Close to Me

I’m so glad I left the globe artichoke flower on the plant when I was too slow to pick it. What a beauty, especially up close - go on, zoom in on it. The petals remind me of sea anemone tentacles. And this bee was enjoying them too - look at all that pollen!

I was getting up close and personal a lot today (no, I’m not mad, I’m still social distancing and not intending to return to pre-COVID-19 life for a few months yet). But I remembered to have the macro camera with me.

As usual, the camera focuses on anything but the intended subject for four out of five shots! And never when this harlequin ladybird was in the best position! But the Gigantes bean flower buds are quite photogenic too.

I gave up trying to get the miniature rose buds in macro focus, which is a shame as they’re so pretty. We bought this tiny plant (it's only about 30cm tall) a couple of year’s ago for £1 and it looks after itself pretty much in its small pot. The other one we bought has rooted through the pot into the ground so has grown substantially larger - we'll deal with that when we deal with the greenhouse.

This gladioli has also been left to fend for itself and is clearly satisfied with the weather we’ve had - such beautiful colours, but I’m sure I planted more than one bulb!!

We had a lovely couple of hours on the plot yesterday. Jamie put our new bench together - our old one slowly collapsed under us one lunchtime last week; must be that lockdown weight gain 😀 And we left the site with a tiny harvest of runner beans and a courgette, from our plot, plus the excellent looking Tromboncino kindly donated by Liz.

And those runner beans joined tomatoes and cucumber from my sister for a lovely fresh lunch.

The Cure provide the great song title and now it’s back to work for a full week. I think the weather’s going to be decent, so I’ll hopefully get a visit to the plot most lunchtimes - really, it’s so necessary to escape the screen when working from home full-time.