Friday Smiles 2023: Week 16

It has been a quiet week here, and mostly sunny though a few degres cooler than last week because of a sharp easterly wind.  The flowers are loving the sunshine so that is what most of my photos are about this week. The roses are coming into their own, with loads of buds showing colour now.

I always call this a 'potato tree' but it is really called lycianthes rantonnii, and it is a member of the Belladonna family. It is also know as Tasmanian kangaroo apple. Ours is a straggly little 'tree', which doesn't like having its roots confined in a pot, but the flowers are so lovely that I can't get rid of it.

The Christmas before last, our poinsettia stayed quite healthy looking, so we tried planting it in the little square of earth at the front of the house. It has survived and is now covered in smallish red bracts. They started showing their colour at Christmas but it has taken until now for them to be fully changed.

My pelergonium is looking lovely and the crown of thorns in the pot below it has grown up to almost the same height.

This one is a tuff succulent that grows almost as a weed, and can be found on sandy beach heads as well as gardens and roadsides. It is a ground cover and can get out of hand. I rescued a small piece from the beach when we moved here from the  flat fourteen years ago. It didn't take to life in a pot very well either, but this year it has taken off and now creeps along our path, and has at last produced these stunning pink daisies. Its botanical name is Carpobrotus aciniciformis, but it has a whole list of more common names. Here are a few of them.   Sour fig (on account of its edible fruit,), Hottentot fig, Pigface, Highway ice plant, Sally-my-handsome, Elandssuurvy and Elands sourfig. Aren't they great!

And finally my Elephant foot palm. This was one small plume of leaves when a friend gifted it to me when she moved back to UK some years ago. I put it in the biggest pot I could manage to manhandle and it has flourished. I was so surprised when it produced one tall stem of small, insignificant flowers, and then I was dissapointed when it seemed to die off after flowering. But I soon discovered a new rosette of leaves were forming, and these too produced a flower the following year. I am not sure it flowered at all last year but this year it has no less than seven flower stems. Three are standing tall from the top branch: ....

... And three more from the main centre branch, and now one more has shot up a bit lower down.  I had no idea it might do this, but I like surprises in my garden.

I am pleased to say my back is improving and I am now able to walk around, almost upright and without limping. I have a permenant dull ache in my lower back and leg and it is difficult to stand up if I sit for too long, but there is definitely an improvement. As I am better standing and walking around, than I am sitting down, I decided to go ahead and make strwberry jam yesterday. I managed to go across to the market on Tuesday and I was surprised to find beautiful strawberries for 3€ per kilo. I don't expect them to get that cheap until the very end of the season when there are just a few scappy boxes left (which are fine for making jam). These were almost too good to use for jam but I bought two two-kilo boxes and I only need three kilos for my jam so there were plenty left for us to enjoy. I took this photo because it looked so lovely with the sun shining through it. It actually looks as though it is just juice, but it does have lots of fruit pieces in it and it taste good!

Today is our forty-forth anniversary, which also seems almost impossible! We didn't do anything special today but we plan to have a meal out next week. Instead I had an exciting day planning a holiday in UK. I am going to be there for the whole of August. I decided to escape from the ever hotter summer, and get to see all my boys and my two sisters down on the South coast. Chris will go over with me, but he will retrun after the first week and look after the animals at home. He loves the hot weather and will be happier here. But on the recommendation of a couple of friends, I have found a new house-sitter making it possible for us to both go to our son's for a big family gathering on 5th August. And now he has booked the flights so I am all set to go! The rate the weeks are flying past, it will be here in no time.

And on that happy note I will prepare this to publish and link to Annie's Friday Smiles tomorrow.