Planting courgettes and eating the first broad beans / Les courgettes et les fèves

We are in a strange cycle of weather at the moment - fine, warm and sunny in the mornings until midday when the cloud starts building up to a thunderstorm in the afternoon. It's good growing weather because the plants and the soil are getting watered and warmed, but it means we have to get what we can done in the mornings before we're driven home by the threat of rain. Maybe I'm not very brave, but I don't like being out of doors in a thunderstorm.

Cette semaine il a fait beau les matins - chaud avec le ciel clair et le soleil - et puis à midi les nuages viennent et l'orage arrive. C'est bon pour le jardin parce que les plantes sont arrosées et chauffées, mais on doit faire ce qu'on peut le matin avant la pluie.

As we left the garden this afternoon the view was clear towards the village, but behind us the dark clouds were gathering.

The courgette plants were ready to be planted out. We've put some of them between two rows of lettuces which we'll eat before the courgette plants grow much bigger. We've protected the plants from snails by putting cut-off plastic bottles around the stems. Too often in the past snails or slugs have eaten through the young stems, destroying the plant.

Les courgettes sont prêtes à planter dans le jardin. Nous en avons planté quelques plantes entre deux lignes de salade parce que on mangera les plantes de salade avant que les courgettes pousseront. Nous les avons protégés contre les escargots avec des bouteilles en plastique coupées.

Eating our first broad beans / manger les premières fèves

Today we picked our first broad beans of the year, small ones which we cooked whole, and ate with a little olive oil, chopped garlic and savory. They were delicious!

Aujourd'hui nous avons ramasser les premières petites fèves de l'an. Nous les avons cuites entières, et nous les avons mangées avec un peu de huile d'olive, de l'ail haché et de sariette. Elles sont delicieuses!

Victory gardening

The new White House vegetable garden seems to have become part of an encouraging increase in interest in food-growing. Perhaps this is because of the economic crisis, but for whatever reason it is good news that the idea of growing one's own food is becoming more popular and even fashionable. In today's Observer, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/19/community-vegetable-patches, there is an article by William Shaw about the community garden movement in the US and a link to Fallen Fruit. This is an organisation in California which maps the fruit trees in public spaces so that people can go and pick their own. A great idea! Now it is moving on to planting fruit trees as well. As the organisers say on their web site:

We believe fruit is a resource that should be commonly shared, like shells from the beach or mushrooms from the forest.