Rocking Your World 2017: Week 13

Hi folks. I'm a bit later posting tonight and also a bit short of time so it will have to be a quickie. 

This week started with a lovely church service for Mothering Sunday. Our Spanish friends were a bit non-plussed because they don't celebrate their Día de Madres, until the first Sunday in May. After the service, all the ladies were given a posy of flowers, made up mainly of the wild daisies and other flowers that are so abundant this year, with just one or two stems of cultivated plants in with them. Mine were yellow and white and they were so pretty, and they are still looking quite good almost a week later.

The week has flown by as I have been busy completing a few little projects so I had enough to fill a small table at my friends coffee morning today. And here it is though it is not a good photo. I nearly forgot to take one, so this was after I had sold quite a few pieces, and as my Easter cards were in individual cellophane bags, there is a lot of light refection from them.

We had a good turnout, and the sun shone for us, so it was a good morning. I took 65€ altogether, and I donated part of that to church funds, (the coffee morning was in order to raise funds for our church), and the rest will go to Greenfields Africa, the charity I continue to support although we no longer knit for them.

Jasmine, who organises these coffee mornings, is always busy knitting and sewing, and like me, she makes jams. She has a variety of fruit trees on her land, so generally she makes the fruit jams and I concentrate on marmalade and pickles, and we sell them together.

There was some excitement at the end as the winners went to choose their raffle prizes.

Half way through the morning I took a little break and had a wander around the garden. I had to take a photo of this splendid cactus in flower. It was so beautiful.

I also spotted this wonderful clump of osteospermums. Such a gorgeous colour, and it was smothered in flowers too.

I did manage to do a little bit of work in my own garden this week, planting out a couple of companula plants in Chris' window box, and finding homes for two pretty minature roses. Both of these were bought from Lidls when I did my monthly food shop yesterday. Their plants are very healthy and well priced too, so they are hard to resist.

We sat out in the fly-free area after lunch today and I watched the big, black, carpenter bees flitting around our purple flowering tree. It is just coming in to bloom now, but the bees stayed up on the top level and didn't fly low enough for me to catch them on camera. I don't know the name of the tree, but it is quite common in gardens out here, more often as a bush, but we bought ours as little standard tree, and it has grown massively. We prune it quite ruthlessly every autumn, but it always grows back, and it has lots of interesting flowers on it. I like its 'pom.pom' stamens, as do the bees.

Just below it is the white shrub I grew from a cutting off my friends one. It is another year on and I still don't know what it is, but again it has an interesting flower, and it continues to produce them right through the summer.

These two have the same flowering season and they complement each other, and look good together.

Out at the front of the house, the flowers are still looking good too. The rose bud I showed last week, has opened into the fullest, multi-layered rose I think we have ever had. It has a second bud just opening now too.

The Easter lily has a couple more flowers on it. Every time I go to look at it, there are at least two black and white spotted beetles in each flower. I don't know what they are. They seem to be collecting the pollen from the stamen, and they don't eat the flower, or damage it in any way, so I leave them alone.

And finally, this one is now just opening in many gardens around here. It is what we call the bottle-brush plant. Again it varies from a shrub to a tall tree. Ours, has to be a shrub in a big pot, as our little patch of plantable land is already full, but it has lots of 'brushes' coming this year. The first one is fully open. I think they are fascinating.

Most of ours are still at this stage, but I can see it will be really good in a week or two.

And that is all for this week, except for this photo of the sky, taken early evening today. It made me smile to see the sky criss-crossed by the vapour trails of all the planes bringing visitors over for some early sunshine. It made me happy, because tomorrow one of the planes will be bringing our youngest son Ben over with his partner, and on Tuesday his nephew Marcus, our grandson, is also coming over. So the chances of me posting next Friday are pretty slim. It will be Ben's last day, and we will probably be out somewhere. Marcus is staying for another week, but he wants some relaxation time before his uni exams, so I may manage to post the following week.

Sorry this photo is slightly blurred. I had forgotten that my camera was set to macro from when I was taking the flower pictures!

Right, I had better get this linked up with Rocking Your World, and Annie's Friday Smiles, and then I shall have a shower before going to bed as we shall be up with the larks in the morning to get to the airport for their early flight.