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!

Things happening here, in no particular order:

The cat is sleeping. Well, mostly - sometimes she wakes up and goes "meow". Sometimes she wakes up and has an itchy ear, which results in something like this:


The first seeds from the surprise seed mix have sprouted, and it's cress:


Also green, but a long way beyond being a seedling? My hippeastrum. It's blooming.

And just in case you are wondering what I have been doing, apart from taking photos and annoying the cat by waking her with the camera click - I've been doing some weaving. Proof here:


That is silk and gold thread, and I can tell you right now that the warp is a nasty thing to handle - the silk and gold are quite, quite different in their elasticity, and the gold especially needs careful handling. I did test runs with the materials, but with a shorter, narrower warp, and it does not scale without trouble, so I had some figuring out of solutions to do (and there might have been "aaaargh" sounds along that way).

For now, though, it seems like I've found ways to compensate for the different takeup of the two materials, and should I ever do this again, I'll definitely be smarter. Well, maybe. Hopefully.

Even though we've had some snow in the past days, and it is rather cool outside again, I'm all delighted with the garden and how much is blooming there. The day of planting a few tomato plants into nice, large containers in the wintergarden so we can have early tomatoes is also drawing nearer - just a few more days for the small plants to grow before I'll pick the three strongest and biggest ones to go do their thing.

In spirit with the season of growth, I also had some fun sowing a sort-of-surprise seed package. When we were shopping last weekend, we stumbled across this:


It says "kitchen herb seed mix" and on the bottom, "Sparpreis" means something like "budget price". At 29 cents, it really was - and I took it home with me, expecting to find something like a wild mix of seeds inside. Like when somebody would have swept up the seeds fallen down from regular packing and tossed them into a paper bag.

Which is exactly what the contents look like:


Now, if I were really good with seeds, I'd be able to tell which plants might spring from them. I'm hoping there will be parsley among them; probably there'll be chives, and it looks like something from the aniseed family will also be present. Dill would also be nice.

Well, I tossed a generous amount of the seed mix into a pot with earth, and now... I'll wait for the surprise in green to spring up. I'm already having a lot of fun just anticipating the things to come - which, again, proves that I am really easy to amuse.

I'm away for only a few days, and my return is to a garden in bloom - the tulips are open, and there's spots of colour everywhere:

[caption id="attachment_3036" align="alignnone" width="600"] Yellow tulips, and the willow in the background is going like crazy.


[caption id="attachment_3033" align="alignnone" width="640"] That said, the willow fence is going like crazy everywhere now!


[caption id="attachment_3034" align="alignnone" width="640"] More tulips - these were more yellowish once, but they have sort of migrated towards orangey red over the years. There's also hyacinths in blue and dandelion that snuck in (and is allowed to bloom a bit more).


[caption id="attachment_3035" align="alignnone" width="640"] And the peach tree is also flowering - let's see if there will be peaches this year...