Perfect Sunday

We know it won’t last and it will be cooler again in the next few days, so with the temperature over 20 degrees we took advantage of the glorious weather today and cooked our first lunch in the garden this year.

But first some planning for this year…

I sat in the sun and roughed out a plan for planting this year… I hope we’ve got room for everything!  We may not follow the plan exactly but will use it as a guide.

The autumn sowing of mangetout peas seemed to have suffered from the cold, so I sowed another row, while Lo Jardinièr did some weeding and dug in some of the horse manure we collected yesterday.

an apéritif…

It was busy at the gardens this morning, with many out enjoying the sun, and one of the friends who stopped to chat joined us for an apéritif.

and then some lunch…

Red pepper, sweet onion and oregano salad, followed by barbecued lamb chops and onions.

Birds and insects

The birds certainly thought it was spring and were flirting and nesting in the bay trees at the end of the garden.  There were a lot of bees and carpenter bees on the rosemary flowers, the blue-black wings of the carpenter bees glistening in the light.

Carpenter bees are interesting, big, shiny and noisy. We see them in the garden all through the spring and summer, often inspecting the holes in the ends of bamboo poles, one of the places where they like to nest.  When I googled the name for more information I was shocked to find that many of the results consisted of information as to how to use pesticides to get rid of these bees, but in the garden they seem to do little damage and a lot of good, pollinating the flowers.  For more information see this link.