After Eight

I don’t know wheter ‘After Eight’ still exist or not, they are fine black chocolate with a mint cream inside, I used to eat a lot of that supergood stuff when I was a teenager (teenagers always find the way to feed their pimples…) but this post (unfortunately) is not about chocolate, I took all the pictures in the evening, just before the sun set, after 8 pm indeed.

A very big poplar in the neighbor’s field casts its shadow over the grass garden from late afternoon. The bench by the pool becomes a very refreshing spot and colours and shapes of the perennials and the grasses can be appreciated. I wish the grass garden could have been backlit at sunset but you can’t have anything perfect in this World, can you? (that stuff splattered over the gravel is Tigre, and yes: she’s still alive).

We are having a very hot and dry summer this year, even dryer than last year, I’d say. I wonder how the plants are holding up this drought and heat, there are deep cracks in the ground and as soon as I water some plant, moles arrive from anywhere and dig the soil like Swiss cheese.

I’ve also painted white an old bench. I still bother about the colour, maybe I should have picked a sage green or a dusty light blue but I had white paint at home, so there weren’t a lot of choices really… I am pleased with the place where I positioned the bench by the way. A little shady in the afternoon, thanks to the birch and it gives me a brand new point of view of the house and gardens.

The veggie garden is holding up too, yet I am watering it almost every day since I’ve lost all my salads (they grow and flower all in a few days and leaves are no good to eat). Tomatoes are producing like mad, I have cherry tomatoes, pachino tomatoes (they are little but pear shaped and sweeter than cherry tomatoes) and rame tomatoes, the bigger ones. I even tried and made sauce out of them. I’m no good in doing such things, normally I pick them up and bring them to mum’s. After a while I go back and find tasty canned tomato sauce ready to use, why bother then? Anyway the sauce was nice and tasty and the kitchen… well it seems I have another room to paint. Again.

Aubergines are doing surprisingly well too, and my chilies are full of hot fruits, ready to be dried and stored. As you may know this is my first real experience with a vegetable garden but I’m quite pleased with it and I think it could be addictive: I want more salads, more vegetables, more stuff to grow. At the end of the day a vegetable garden is not that different from a perennial garden: you nurture plants, see them grow, water them, you check for pests and diseases, you hope them to flower and fruit (unless they are salads!). I guess I should not grow summer salads here, it’s too hot and dry. I should grow only spring salads and fall salads (like chicory and escarole). Well: you live, you learn. I should post some more detailed pictures of the veggie garden maybe in a few days. There are also great news to come soon… they are now building the pergola on the gravel garden (just out of the kitchen door). It looks exactly as I wanted and I’m thrilled. Pictures in the next post.

Meanwhile if you wanted some shocking news here we are:

Oh yes, bitchy Mina is pregnant. Oh yes, again. Oh yes, honey, get ready to say goodbye to your fallopian tubes or whatever they’ll take you away or knot or sew (ok, I don’t know how it works). Her belly is not as big as the other time though, I hope there’s only one or two puppies this time. I know what you are thinking: I should have watched more carefully over her, but in this house we believe in freedom and self control. Now we firmly believe in castration too.

I’ll leave you folks with a picture of the closest thing we had to rain:

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Tags: dogs, grass garden, gravel garden, light in the garden, vegetable garden

• 30 July 2012
• Cà Rossa
• 52 Comments