Sunflowers

It's been a perfectly beautiful day, and I hoped for something more than a quick end of day photo of one of J's sunflowers; but the sunflowers are finally starting to look quite good, after weeks of tall but puny growth and a few undersized flowers. They are significantly taller than the adjacent greenhouse, and at present we have several beautiful blooms, some interestingly faded ones, and more buds developing. What we don't have is any colour variation. We grew the same variety as last year, because they produced such wonderfully varied flowers, golds, oranges, russets and almost reds. I like yellow sunflowers, so it's unreasonable to be dissatisfied, but they are not quite what we hoped for.

I didn't manage to get out for the walk up the hill I'd been hoping for: the morning was filled by J's art talk (looking at artists who depict the same place in different seasons - an interesting topic to me, partly because it's something I love doing with photography) and then her daily cycling session on the Motomed, which is going well. She's enjoying it, especially when we find a good cycling video of a place she knows for her to watch as she pedals, and the oedema in her feet has improved a lot over the past three weeks after three years of more or less permanent swelling since she lost all the involuntary movement which had kept her legs and feet healthier than I realised for her first thirty years. This afternoon, after her long lunch, I prepared a big bowl of windfall apples, which are now cooked to pulp and dripping through the jelly bag. They will combine with the blackberry juice waiting in the fridge for the year's first batch of jelly. There's now lots of garden produce to eat and preserve: P made delicious ratatouille for lunch with our courgettes and tomatoes and some of last year's aubergines from the freezer, and I picked a kilo of small orange Merrygold tomatoes from the plants on the balcony, which are cropping prolifically. I ran out of time to pick raspberries or bring in cauliflowers, which are on my list for tomorrow. It feels good to be eating more of our own produce again, but is sometimes hard to keep up with.