Spring has really sprung now, and there are flowers, flowers galore in the garden. Here's picture proof, first of the first tulips:

The peach tree is also flowering nicely:

... and the hyacinths are doing a good job of adding some blue to the flower beds. Which I much appreciate, with blue still being my favourite colour!

At least early spring is - as these guys in the garden stand testimony:



The crocus, as usual, is the first to go bloom. The snowdrops sit in a more shady part of the garden and will need a few more days, but they are obviously also getting ready:



Early spring also means it's willow-pruning time, and our fence goes from its wild winter stage, which looks like this:



to being all bare of withies, ready to make new ones when spring truly comes:

Late summer is a season for delights - our peaches are ripe now, the first late-summer and autumn apples are also ripening, and of course there are the Zwetschgen, this kind of plum that lends itself to baking and cooking like nothing else does. Few things are better than Zwetschgen on a cake with Streusel... or even without.
There's another delight of the season, however, and that is elderberries. As fond as I am of elderberry flowers (excellent fritters, lovely syrup, wonderful jelly - though I only make fritters, because I am lazy and our tree doesn't yield so much, flower-wise, without getting a jetpack or some way to turn off gravity), it is totally worth it to not harvest all the flowers, because then... there's elderberries later on in the year.



While one should not eat them raw (they are slightly poisonous when uncooked), they will add colour and wonderful flavour to cooked dishes. So when we happened upon some windfall apples, I took this as a sign to get out the ladder and harvest some elderberries... and a while later, we had dinner.

Curd cheese casserole with elderberries and apple, seasoned with a little cinnamon. A seasonal delight indeed!

I'm on my way back home from the fair, and while I am on the road, you are getting peaches. Or at least pictures of peaches, hanging on our tree:



Though they look temptingly yellow and red, they are still hard as stones, and will need some more weeks to ripen. Last year's fruits were edible sometime in September, so I'm waiting. And hoping there will not be more people along like the guy who recently stole one of the unripe ones when leaving the premises, triggering a nice little fit of temper!

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.