Harvesting

The garlic and onions are drying nicely in this settled spell of sunny weather - the best June we've had for a few years I guess. Some of the onions have gone to seed, a bit like their custodian.

The Froome Valley

Yesterday, four of us met up at the Daneway Inn for a walk up to Pinbury Park and back via Dorvel Wood. We saw a trip of goats (all black), a rag of colts (destined to be polo ponies, and waiting for the vet to geld them), and a bevy - there must have been a dozen or more - of roe deer, showing us a way into the woods. There the wild garlic reminded me of the bärlauch on so many menus in Germany and Switzerland last month. (My photograph shows the sign I followed when looking for a bed in Märstetten - and very comfortable it was too.)

The new service station on the North-bound M5 near Gloucester is "Hofladen" (farm shop) writ large: we stopped there for (very expensive) petrol en route home from supper with Edmund in Bristol last night. On the one hand, I can't conceive of any reason beneficial to the environment why more commercial outlets should be needed: on the other, if you are going to have motorway service stations, they might as well be on this (the Westmorland Tebay) model.

Today, I've been in amongst my not-so-wild garlic. (Only the weeds have gone wild, but they pull out readily after the rain.) And this evening, we went to Cineworld (along with half the rest of Cheltenham, it seemed) for the National Theatre's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This, with its dizzy-making camera angles and Pirandellian roots, hugely benefited from the big screen relay. Fabulous drama!

Troy and destroy

John Bell was the speaker on Thought for the Day this morning. He came on immediately after someone salivating over the prospect of life on Mars. John reminded us that "Adam" meant "earthling", and that the earth does not belong to us, but we belong to it - by decree of its maker.

You feel this when kneeling on warm soil to plant garlic and onions, as I have been doing in this lovely spell of mild weather. Softneck Thermidrome garlic this year, and 500g of Troy onion sets - netted against the birds, who enjoy tweaking the sets out of the soil.

I was slow to fix the mesh tightly round our sprouting plantlets earlier, and the result is a plague of caterpillars. It's either I who go into destroy mode, or they who remain in it.

The Autumn raspberries don't look up to much either, but the late Summer canes (seven foot tall in some cases) are still fruiting plentifully. As are the beans and Caroline's tomatoes and figs. She even presented me with her first melon the other evening.

The back lawn is littered with apples, and both lawns are also littered with rose and other prunings: we need more room in the deep freeze for juice and a couple more brown bins.

I photographed these onions this time last year on our visit to the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

Harvest

Our onions (75) and garlic (35) are lying in the sun now, awaiting storage. Lifting them involved breaking into ground as hard as iron. You wouldn't think we were crying out to an end to the wet weather only a few months ago.