Summer Solstice.

Sweet Rocket.

Where has the year gone, already we are at the halfway mark, the longest day is past. The garden is looking very colourful and the air is filled with the perfume of roses.

Somehow we have managed to collect  at least twenty six different varieties of roses, many of these I have done from cuttings.

Albertine Rose

We often spot old roses growing around  deserted farms and cottages, we normally have a pair of secateurs in the car so if we see a nice rose we can take a couple of cuttings from it, now is the ideal time to take half ripe cuttings from roses, dianthus, and clematis. I'm sure there are plenty of other plants as well that do at this time of year, but these are the ones that we go for.
The soft fruit is doing well, we have already picked some blackcurrants and gooseberries, lightly cooked together to be served over

Crema  Catalana, this is more or less the same a Crème Brulee, which is a posh way of saying egg custard. What ever you call it is  delicious, especially served with summer fruits. It is so nice having your own fruit and veg,

Fresh from the garden.

it cant come any fresher than tonight's meal and only the milk was not home produced coming from a farm just twenty miles away. Not a plastic container in sight, even the milk comes in glass bottles which are returned to be reused.

Pippa and Poppy.

The donkeys are enjoying the fresh grass growth and the sunshine, they had their six monthly pedicure last week, although they always feel better afterwards this is not something that they enjoy having done although Paddy the German farrier is great with them.
Over a decade ago Ireland became the first European country to introduce the plastic bag tax, this was supposed to cut down on the use of plastic. It has failed, OK, so you have to pay for plastic bags, and most people now have shopping bags, but this is a futile exercise given that almost all fruit and veg from a super market comes in plastic containers.
 We have two shops, one a fruit and veg shop and one supermarket that give us their green waste for the pigs, and we are very grateful for it but the plastic that comes with it is astounding. We always separate our waste, we have very little, one black plastic bin liner takes us six weeks to fill, since collecting green waste for the pigs we have a sack full every week. 
It is twenty one years since we last had pigs, once a week we collected green waste from an importer, there was no plastic in sight.
 Given the amount of fruit and veg that we get each week from our two shops clearly the use of containers or plastic wrapped fruit and veg is not to save on wasting food, so I wonder what purpose it does serve.

We are now holding our breath that the weather forecast might be correct, we need rain! Again!!
 Unfortunately we have to replant some of the veg crops, purple sprouting broccoli, spinach, turnips and swede, our young male rabbits managed to escape and had a feast, but there is little point in replanting until we can be sure of some rain, promised for Wednesday, I wonder if it will come.