Rocking Your World 2021; Week 18

Well it is that time again, when we reflect on the happier moments from last week, but I have little news as it has been a quiet week. We have had all kinds of weather from hot and sunny, to too windy to open the door safely, to dull, warm and overcast, to heavy rain bringing in so much red sand from Africa you would think we lived in a desert.  Chris was using the power washer this morning to try and shift some of it. 

But in between the bad bits we have managed to do a good bit of clearing outside, and I got two loads of washing dry, even if I did have one eye on the clouds until I brought it in again.

The combination of rain and sun have brought all the plants on well. I was so pleased to see these gorgeous orange hibiscus out. The plant was suddenly infested with black-fly earlier this year and I thought it might die. It lost all its first buds, but I sprayed it and slowly it is recovering I think. It certainly managed to produce some beautiful flowers this week.

As I had hoped last week, my lilac mini-daisies are out all over the ground cover plant, and there are also flowers on all the cuttings I took in the autumn now.

As you know I love all the daisy flowers so I was equally happy to see these little gallardias out. They were self-seeded by insects or birds a few years ago and every year they produce so many little sunshine faces. I love them.

One other daisy that is struggling but still going is this shocking pink one. It is a ground cover succulent that can be smothered in these quite large flowers. Mine was swamped by other plants but this one stem is clinging to life so I may be able to rescue it.

I always refer to it as the 'crawling daisy'; a joke between the biology teacher and myself from my days as laboratory assistant at a private girls school. But it actually goes by many names and here are some of them. "Sally-my-handsome, Hottentot fig marigold, Giant pig-face, Sea fig, or Sour fig." In general it is just known as the Pig-face plant, a name I don't think it deserves! Of course it has a proper name too which is Carpobrotus Acinaciformis. I think I'll stick to pink crawling daisy. Its bright colour looks very dramatic when you see it tumbling down a bank with no space between the flowers.

Yesterday was quite sunny all afternoon though rain was threatening, but we both noticed how clear the Cabrera mountains looked from our house. They are often a bit blurry even on a good day, but the air must have been just right and I took this photo of them.

But when I turned around, the sky behind me looked like this!

However, it all cleared away again without shedding any rain on us, and it was so warm that we both sat out on the porch until bed-time, for the first time this year.

On Wednesday, I had my usual evening video call with my youngest son Ben. We often put the world to rights for a couple of hours each week, and it was getting late when he said 'I wish you could see the full moon outside my window. It is beautiful tonight'. Then he went outside to send me a picture of it. So when we had said Good-night, I went outside to look at our moon. This was around mid-night and the moon was covered with patchy clouds, though I could see where it was. I waited patiently as the clouds drifted across it, almost revealing it and then hiding it again, until finally there it was, in all its splendour. And it was indeed a beautiful one. Well worth waiting for. These photos were all taken on my phone. It has a really good camera, though I could do with steadier hands for these zoom shots!

The last bit of this post may be too creepy crawly for some of you, but all the wildlife does fascinate me.

The back wall of our house gets the full sun all afternoon, the hottest part of the day, so it soaks in the heat and you can feel the warmth coming from it right through the evening. This makes it quite attractive to the bugs and this week as I walked past I noticed this lovely little caterpillar walking up it.

I have seen the odd one of these before so I know it is the caterpillar of the Spanish festoon butterfly, a very pretty yellow one with blue and red spots on its wings. I have read on a wildlife in S.Spain group that I follow, that the caterpillars love the plant called Dutchman's pipe, which is an invasive weed that has interesting dark purple pitcher flowers and huge seed pods. It is a bit like bindweed and can be a problem in the garden, but I knew there was some growing just beyond our back railings on the bank of the green zone, so I went to look at it, and sure enough there were at least a dozen of these caterpillars in plain site. We see very few butterflies here, but I am hoping we get one or two this year if the birds don't get them all before they pupate.

I also noticed this lady high up on the same wall so I went in to get my phone to take a photo. But when I got back there, it had gone, and then I saw it had fallen down and was on the ground.

I try not to interfere with the natural order of things, but I knew I had to move it before my cats spotted it so I picked it up and relocated it at the top of a tall plant. It posed beautifully for me before I released it. Just look at that face! It's like something out of a sci-fi movie.

She looked quite mature so I am hoping she makes an egg nest (an otheca) somewhere nearby so I can watch it.

And finally something less scarey. This morning I saw this rather unusual ladybird on a plant next door. It was twice as long as the usual lady bird and it looked big when it opened its wing cases and flew away. I hadn't realised how many different varieties of these are out in Spain until I looked it up. I didn't find a specific name for it, but they were all called lady birds.

Now I can link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World.

I hope everyone is staying safe while enjoying a bit more freedom of movement now. We are looking forward to getting our second injections next week.