This guy looked to have his life sorted on the beach this morning. My brother-in-law pointed out that he probably used a drone to take the lines out beyond the surf. Sure enough, when I zoomed in I could see a drone beside him.
I grew up in a culture of fly fishing in which other forms of fishing were ‘chuck and chance’. This form of surf casting is next level: ‘drop and wait’?
When I’m considering wearing socks I know summer is over – yet in my last post it seemed it would never end. Now the heat pump is on. The temperature has plummeted in the last couple of days, the sun doesn’t come up until closer to 7am than 6am, and when it’s shining (which it isn’t right now) it creeps further across the windowsills on the north side of the house. On a couple of days I haven’t taken the cover off the egg chair, while last week I had to wait for the sun to go off it before it was cool enough to sit in. Sigh!
The lawn looked as if it was going to turn yellow at one point, but the episodes of rain we’ve had have kept it green and the garden growing well. The ‘salad bar’ is still ready for action so I hope there’ll be a few days when summer does a reprise. Right now it’s soup or scrambled eggs with toast on the menu.
I imagine the people attending the music event, Electric Avenue, in the park today and tomorrow would rather die of hypothermia than be seen wearing a jersey but might be able to keep warm by leaping about and mushing together in the mosh pit.
Post Script: Wouldn’t you know it? The sun has come out. Cicadas are chirping. I’m going out to sit in the egg chair.
It was entertaining to sit in the egg chair and watch birds in the garden today. There were piwakawaka (fantails), finches, waxeyes and blackbirds (two flapped about in the birdbath) and constant bird chatter high in the trees. I’ve noticed a lot of black seeds on the ground and the usual bugs, especially passion vine hoppers, so I think there is plenty for birds to eat.
The same is true for us, I thought, as I gathered salad ingredients from the garden.
For tonight’s dinner, I had the satisfaction of harvesting ripe tomatoes to pop in the pot.
There are plenty more tomatoes for the next time – and more yet to ripen.
While it’s much easier to open a tin of tomatoes, the effort of growing your own is something else!
In December 2024 I wrote a post about repotting my aloe vera which had become too big to keep inside. I needn’t have been concerned that it wouldn’t grow outside. This summer it produced a spike over half a metre tall (66cm in fact) from which elongated trumpet-like flowers emerged. It was intriguing to watch – my home-grown variation of the ‘corpse flower’ in the Botanic Gardens which people queued to see.
Today, the last flower is fading at the tip of the spike. The plant is on more of a lean than it was, probably because Felix tried to climb it this morning. Incriminating evidence: his fur all over it, and the thumping and scrabbling noises he made as he fell between the wall and the pot – which was where he was when I looked out the window. However, the plant seems to have a firm foundation, having grown massively since I repotted it – quite a change from the wobbly little plant it was when my nephew gave it to me in 2021.
And now I have to write this post standing up.
It’s nice to have a day of steady rain to read and do a jigsaw and write a blog post while the rain waters the garden. I dried Felix when he came inside all soggy, and gave him some of his favourite cat patē which comes in a tiny can. I sat down again at my desk to read a book, got up to reach for something and turned around to find my chair was occupied.
There’s a sweet honey scent in the garage; the hoya is flowering. Its flowers are sometimes called porcelain flowers, which seems apt as they hardly look real. There are three clusters of flowers this summer. You can see nectar dripping from the centre of each flower.
I have had the plant since the late 1970s when house plants were all the rage – as they are again now. It’s still in the same small pot and macrame hanger. Long ago, I decided to divest myself of indoor plants (but do enjoy a couple of small ones I have been given) particularly when the monstera deliciosa grew monstrous (think Little Shop of Horrors) and the spider plants looked tired. They ended up in my classroom and in the department resource room for years. I liked to think they removed pollutants from the air, but apparently, you need to have a room crammed full of plants for that to happen. I would bring them home over summer, not into the house but into the garage or sheltered spots in the garden. One, a Fatsia Japonica, didn’t make it back to school. It is now about three metres tall and about as wide, growing happily in the garden – despite at times attracting blackbirds (for the seeding flower heads), scale, aphids, whitefly, sooty mould and ants.
The hoya remains on the laundry side of the garage where it seems to be thriving beside the window, growing in and out of electrical cables and the laundry stuff. I try to remember to water it, feed it occasionally and wipe the leaves with Conqueror Oil sometimes. When it threatens to spread itself around the garage I cut it back but, undeterred, it sends out new tendrils with ambitious intent.
Actually, it was my sister who gave me a bag of plums from her tree yesterday. She’d already put 14 bags of plums in her freezer and had more to give away. I planned to put them in a fruit sponge, but in the meantime I decided to make muffins this morning. There are still plenty left to make the sponge pudding.
Notes on the recipe, should you be interested: I used less than a cup of sugar (as we do these days), and I used raw sugar. Instead of ‘margarine’ (yuck) I used rice bran oil. Plain yoghurt with a dash of vanilla added did the trick as I didn’t have vanilla yoghurt. To moisten the mixture a little I used sparkling elderflower instead of milk. I also used a cup of wholemeal flour and two of plain flour, with baking powder added (1 tsp per cup), as I don’t have self-raising flour. I have previously used this recipe to make blueberry muffins. The recipe says it makes 12 muffins; I managed 20 – perhaps my muffin tins are smaller.
Source: More Muffin Magic by Diana Linfoot
After a few days of rain, much appreciated by the garden, I looked under the leaves of a courgette plant and found a courgette well on the way to being a marrow. I had the perfect use for it, a favourite recipe cut from a magazine a few decades ago: Carrot and Courgette Kugel.
This morning the rain dried up, the sun came out and I took a look at progress in the garden. First, some of the edibles:
Then the flower garden:
Nothing appears to have suffered from the rain and, for me, it’s a relief not to water most days. Everything looks green. Most plants look healthy. As will I, no doubt, after trying some of these recipes:
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