One measly crumble! Last year we had plums, plums, plums. Yellow ones, red ones, purple ones and green ones. Mirabelles, Victorias, Greengages and Damsons. We had loads of crumbles and litres of cordial. This year I picked enough to make one plum crumble. It was still delicious though and I’m looking forward to making plenty of apple crumbles to partly make up for the plum disaster.

The summer bush fruits weren’t too bad – redcurrants, raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants. And the strawberries keep coming. Meanwhile the summer veggies are now coming through – we’ve had cucumbers, plenty of courgettes (of course), and our first batch of aubergines. And the toms are not too far behind. The corn on the cobs were variable but overall not quite as bad as we thought and the later ones are looking good.

In animal news, we’ve seen a few snakes recently, including this rather brazen metre long ladder snake cooling in the pond (its rear half out of shot was in the pond). We were a bit worried about our resident frog but apparently ladder snakes feed almost exclusively on rodents (thankfully sorting out our temporary mouse problem). However a week later froggie was found floating face down in the pond anyway. 🙁

We’ve also had a roastie death. A few have been making unpleasant gurgling noises – they seem to have some sort of a cold and one has succumbed so far. Although there are still a few sniffles about they don’t seem too bothered by the heat and have been growing quite nicely. The hens take everything in their stride as usual and only recently have gone on summer laying schedule (ie. have the odd day off) but we did have one surprise the other day finding a monster egg.  In the UK a large egg is classified as between 63 and 73g. The small egg in this picture is 70g. The large one is 126g! It was indeed a double yoker.

In Jackie’s last post she described our courtyard which is looking really good. In the picture you can see some hollyhocks. They are over 3.5 metres tall. I don’t know much about these flowers but I think that is pretty tall for a season’s growth. The lavender is also doing well and is attracting huge numbers of bumble bees from dawn until dusk.

So now we are well into July and the garden itself has been transformed, the lush green of early June is a distant memory and now all the grass is burnt away not to be seen again until November.