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.

Rocking Your World 2021; Week 17

How fast the weeks are flying past. I can't believe it is Friday again already. 

Our weather is still unsettled and we have had rain and even some thunder storms this week, but also some nice periods of sunshine.

Sunday started off lovely so we ate our dinner out on the porch and then went for another walk along the sea front.

It was warm enough to walk in short sleeved T-shirts but a bit windy so the sea was quite 'lively' and I like it like that.

Again we were a bit too early in the afternoon to meet many other walkers, and as you can see the beach was deserted.

I often show photos of the Cabrera mountains as seen from our garden, so here they are from the other side, as seen from the beach. On Sunday they had a layer of clouds gathering at the summit.

We started our walk near the beginning of Mojacar Playa, and all along the water front there are beds of flowers. At this time year you can't miss their vivid colours like these orangey-yellow daisies...

...and the shocking pink pelargoniums. These were in flower everywhere and didn't seem to mind the strong wind or salty air.

Of course the cacti thrive in this environment too. There are a lot of these tall ones along there, and at this time of year, they all produce these nodules. I am not sure whether they are flowers or fruit.

We walked a long way until the path ran out, and as we did not want to go down onto the sand we decided to turn back. We both wanted a drink so we stopped at a bar we have not seen before. It may be new this season or it may have had a 'face-lift', but it looked nice so we went in and found an empty table.

We had the first table inside the gates on the right, and we could look past the couple on the next table to see the sea.

To the right of us there was a long bar and beyond that a long 'plancha' or grill plate. The chef was cooking tapas and full meals to order and he didn't stop once while we were there. We had just eaten our Sunday roast, so we didn't want a meal, but the food looked very nice so maybe we will go back another day to try it. Instead we just ordered our drinks and I had my first tinto verano of the year. Tinto verano means Summer wine and it is red wine mixed with lemonade, ice and a lemon slice. Most commercial bars have it on a pump during the summer, or ready mixed in individual bottles, but if you go in a small rural bar where they mix it for you, you sometimes get a splash of vermouth added. It was very refreshing after our walk, and set us up nicely for the walk back to the car. Soon after we got home the rain started, so we were glad we had gone early.

I was happy to see the warmth and rain had woken up our little mauve daisies. This is a ground-cover plant we bought from the cactus garden in Nijar that we visited back in 2019. I bought a little piece in a pot and the man told us it would cover a square metre in a year. I planted it into a big pot on our top step and sure enough it quickly grew to cover the top of the pot and then tumbled down all around it. This autumn it needed to be cut back and I planted stems of it in various other pots and window boxes and they all seem to have taken. Now the flowers are just opening and soon it will be covered with them. They are a bit smaller and paler than they were the first year, but still very pretty.

Although we don't eat lots of curries, I do make it once or twice a month and we both like poppadoms with mango chutney, but since Brexit I have not been able to buy this anywhere. There are plenty of mangoes out here, but I have never seen the chutney on their salsa shelves. So I did a google search and found a few recipes. I was pleased to find that I already had almost all the ingredients in my cupboard, so I only had to buy the mangoes and a new bottle of distilled vinegar. That is something else the Spanish don't use at all, preferring apple or white wine vinegar, but I did manage to find some yesterday. There were a lot of different spices in the recipe so here are my ingredients all set to go.

Of course the bit that took the time was preparing four large mangoes, but a Sudanese lady who used to work for me in my nursery, taught me the best way to do this, and soon it was bubbling away.

The black specks you can see are Nigella seeds, or black cumin seeds. This was a spice I didn't have already, and it was unfamiliar to me. I know Nigella as pretty little blue flowers called love-in-the-mist, which may be the plant these seeds came from but these were grown in the "fertile plains by the River Nile". I had not heard of them before and have never seen them in our shops, but the recipe said that although they are not essential they do add something special to the chutney, so I went online and sure enough Amazon had them and delivered them the next day. They kept boiling up to the top in the pan, but when it was made they mixed in fine. Apparently they add 'Indian authenticity' to any curry, which is just as well as I have lots of them!

When it was cooked until the fruit was soft, I pureed half of it to thicken the mixture, and quickly reduced the remaining syrup to give a good consistency and I now have two jars of chutney and two boxes to freeze away. This was recommended to prolong its keeping ability. It tastes really good but is a bit 'hotter' than I am used to. I think if I make it again I will halve the chilli I put in it!

I had a very pungent kitchen last night but I left the extractor fan on for a while and it has mostly gone now.

This week did include our 42nd wedding anniversary on Tuesday. We had a quiet day. We have never made a 'big thing' of anniversaries though we do acknowledge them to one another, so we just enjoyed a peaceful day in one another's company. This year it got a bit more public notice than usual, as our 40th anniversary, (which was a bit special) came up as a 'memory' on my Facebook page so I shared it again. 

As well as my usual video call with Ben and Tom, earlier in the week, we had a zoom chat with Jonathan and Ella last night and a very sleepy baby Aisling. She is settling down now. On Wednesday she had her 'tongue-tie' cut so she should be able to feed more easily now. I didn't see Jonathan as a particularly 'baby' person, but he has proved me wrong and is taking his turn at night feeding and nappy changing and is obviously thrilled with her. He goes back to work next week, and Ella will miss him, but I am sure she will soon have a routine worked out.

Chris has just left to collect our weekly treat from Miraflores camp site - a fish and chip takeaway dinner, so I had better go and put the kettle on for our cuppa. I will just link up with Rocking Your World and Annie's Friday Smiles before I go.