The future's bright

With last night's (relatively mild) frost being the last forecast for a week or so, it felt safe to venture to the garden centre for a few treats. So I replenished our thyme supply and fell hook line and sinker for these bright cheery blooms. They're called Ranuculus or something like that - I'm not really very good on flower names.

Of course as I closed the shutters I noted the clear starry sky and felt the plummeting temperatures... and felt a little smug that I had wrapped them up safely in fleece for the night. Hopefully tomorrow I can get on with some more seed planting ridiculously far ahead of time too. We're going to be away for a critical three week period at the end of July into August, so I'm trying to get an early start on plants so everything can be harvested before we go. It also means a limit on plants I really want to grow like tomatoes and melons that do need regular watering - I don't mind asking a neighbour to turn the hose on them for a week - but three weeks and a bit seems a bit cheeky.

Anyway, a mostly baking day today including possibly the first bread that I'm really quite happy with - it's a bauernbrot type bread; quite dense but not at all dry and was delicious fresh out of the oven with salty butter. (That I was nibbling that rather than the newly invented lemon cupcakes should tell you something.)

And so the last weekend of the holidays begins. Conor still has four verses of his poem to learn and has probably forgotten how to write. However he did amuse me in the shops earlier by looking at a brand of chocolate drink he wanted ("Kids") and squinting at it for a minute before looking questioningly at me and saying "Keeeds? What does that mean?" He wanted to read a quite hard book (like a 12 year old's book) in English when we got home and it really made me realise what a job we will have reinforcing his English - though I'll wait until the French has a firmer foothold before taking that up again I think.