Fruit frenzy but going quieter on the bug front

It's certainly harvest time and that means time to preserve some of this bounty, especially the fruit. I'm only spending time jamming and chutneying the fruit that needs to be cooked from fresh, so raspberries and blackberries are in the freezer and can be made into jam and jelly respectively later on. Freezer space is at a premium at this time of year so I also had to make some tomato sauce to make a bit of room in my chest freezer. I've still got three huge plastic bags full of frozen tomatoes and loads more ripening, despite the cooler weather.

I'm keeping busy..... the Mixed Fruit Chutney has damsons in it as well as tomatoes,
and the Sweet Aubergine Preserve is a middle eastern recipe and amazingly delicious.

The rain that came over two weeks ago was just in time for the plums; however many of them split open or completely burst because they'd been dry and were then subjected to rather a lot of moisture all at once. Of course that's letting in rot so the greengages are spoiling at a rate of knots, but I managed to make my jam and it's the first time in three years I've had enough fruit for jam from the tree. The purple plums have also started rotting but there's only so much one can eat or preserve anyway, and just when you need some handy neighbours to take some off your hands, they all go away on holiday!

Greengage, known as Reine Claude here in France, and an unknown purple dessert plum.

Autumn fruiting Raspberries 'Zeva' and thornless cultivated Blackberries (with a Dock Bug).

Everyone loves blackberries! Dock Bug (Coreus marginatus) nymph left and (I think)
the Cricket is a male Speckled Bush Cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima).

We usually see juvenile Green Woodpeckers in summer pecking away at the ants' nests in the lawn, and since taking these photos recently I've been seeing and hearing them regularly. They are loud!

A male juvenile Green Woodpecker (Picus viridis).

Male juvenile Green Woodpecker (Picus viridis) again looking a bit fluffy.

It was time for my OH to do some varnishing but when he went to unhook the bedroom shutters he found about a dozen bats roosting behind one of them. Some flew off but he had to close the shutter carefully to protect the rest of them, so no varnishing for that shutter that day! Now I missed what came next but I'm kind of glad that I did. As he was varnishing the window frames and the other shutter, a bat came back and started circling around. My OH retreated slightly and started to close the windows so that it could go back behind the shutter, when all of a sudden out of nowhere came a Sparrowhawk who caught and flew off with the poor bat! Oops.

I assume they are Pipistrelles which are common bats but they look bigger in the photo, but I think there were several of them all grouped together here. I couldn't do any better than a silhouette and was trying not to think of the drop as I leant out of the window!

Bats roosting behind the bedroom shutter!

Here are a few tatty creatures seen recently. Summer feels like it's really coming to an end with the cooler, more cloudy weather and there are far fewer butterflies than I'd expect at this time of year. Hopefully it will pick up in September.

I'm not sure what the bee is, possibly a Bombus sylvarum.

Most of the butterflies I'm seeing are Browns or Whites - here's a Gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus)
 feeding on my Garlic Chives - another odd thing about this year because this plant is usually
covered in bees, flies and some butterflies, but it seems fairly unpopular this year.

And still the only 'Blue' I've seen here in my garden this year - this is a female Holly Blue
(Celastrina argiolus). They don't normally open their wings when resting or feeding,
so I was lucky. Apparently they only do this in weak sunshine.
Weak sunshine is what we are grateful for right now!

Female Holly Blue (Celastrina argiolus).

I nearly didn't take a photo of this bug as I thought it was a Sloe/Hairy Shield Bug - luckily I checked because I'm wrong. I then spent half an hour IDing it only to find when I was keywording my photos that I've already seen and logged this species this year - it would have been quicker to do a search for shield bugs in my photo library! Judging by where I live in France, then using this guide I would hazard a guess at Carpocoris purpureipennis, but it's too difficult to say, so let's just say it's one of the Carpocoris species.

Carpocoris sp., an interesting bug with little info about it on the internet.
Obviously it likes running around on hairy arms. :-)

Carpocoris sp. doing the 'biz', seen back in June.

There appears to be an exchange of fluid going on here -
looking at my other photos that droplet disappeared, so I hope it went where intended! ;-)

The eight day weather forecast looks dismal for the next week, although I will appreciate whatever rain we may get today as the garden is already drying out.

I may go quiet for a while and that's because I have a new desktop arriving this week - and not just any old desktop. I'm jumping ship so it's bye-bye Microsoft, and hello to the world of Apple and iMacs, which could be interesting for a few days weeks? until I get used to it! :-) 

Veg patch update - June

Just a quick note to say that if you are a subscriber by email, you will not see the videos embedded in the blog posts, not even a still to let you know that there is one there. I noticed the same thing on Feedly, although if you press the Preview button on Feedly you can then view the videos. So email subscribers you'll have to come direct to the blog to see my videos of the Swallowtail butterfly eclosing!

This is a pure gardening post; I also have tons of interesting bugs found recently in the veg patch, but I'll post that separately, otherwise this post would be way too long! But before you skip this if you are a bug rather than gardening lover, I want to let you know that the Swallowtail who fell out of its cradle whilst pupating, eclosed yesterday with no problems whatsoever and is now outside doing what Swallowtails do. Phew! 

Earlier in June when the grass was nice and green -
but since then I have nice new gravel spread on the drive!

The rest of the photos are taken in the last week of June. I was plagued by problems earlier in the year. First the various different lettuce that I sowed in March under cover nearly all failed to germinate. Annoyingly, French seed packets seem to think that lettuce seed is good for about 6 years, whilst British seed packets seem to give you about 1-2 years before their 'best before date'. I think it is actually somewhere in between.

The next two sowings after buying more seed I lost about 80% to slugs; this includes spinach which I was growing for the first time. Those that survived then got munched by sparrows so I had to cover every plant with a cloche! I was reduced to sowing seeds in pots in the cold frame which have now been planted out. Of course by the time these plants got near to maturity (and I'm still waiting on cos and batavia which need 2-3 months to heart up) the weather turned really hot and dry. I have spent so many hours watering I get so fed up by it all. I would buy lettuce but sadly in France there is very little choice and all the lettuce sold here is very floppy and I only like hearted crunchy lettuce, so I have no choice but to grow my own. 

Strawbs, lettuce, the cucumber frame, spinach already bolting and a strip of flowers near the
fence. I have taken out the borage now and planted annuals which are attractive to pollinators.
Oh, and those are mulot traps, a burrowing mouse which is a complete and utter pest
which tunnels under all my strawberries.

This is the weird disease which is affecting my dill plants.
I don't sow dill, it self seeds everywhere but as it's an important
food source for Swallowtail caterpillars I'm a bit concerned.

I'm getting more and more into having flowers in the veg patch and some I plant, and some
appear all of their own accord. In the background where you see the yellow flowers,
that is my Pollinator Meadow Year 3 and still doing its job of looking great
and attracting tons of bees, hoverflies and butterflies.

My early potatoes (Belle de Fontenay) have taken longer to mature this year and I had to set up seep hoses along the ridges of the potatoes because it's impossible to water them when they are earthed up.

Potato flowers are attractive too!

Behind the spuds I planted sunflowers which I grew from seed,
but in the middle there's one that self seeded from last year
(they were whoppers) and the opium poppies are self seeded.
There are also two potimarrons (a French pumpkin) in this area.

Opium poppies again. These are the ones that produce the seeds
that you buy for culinary purposes so I'll be collecting seed
from them later on. Never done it before but
I'm 99% sure I've got the right variety!

Harry and some tomatoes.

Annoyingly this year I could not buy a barquette of six of my favourite tomato variety and buying individually was too expensive, so I only have three plants, although I've propagated three more from side shoots. This variety (Fournaise) is really early to form fruit as you can see here. Even my cherry toms have only a few toms actually forming yet and the six Premio variety which I did buy in a barquette are very slow to form fruit.

Fournaise, my favourite, best producing tomato.

Looking from the lettuce/spinach bed towards the pea and bean bed with another strip of flowers for pollinators on the right by the perimeter fence. The empty gaps on the left foreground are spring onions which have been sown, these are taking forever to germinate and I am getting maybe one for every 20 seed sown even with brand new seed. I have found over the years that some years they just will not germinate, and other times they germinate no problem at all. And it's got nothing to do with the weather. A mystery.

Lettuce and spinach bed looking towards peas and beans
with my large Greengage tree in the background.

Another disappointment this year were the sugar snap peas which I had to buy in England as they don't exist in France. Big mistake. Not only were there ordinary peas which had got into the packet too but apart from the first few pickings, they are really stringy and tough even when I pick them young before they swell up (which they do really quickly) so they are all being composted now. What a waste. I'll stick to French mange tout in future which are miles better. Of course it may have been because the weather turned hot and sunny and I just couldn't water enough, but a veg like that has no place in my dry garden.

Sugar Snaps.

Rust is very prevalent here and my garlic always has rust (leeks always have it too to a lesser degree, and sometimes spring onions, and one year even the plums succumbed to it!), but this year it was even worse and the heads have not swelled up as much as normal; having said that I never get through all the garlic that I grow so not a probem. And they still store fine.

Rusty garlic lifted.

The Pollintor Meadow Year 3.
The Phacelia in the foreground I allowed to grow because it is short lived;
my leeks will be transplanted into this area later.
And in the distance many more self seeded flowers growing around the peas!

An older photo when the sugar snaps were still tender, with spinach and a courgette.
The courgettes are doing really well!

Another disappoinment are my aubergines. I've only tried once before here in Brittany, growing them in pots and I had not a single fruit. This year they are in the ground and the leaves just yellowed and they refused to grow at all. I have given them a supplementary feed specific to this kind of veg so will wait and see if anything happens. I'm annoyed because one neighbour nearby grew them really successfully last year! I used to grow them easy peasy when I lived the other side of France too. 

And now fruit - soft fruit is always good and reliable here but the fruit on the trees not so. But things are looking good - we have the most amazing crop of cherries which have not split nor have they been munched by birds! Also the three plum trees which are near the veg patch are absolutely loaded with fruit. One tree has more fruit in three foot of branch than it's ever produced in the previous nine years! However..... I won't know until they are ripe if they are any good as brown rot attacks them four out of five years and it gets them just before they are ready to pick.

But raspberries, strawberries, black and red currants are doing well and I can hardly keep up with the harvesting!

Cherries, greengage top right and unknown dessert plum bottom left.

Preserving frenzy and veg patch update

In between swanning about playing with butterflies, I've been spending time in the kitchen dealing with monstrous amounts of fruit and veg. No really, actually this year everything has been pretty well under control; I have managed to keep up with nearly all the veggies, and the fruit that can be frozen for later use has been bunged into my freezers until I had the time to do something with it all.

Raspberry jam. It was supposed to be seedless and I spent ages pushing
all the pulp through my mouli thing to get rid of the seeds!
Never mind, it's an acceptable level of pippiness.

The orchard is brimming with fruit and nuts. It's mostly an autumn type of orchard with pears, apples and walnuts planted, as well as wild hazels and elderberries. My two newish plum trees are about as rubbish as the other ones in the main garden though, but I've found over the years that plums and peaches are dodgy fruit to grow and succumb to disease very easily; that's if they ever get pollinated and produce any fruit in the first place. Apples and soft fruit are much easier! This year is probably the best ever for pears though (also a bit hit and miss) so we've been making the most of it!

Three different kinds of pears ripening at different times, thankfully.
On the left are Conference and the other two are unknowns.

Just to give you an idea of what I've been harvesting on a regular basis as far as veggies and soft fruit go..... this photo was taken at the end of August but the French beans have only recently finished, there's little left in the way of lettuce and the cucumbers are history now, but only yesterday I picked a load more strawberries and tomatoes, the courgettes are still producing and there's tons more beetroot. And we are so sick of raspberries because we've been eating them non-stop since mid June!

Note the two greengages!

Elderberries, different apples and Pear Clafouti,
which is one of my favourite desserts.

The next two photos (this is all rather random and in no particular order, date, fruit or anything else-wise) show me having a blitz on every courgette clogging up the fridge by making two savoury courgette cakes (recipe here from last year), a vat of courgette, basil and parmesan soup, with blackberries dripping through muslin in the background to make bramble jelly. 

The pic below that is yet more courgettes in a sort-of-ratatouille using the tomato sauce which I've already bottled, cooking down loads of frozen tomatoes to make said tomato sauce (method here from ages ago) and a spicy mixed fruit chutney which I usually add damsons to but this year just used tomatoes and apples. The recipe for the chutney is here but this time I used 2kg of tomatoes instead of 1.5kg damsons and 500g tomatoes - it's fairly easy and safe to adapt different kinds of fresh or dried fruits in a chutney recipe, so long as you keep to the same quantities.

I will get through these courgettes if it kills me!

Ditto the tomatoes!!

I have to mention something regarding the photo below of beetroot and apple relish from a recipe never tried before and elderberry syrup. I spent hours picking the elderberries off the stalks and my hands turned black. I duly made the syrup, the recipe for which I'd got from the great Greenside Up blog (later to find I already had that cookery book here!). So, bottled up the relish and left the syrup to cool because I was going to freeze it, then went off to do other things. 

A little while later a very sheepish husband came to find me and said "oops". He'd only gone and thought my syrup was the beetroot boiling water and tipped it all down the sink! And if that wasn't funny enough, I had to remind him that actually, I had boiled the beetroot the day before, and he had already washed up that pan! I guess I should just be grateful that I have a hubby who clears up my mess and regularly washes up my preserving pans..... but oh, I've just remembered, there was also the time he chucked my Tom Yum Goong (Thai hot and sour prawn soup) down the sink because it looked like 'dirty dish water' in the pan.... hmmmm. :-)

Beetroot Relish and Elderberry Syrup.

Back in the veggie patch for a few more pics. There's still plenty to eat and loads of colour from my various strips of flowers for pollinators or butterflies. I'll do a report on my Pollinator Meadow Year 2 at some point, because it's been a huge success both visually and for the bugs.

Various veggies with various flowers in the background.

I found a third, much larger Swallowtail caterpillar which I put on the same plant as the other two. Since then the smallest has disappeared and the middle sized one is the same size as the big one now, and they have chomped through most of a plant and I've moved them to another one. They have a tendency to just sit on a stem which they've eaten all the leaves off. Maybe I should leave them to it but I like to mollycoddle my 'babies'!

Swallowtail caterpillar, tomatoes, a strawberry and a late squash which I don't know if
it'll have time to ripen (I've already picked the two that had turned orange).

Physalis, a fruit I have never grown before. The jury is out really as I've
only eaten a few and I'm not sure this is something I would regularly grow.

I've decided to take out the peach tree that grows in the veg patch. I've kept that one because peaches need so much water that it has to be irrigated with a seep hose, and whilst it's got a bit too big despite pruning, it does provide some much needed shade for lettuce in summer. But two years in a row and no fruit at all due to brown rot setting in (which affects our plums some years too), and all the fruit has scab anyway. I already buy peaches and nectarines all through the summer season and if mine were good, they'd all come at once in a big glut at the end of September and I can't freeze them, and they are no good for bottling due to the scab. And the biggest problem with brown rot is that you don't know you've got it until the fruit is almost ripe.... so you can spend all summer nurturing and watering your fruit, and then the whole crop is lost, just like that. It's just not worth it.

Brown Rot or Monilinia on a peach. Not pretty.
The black freckles are scab.

Not my hairy arm.
This tatty old Peacock really did just land on my OH's arm
whilst we were standing in the veg patch!

You may have to look hard, but you never know
who is sheltering under your cherry tomatoes!

"Holy Cow Bertie, what on earth is THAT?!"

We had a good amount of rain yesterday and the weather forecast shows mostly sunny and still very mild for the next week, and my tomatoes continue to ripen. If only autumn was always like this!

Veg patch update - July

I've been taking photos for weeks meaning to do an update, then after a few days it's all gone and changed again! In the last few weeks everything has grown really fast due to so much sun and warm to hot weather. Of course that has meant copious watering, even at times getting the hose pipe in there. Once I gave up and put the sprinkler on to try to give my maincrop potatoes and red onions a good watering, as a watering can is quite futile for things like this (unless you do it all day long). But using mains water is costly, so whilst we long for sunny days we also need rain!

So now I am harvesting all sorts of lovely summer veg but I'll show some of the photos from several weeks back anyway.

6th July and I only show this photo because I actually captured a Swallow swooping over
the veg patch - sometimes they land in it and take soil or just perch on the tomato posts.
But have I been able to capture this? No, of course not!!

13th July and looking nice and moist after the sprinkler had been on!
The shallots have been lifted now and left to dry in the barn.
My wildflower meadow is in the background.

My rusty garlic has been lifted and left to dry in the barn; we are already eating it.
The spring onions (left) are huge now and the leeks (right) are desperate
to be planted out, but have to wait until the onions come out,
as they need that space!

That nice feeling after you've dug up a load of spuds!

Oh no, not more courgettes.... a week later and it's glut time again!

16th July when the harvest was still quite meagre.
First tomato, 2nd cucumber and something like courgettes nos. 5 and 6.
Since then there's been nothing meagre about the harvests
and my fridges are bursting with cucumbers and courgettes which we can't eat fast enough!

I am still picking tons of raspberries, although I have had to put the seep hoses
on regularly on my two raspberry patches as they are very thirsty plants.
We even got a few cherries that the birds left for us.

This is a Physalis (Cape Gooseberry) flower - first time I'm growing them.
They are already forming their 'lanterns'!

18th July and planting out my French beans -
the soil was getting seriously dry.
I dug down about 6 inches into pure dust.

And then it rained! Hoorah, hours and hours of thunderstorms last Sunday; the temperature dropped a whole 10C which was a blessed relief and it rained and rained, totalling 28mm which is a little over an inch. Most of the water butts were full and the garden and I sighed in relief. Of course it was short lived because the temps are back up to about 29C again and the plants have sucked that moisture up like you wouldn't believe, and I have just started watering the veggies again, but having 3 nights off from the watering was like the best present ever.

After the rain and my bought squash plant 'Courge Musquée de Provence' is going crazy
in all directions. Usually I train smaller squash up through the fence wire a bit but
I have never grown this variety before and have discovered that the fruit grow to 6-9kg!

Another view of this plot which has tomatoes, courgettes and two kinds of squash.
The straw mulch is more for keeping the tomatoes off the soil than keeping moisture in.
We've eaten 4 tomatoes so far, medium sized ones called 'Fournaise' which are
my favourite all rounders. I've tried all sorts and been disappointed with many.

The 3 cucumbers are producing too well now but the lettuce
in the background is starting to bolt.

I also have 3 cherry tomato plants in pots at the front of the house which are
doing really well and the first fruits are just changing colour.

We're also eating blueberries from my one plant which is in a pot.

Finally, did you think I could post anything without a bug?! I just noticed this tiny Cinnabar Moth caterpillar last night, on a groundsel 'weed', near my currant bushes in the veg patch. Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)* really is an annoying weed as it has fluffy seed heads that disperse seeds like dandelions, but the Cinnabar Moth larvae eat this, although their primary food plant is Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris/Senecio jacobaea). So I always leave a few of these weeds here and there and check them for the caterpillars before I weed any out. The moth is a daytime flying one and very beautiful; I've only seen a few this year but I finally managed to capture one at long last, sitting on a strawberry plant!

Cinnabar Moth caterpillar on Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Cinnabar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae) on a strawberry leaf

* Note about Groundsel from Wikipedia, and I have read this before elsewhere. I've not had a problem myself, but I wouldn't purposefully leave it growing right next to crops because of it:

"Groundsel acts as a host for the fungus that causes black root rot in peas, alfalfa, soybeans, tomatoes, red clover, peanuts, cucurbits, cotton, citrus, chickpeas and several ornamental flowering plants...."