Grape harvest

These are table grapes that grow in our back yard. About half of the dozen or so vines that grew here died since we moved in. They were planted by the previous owner and over the years nearby trees grew up and shaded them. We've never seen many grapes on the vines, but this year is different. First, one of the big trees that shaded the vines is gone. Second, last year was wet and this year has been hot and dry. There must be some correlation.

There are also two small bunches of red grapes out there, but I haven't picked them yet.

So, anyway, it's a small harvest, but it looks bountiful, considering. I don't know what varieties of grapes they are. Some are very tart (maybe I picked them too early) and others are quite sweet.

I heard yesterday (from the mayor) that the actual wine grape harvest may be starting up by the end of the week. UPDATE: A mechanical harvester just arrived in the vineyard (07h10).

Panorama

Just a quick post as a thunderstorm is moving over us first thing this morning. And it's raining! So we're closing windows and moving the car and hoping the power doesn't go off. We had a brief power outage yesterday (for no apparent reason) that lasted just long enough to cause the computers to go out, along with several digital clocks. The satellite tv is out now because the storm is between us and the satellite.

About three quarters of our yard and garden. There's more behind me and to the right.

This is a panorama of the back yard. The gate is behind me and I'm looking east. I didn't intend to take a "pano" shot, but noticed that two of the photos were pretty much adjacent, so I stitched them together in Photoshop. You can see our disaster of a vegetable garden on the left. The house is toward the back on the right. Maybe I'll make an effort to get a better "pano" at some point soon.

Dead heads

I didn't water the artichokes much this summer. Now they stand like otherworldly sentinels along the garden path. I don't think they're really dead. Maybe they're un-dead. The roots are probably fine and, when (if?) it starts raining again, green shoots will sprout anew.

Pretty in their own way.

Meanwhile, our drought deepens. Ken was looking through photos of the back yard and vegetable garden from ten/fifteen years or so ago yesterday. It's amazing how green and lush everything looked back then and how productive the vegetable garden was. It's like comparing the Amazon rain forest to an abandoned Death Valley parking lot.

Well, well, well

A week or so ago, I dug up all the clary sage plants and weeds that were growing in the little strip around the base of the real fake well. The sage plants get too big for that spot, so something else has to be done. In our first years here, we planted flowers like marigolds there and they did well. However, in more recent years, the few times I tried, snails and slugs devoured them. So now it's time to try something else.

You can't see them in this photo, but there are hens and chicks planted inside the well.

I've been wanting to get some day lilies for a while, so I think I'm going to look for some when the bulbs and rhizomes show up in the garden stores this fall. They are supposedly drought tolerant, like poor soil, and are resistant to heat spells. In the meantime, I'll keep pulling up the weeds as they grow and we'll enjoy the bare look until next spring.

Cut grass

Once again, the grass is cut. Not that there's much grass. What grows in this dry and hot weather is weeds. Most of the grass is brown, except for what survives in the shade of the trees. I gathered up all the apples under the two apple trees early on Friday morning. Ken helped me pick them up and into the wheelbarrow, then I dumped them into the compost piles behind the garden shed. But there were too many to fit. I dumped four wheelbarrows full into our two compost piles before they started to roll out. So now there's a pile of apples (two wheelbarrows full) in the garden plot. There will be more.

A view of a portion of the west forty with the two apple trees on the left. The line of grape vines behind them marks the boundary between the west and north forties. To the right of the garden path is the south forty. The whole property is about half an acre.

The west forty takes about forty minutes to cut. The north, a little more than half an hour. The south forty, as I mentioned yesterday, about twenty minutes plus another fifteen to do the strip along the outside edges of the property. However, I no longer do it all in one go as I used to. These days I break it up into three stages. Not to mention trimming along the edges of the garden path which isn't done yet.

Fort du Petit Bé

Here's another of the defensive forts that once protected the walled city of Saint-Malo, a city on English Channel in Brittany. Le fort du Petit Bé was built in the seventeenth century as part of the network of defensive structures conceived by Vauban to protect the city. I read that it is accessible to visitors at low tide. Just be sure not to get stuck when the water starts to rise.

Le Petit Bé, just off the coast of Saint-Malo. Digitized color slide, January 1992.

I got out early yesterday to cut the grass in the south forty. It only takes about twenty minutes, so it's not a huge chore. Still, there are a lot of obstacles like shrubs and trees to navigate around, so there's some effort maneuvering the lawnmower around them. All that's left now is the west forty, the largest of the yard's sections. The one where the apple trees are.

Pie are squared

PARENT: What did you learn in school today?

KID: πr².

PARENT: That's ridiculous! Pie are round, cornbread are squared!

The crust turned out nice and crispy. The apples are from one of our trees.

This is the first apple tart of the season. It's just sliced apples on a bed of ground hazelnuts. I glazed the apples with apricot preserves after the pie cooled. High-end cooks would have strained the preserves before glazing, but I left the apricot bits in.