First store havest.

The garlic which we planted last Autumn has now been harvested, again the bulbs are a good size and we should have plenty to last us throughout the next year, we had an added bonus from this bed,

around ten pounds of Ratte potatoes, we didn't grow them last year in this bed but the year before and some potatoes must have been left behind only to make a re-appearance this year. They are a lovely flavoured potato and it's very hard to get hold of the seed potatoes, our original tubers came from a friend, we will make sure that we keep back some of these tubers to replant very early next year. This brings our total of different early  potatoes to seven and one variety of main crop. We will chose our two favourite variety's and stick to them, seven is too many I think but we should be able to decide on the firm favourites.

We have only planted two cucumber plants this year and they seem to be very early, already we have spare cues to give to friends. The courgettes are also forming well and we should have our first ones ready to pick in a few days.

It is also looking as though we will have a good crop of Victoria plums, they are forming well,

but why there should be some late flowers on the tree is anyone's guess.

The ducklings that we bought in have doubled in size in just nine days, they will be ready to put into their outside run later on next week subject to the weather not getting too cold.
The weather forecast is not too good for the next few days, rain for tomorrow and lower temperatures than we had been having. Unfortunately tomorrow is the open day for one of the Secret gardens of Sligo that is a new one for this year, it is a town garden not too far from us and is based on a Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens design, we are both looking forward to seeing it but would prefer to do so without getting wet, lets hope the forecasters are wrong.

Elderflowers are in abundance this year

and we have made the first lot of cordial,

whilst out collecting the flowers we can across yet another abandoned cottage

with a lovely stand of Aconite,

Our Aconite.

I hope that one day our plants will have spread this well, I love the deep blue of the Aconite, such a shame that it is so poisonous. There are so many of these abandoned cottages, yet 'they' keep saying there's a housing shortage, well not in this area there isn't.

Some of our Delphiniums.

One thing that does do very well in our garden are the Delphiniums, we have several different colours and they have spread well, although renowned to be slug food we seem to get no trouble with ours, unlike the Asters that we had grown from seed, as soon as they were planted out the slugs devoured them, fortunately I hadn't planted them all so we have potted the remaining ones on and will plant out when we think they are big enough to sustain slug attack.

Looking down on it.

We now have a nice array of irises, the latest one to flower is this little beauty, almost completely black, I love dark coloured flowers and foliage, it seems to give even more interest to a garden.

Almost black.

Heath spotted orchid.

The wild Orchids are now appearing everywhere,

Twayblade.

there are quite a few different varieties, some are not easy to identify such as the Butterfly Orchid,

Greater or lesser? We have to take a closer look at the pollen sacs.

 we will have to return to the site to take a closer look to decide whether this is the Lesser or Greater butterfly Orchid , both of which grow in this area.

Also in bloom is the Butterwort, a carnivorous plant,

Butterwort.

           despite this it is a pretty little thing.
Last week I was able to get a nice photo of the Irish Hare,

A very handsome boy.

this week we had a Pheasant who seemed quite happy to watch us, giving me a chance to get a good photo of him, such a colourful fellow.

Centaurea nigre. ( common knapweed)

Ranunculus..



A beautiful white rose growing in the middle of nowhere.
 

Pond life.

Zephirine drouhin, a truly thornless rose.

The title of this post refers to a natural eco system rather than to certain politicians either side of the pond.
 One of the first things we made when we first moved here was a small pond, we wanted to encourage frogs  and other wild life into the garden. It takes some time to establish a natural ecosystem but this year we were rewarded with frogs choosing to spawn in our pond. We have three different stage tadpoles, some just very fat but without their legs developed yet, others have their legs and others are now froglets, yet we have never seen an adult frog in or even near the pond.
 Removing some of the duck weed that appears in ponds from nowhere  we found all sorts of interesting pond life, Dragonfly larvae, not the prettiest of things, also a predator of tadpoles,

Rams Horn snails, and fresh water clams, the clams and the snails must have come in on various plants that we have put into the pond.

The clams are tiny but there's a lot of them.

The clams are very small at the moment I wonder just how big they will grow and whether they will ever get big enough to eat!

I am very pleased that a blue water Iris that was a gift from a friend has started to flower this year, much more interesting than the common yellow flag Iris.
Our poultry numbers have increased significantly in the past few days.

We had a good hatch of quail, and at last we have our long ago ordered ducklings,

Just arrived.

they are so cute at this age, and we will do our best to provide them with a good if rather short life before they have to go in the freezer.

Pekin ducklings.

We have timed the ducklings so they will be ready at the same time as the Hubbard chickens so they can all be processed at the same time by 'The Friendly Farmer', meaning just one trip instead of two.
Living in such a rural area means we get to see quite a bit of wild life, we have pheasants, red squirrels, the dreaded Pine Marten , Mink, rabbits and  Hares. There seems to be more hares around here than rabbits,

we followed one down the road yesterday, and for a change I had the camera with me.

Albertine.

At last we have had a little rain,

it has brought out all the roses and other flowers that seemed to be at a stand  still during the very hot and dry month that we have had.

The garden is in full bloom now.

The cats and digs are also happier now it's slightly cooler.

Tess our golden lab doesn't expend too much energy at the best of times,

during the very hot weather she seemed to only wake up if there was food in the offing.
We are still getting strawberries from the tunnel and the first of the Cambridge favourite in the garden are now showing colour, we should have a continues supply for a while longer, then it should be the turn of the gooseberries and raspberries.

Lots of broad beans as well, it seems to be a good year for them.
Elder trees are full of flowers, last year they didn't flower until autumn, we will go gathering in the next few days and I will make some elderflower cordial, lovely on a warm summers day.

Simon liked the mug that I had made for his birthday, we celebrated with a lovely homemade coffee and walnut cake.

They look like roses but they are Ranunculus.

A smug looking cat.

   In a nearby town one of the many empty properties has been beautifully given some life, I love these painting showing what might have been a long time ago.

I wonder if he has a name?
 

Snowball bush, a cutting we brought with us from Spain, now is a real bush.

  

The alums are good this year.

June is busting out all over.

Roses, Dianthus, Sweet Rocket, and Delphiniums. 

It's summer, and it's hot. Today the temperature is 33c- 91f in the sun, inside temperature is 23.9c-75f, this could be some sort of record for Ireland, I can't remember it being this hot in the past.

As it is so hot we have now transferred our Hubbard chicks into their garden house and run, although they are only nineteen days old and we would normally be keeping them on heat until three weeks old.

Although a little bemused they quickly set about exploring their run. Should the weather change back to what we are used to we can always run a electric cable and set up heating for them, but there is no sign of the weather changing so I doubt this will prove necessary.

Almost white.

For me outside work has come to a halt, although I have two dozen plants waiting to be planted they will have to wait until it's cooler and we have had some rain, these are plants that we ordered from a great organic nursery in Clare, we had bought six plants from them at the plant sale a couple of weeks ago at Strokestown House. When we  got home I looked up the nursery and found an Aladdin's cave of plants, they grow over six hundred different herbaceous plants, the farm is on the side of a mountain and the plants are given no protection so are well acclimatised to Irish conditions. If I had room I could have bought far more than I did, there is something for every type of soil conditions, but we have no intentions of expanding our flower beds.

Busy bee/

 The garden seems to be fairing well,

Polemonium.

the flowers gardens are a riot of colour and the first roses came into bloom on the 1st of June.

Trollius, it must have hitched a ride.

There are also a couple of plants that have appeared from nowhere! I suspect they have come in as seeds on plants that I have bought, one is Trollius, not a plant that I would have bought, but it's pretty so it can stay.

This was shown as a blue flower in the catalogue.

One disappointment is my Camassia, it was shown in the catalogue as a vibrant blue, which is why I bought it, it has turned out to be white, still pretty, but not what I had wanted or expected, had I realised it was white I would have planted it in another bed, as the bed where it is is supposed to be blues, purples and pinks, this is also where the trollies has turned up so a little rearranging come the Autumn I think.

The alliums are looking good.

 

Shame they hang their heads down, they are so pretty and the bees love them.

The veg is also fine, I suspect that all our top dressing with mulch is helping to retain the moisture in the soil, my planters and window boxes however are suffering from lack of water, we really can't spare any water from our collection system unless we get some rain, we are now collecting all our grey water and this will be used for the tubs and planters. the tunnel also is holding up well, again probally due to all the composted material we have added to the beds.

Tomato plants are all in flower

and we have our first cucumber ready, I'm sure it's much earlier than normal.
I'm still doing the pottery course once a week, I have never known three hours to go so quickly, my last couple of pieces have now been fired,

one of the mugs I made especially for Simon for his birthday, I had no intention of making two, but Jacqui says you always make two mugs in case one doesn't work out. The other item is a funky duck. I have also made a Troika inspired vase, but that has not been glazed or fired yet, I now have to think of another project to start on at the next lesson.

We detoured a little over the mountains and came across Lock Talt on our way to Ballina

This looks manmade, possibly a passage tomb.

There is one thing that I do miss about Spain, fresh fish and seafood, although we live on an Ireland it is very hard to get good fish or seafood, the stuff sold in supermarkets is not of good quality, in fact the last time we bought so called 'fresh fish' from a supermarket I ended up with an upset stomach, it was Mackerel, always a dodgy one if it's not completely fresh and shell fish is virtually unheard of in our local supermarket , the fish stalls that visit towns once weekly are little better. Our local German supermarket did have some very good King Prawns in their freezer cabinet earlier in the year, but like many things in these cheaper places they don't restock. I was desperate for some good shell fish, I guess this comes from having been brought up in a fishing town, I could easily give up meat, but fish never. So I set about tracking some seafood. Ballina in Mayo immediately sprung to mind, the town was a place that I used to deliver to and I remembered that I used to buy our fish there every week. Unfortunately Ballina is around eighty kms from us, a long way to get dinner!

You can still see the ridges from some long ago farm.
 

However, it was a nice day for a trip out and after phoning the fish merchant to check that he did have what I wanted we made the trip.

 I came away with a couple of kg of Dublin bay prawns,

a very nice looking Brill, some fresh Hake

and a large bag of fresh cockles. On chatting to the fish merchant he  informed us that he operated an overnight courier service for his fish, right throughout Ireland, at only six euro for this service, for us, it's  a no brainer. The next time we need fish and I crave my shell fish we will order on line and have it delivered. Although we quite often go mussel picking we have yet to find the cockle beds although we know that they are close to where we get the mussels. All this shell fish is for me, the other half loves fish but not shell fish, but he is still willing to gather them with me. It made for a lovely trip out across the mountains, I wish the coast was a little closer to us, never mind you can't have everything.

  
With all this fine weather the turf cutters have been busy, even up in the mountains.

The turf should be good this year with all the dry weather.

Early purple orchid.