Spring festival

The tradition here in the Languedoc on Easter Monday is to go out into the garrigue to pick wild asparagus then light a fire to cook an omelette with it out of doors.  Like other traditions at this time of year it must have pagan origins and it is one that I’m very happy to observe.  We find wild asparagus in our garden, so it’s quite easy to collect enough for an omelette, which we did at lunchtime today.

The mangetout pea plants are growing well and I put up their supporting netting this morning.  There are small broad beans coming now, but I’ll leave them for a few days longer.  And the haricot bean plants I sowed on 19 March are coming up too.  Other signs of spring in the garden today were: the Rose banksiae flowers

the apple blossom

 

and the cherry blossom

I love this time of year!

Bees and lizards – it must be summer

A honey bee on the lavender flowers….

and a lizard on the wall of the shed.  I don’t know why this one has a black mark on its back.

 

The apple crop is looking good from this tree we planted as a small sucker about 6 years ago.

This is one of the female flowers we were hoping for on the sweet corn plants.

These scabious flowers grow as a weed in the garden, but they’re pretty.

These Californian poppies aren’t weeds – we planted them, and I love their intense colour.

Work in the garden today: tying up tomato and cucumber plants, pinching out side shoots on some of the tomato plants, especially the Languedocian ones which just want to grow in all directions and have some quite large tomatoes on them now, taking out the mangetout pea plants and planting out some lettuce seedlings given to us by a friend.

>Apples and cherries

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We’ve never before had so many apples as there are on our tree this year.  It almost makes up for the poor apricot crop (I can see two fruits on that tree), but I’d much prefer to have apricots instead.  It’s exciting that our small wild cherry tree, planted as a sucker given to us by our neighbour about two and a half years ago, is bearing its first fruit (below, right).

And those irises again, framing some orange poppies: