Back to the butterflies…

Letting the photos speak for themselves….

Peacock butterfly.

Swallowtail on Verbena bonariensis

Speckled Wood on Bracken.

Swallowtail Caterpillar getting ready to wander off and pupate.

Male Brimstone on Verbena bonariensis

It’s not all butterflies! The dahlias have been good this year too. And the Asters are beautiful now.

Apples and pears in abundance this year.

Tomatoes:  (clockwise) ‘Join or Die’, ‘Caro Rich’, ‘Evergreen’, ‘Indigo Rose’ and ‘Lemon Plum’. 

I love the warm yellow of this Sunflower. The bees love the pollen, and the birds will love the seeds.

 

Out of sorts, but there is still some good stuff…

A version of Rumtopft. Except not really as it was all put in on the same day in a bid to use a mixture of fruit that isn’t jam or chutney… The fruit with the star shape is actually a tomato.

Brown Turkey figs have cropped well – and grown exponentially. Masses of little ones that won’t come to anything in this climate, but it’s been great to have the abundance of enough ripe ones to be able to slice a few and eat them with a mild ewe’s milk cheese, add them to fruit salads, eat them straight from the tree and even drop a couple into the bottle above! (and seeing that this is about positive things I’m not going to dwell overmuch on the quantities that the cheeky mice have been attacking. I know this for a fact as they can’t eat a whole one in one sitting. But their teeth marks are there as evidence. I just shut my eyes and finish off whatever they’ve left.)

‘Lemon Plum’ tomatoes. There’ll be more tomato stuff on my next post. But I’m loving the ‘lemon’ look of this variety.

Fishing this week finally produced a proper catch. Here’s a Garfish/Aiguillette (right), a Chub Mackerel/Maquereau Espagnol – not as good eating as a standard one, but huge and powerful, and finally, on the left, my first ever Gilthead Bream/Dorade. I wish I liked eating them all as much as I enjoy catching them!

Damsons. Not from my own garden. I have a neighbour who’s rarely here to get the benefit from his trees…but doesn’t mind that I do. I’ve dried all these in a dehydrator and jarred them up for later. I know Damson jam is lovely, but I haven’t eaten my 2015 jars yet.

Boletus erythropus. Syn. Boletus luridifomis now called Neoboletus luridifomis. Common name in French – bolet a pied rouge (red-foot bolete). Whatever…It’s a very pretty mushroom, that turns a disturbingly bright blue immediately on cutting. It needs to be well cooked to avoid digestive upsets. So, although I could, I’ve never really felt inclined to eat it!

Hissy cat

No matter how many photos I post, they won’t capture the essence of this most beautiful, (although I once may have said she was ugly) cat. She turned up here one day and decided to stay. Bit by bit she dug herself in until she became, perhaps, the most important part of my being here. I will treasure every day that she was around.  She enriched my life immeasurably. She was the Hissycat. I loved her and I miss her more than I can explain.