🌱🦔 Just reinstalled the camera inside our hedgehog house. Last year, it stopped working halfway through the winter season, and we weren’t able to capture any hedgehog / hibernation activity. This year, it should hold on for a few months longer.🤞
🌱🐝 Remnants of this season’s bumblebee nest inside our hedgehog house. Fascinating structure. I also found two tiny baby bumblebees, already dead. I doubt if they ever have seen the light of day…
🌱 The last batch of this year’s homegrown apples found their way into the slow juicer. They’re actually still very sweet and tasteful this late in the season.
🌱 We just unpacked the Bonsai Starter Kit my daughter got as a birthday gift, and learned about scarification and stratification. Start of a new hobby? We will know in about 5 years..! 🙃
🌱 🍂 Autumn colours! 🍁🍂
🌱 Just saved a 40+ year old cactus from dying. At least the viable parts that were left of it. Or so I hope…
🌱🐝🦔 I wanted to clean up the hedgehog house for the winter, since I wasn’t expecting a lot of bumblebee activity anymore. I was wrong, so I covered it back up to give them a few more weeks…
Found the perfect destination for this year’s harvest of almonds: toasted and crumbed, on top of a risotto with roasted sweet garlic, thyme and mascarpone. From Jamie Oliver’s Return of the Naked Chef.
🌱 Cracking almonds can be a fun and even mindful activity (once you get the hang of it and only when using the right tools; our original nutcracker broke after just a few tries…)
First time making jam from grapes from our garden. Found an interesting recipe with rosemary, laurel, lemon and a tiny bit of cinnamon. Can’t wait to taste it!
🌱 Harvest time! A modest but first ever batch of black grapes, a plentiful harvest of almonds and the first batch of Braeburn apples.
🌱 Just enough for one jar of delicious plum jam!
🌱Tulips in the garden of our old house (2006, one of the first photos taken with my old Nikon dslr) & Oleander in our present garden (2022, one of the first photos taken with my new Sony mirrorless)
🌱 Just a few more weeks to go…
🌱 Made a delicious pasta dish tonight, with a creamy sauce with homegrown sage, parmesan and lemon. Loosely based on the Ottolenghi recipe in Plenty More.
🌱 Last year we finally could harvest some plums, after waiting in vain for about 5 years. I remember almost cutting the whole tree because we thought it would never bear any fruit. I’m glad I didn’t: this year, even the other (grafted) stem joined the club!
🌱 Unfortunately our hedgehog house isn’t in use this season, despite plenty of hedgehog activity in our garden. (Probably it’s just too hot during the summer?) But today I discovered that a brave bumblebee queen decided to use it instead and start a new colony in there! 🐝
🌱 Upon arriving home after a short holiday, I found this ‘fledgeling’ in our garden. Probably left there as a kind of trophy by one of our cats. It certainly wasn’t there a week ago. The hot temperatures and the abundance of insects must have contributed to its current state…
🌱 Synchronised Nuptial flight of three (?!) ant colonies in our garden.
Different colonies of the same species often use environmental cues to synchronize the release of males and queens. […] The actual “take off” […] is also often synchronized to overwhelm their predators.
🌱 The newly planted grape in our garden is coming along nicely.
🌱 There’s nothing like the fresh smell of boiling jam from homegrown raspberries and redcurrants…
🌱 Blooming sage in the morning sun. For the first time since we planted it years ago (but used its leaves for culinary purposes). Didn’t know it had such beautiful flowers.
🌱 There are literally hundreds of ladybird beetles living in our garden right now. I already spotted several larvae and pupae in the last couple of weeks, but I never saw so many of them before. They’re right on time though: our fruit trees have a lot of aphids on their leaves.
🌱 Record amount of apple pies in the making 🥧
🌱 Plane crossing the blue sky behind our blooming almond tree.
