Wonderful, glorious...Today

Yesterday we had our first major South Easter for the change of season. This gale blows through and doctors the air in Cape Town but also causes havoc to my broad beans. We tighten all the window latches and make sure that one side of the house stays closed but we smile as summer is on the way!

I find it hard to settle into our schooling schedule but need to be disciplined for the next 8 weeks to finish the required work...I wander around the garden "moving the sprinkler" but actually delighting in the color and the bugs and the new corn and the berries about.

Thankfully I can call a young one to my side to look at the bug on the berry blossoms and a bee on the Calendula...it's just as well that we have started studying flying insects!
   

All the Calendula flowers are to be harvested today but we may get another flush. These ones I will leave to go to seed and when I pull them up I shake the dry seeds out over the garden and in Spring next year they will begin to grow again.

I love that while we do not have a traditional flower based garden that ours is alive with the color of useful, edible flowers like these as well as the sunflowers that attract birds and bees as well as the normal vegetable flowers.

 My son always plants sunflowers around the pond and they smile at us all through summer. Where we sit and read in the lounge, we look right out at the pond where they grow.

We leave them until the heads are pollinated and then when they are dry we put the seeds to the chickens for a homegrown treat if the grey squirrels don't get them first!




Strawberries are on their way in...so hard not to count my strawberries before they ripen...and we have our first ripe blueberry which went into my mouth after taking this picture.

I need to buy another barrel and different cultivar blueberry very soon for cross pollination or we will loose the opportunity for more berries as the plant has more flowers.




And then as I finish the loop around the garden in between a lesson with the children I am reminded of the love of a faraway friend as her gift stands as a permanent marker of our friendship in my herb tower.

 Wonderful...glorious....windstill :)....today!