, and serving as a comfy seat with backrest. It has seen use in all three of these, though the canoe portaging time is by far the smallest amount of the use-hours. Being used as a seat? By far the largest. It really is comfy!

It has been a while since you got garden pics - high time to change that!


Bees are visiting this not-real-sage plant, enjoying the nice purple flowers. Speaking of nice flowers (though not purple):


Nasturtiums in full bloom. And I haven't eaten any of them yet!


Finally, the good old chili plant is enjoying the sunshine, too - which actually makes a big difference in the depth of colour of the purple chili fruits. The purple colour acts as a sun protection for the fruit, so it is rather logical that it would get deeper with unfiltered sun than in the wintergarden, where a lot of the UV is filtered out by the glass.

(If you are like me and are thinking about purple chili sauce now - unfortunately the anthocyanins that make the colour are not stable enough to survive the process to make tabasco. To my great regret, it turned into a brownish-green colour very quickly...)

We went off to harvest some cherries a while ago, and together with loads of them, we accidentally brought back this guy:


Which, the Internet helpfully tells me, is the caterpillar of Orgyia antiqua, the rusty tussock moth, or, in German, Schlehenbürstenspinner (it seems to go for unwieldy names in both languages). I've never seen one of these caterpillars before, but they seem not to be so rare.

When searching for what this might online, I found a nice site with quite a lot of caterpillar pictures to help identify their species: Schmetterlinge Westerwald. There's 152 different caterpillars there, and the photos alone are worth a look to wonder about the variety of shapes and colours that these tiny critters have!

The one in the picture, by the way, got set outside onto our own morello cherry tree - where it will hopefully be okay...

This day.. somehow got away from me. Or at least it cunningly succeeded at hiding the fact that I hadn't blogged yet. There were a lot of things getting done, and with this and that and then a phone call inbetween and my parents stopping by for a short visit, somehow the day flew past, and there I am, suddenly remembering a lack of writing.

Well, you're not getting a long text now - but I have a few garden pics for you:

[caption id="attachment_3131" align="alignnone" width="600"] Everything is blooming these days - the white bellflowers...


[caption id="attachment_3132" align="alignnone" width="600"] ... the wild poppies...


[caption id="attachment_3133" align="alignnone" width="600"] ...one last iris is holding its own, while its comrades have already finished...


[caption id="attachment_3134" align="alignnone" width="600"] ... there's yellow and purple lilies...


[caption id="attachment_3135" align="alignnone" width="600"] ... and finally the elderflowers, filling the garden with their sweet smell. Maybe we'll manage to make fritters of these during the next few days!