I'd been baking in the morning to have a supply of snacks for John in between his small meals. I made cup cakes and shortbread biscuits [Trish's recipe, wonderful!]
A box of gorgeous pink peonies along with chocolates was delivered, an anniversary present from Gerd and Maria, thank you both so much, they are lovely, look:
Sam arrived after walking across from his home, and shortly after our friends Molly and Arnold surprised us with a visit and another beautiful card and bouquet for our anniversary:
We do have some wonderful friends, Frances and Alan [best man -and woman! - at our wedding] had also sent a beautiful card and a present of "lucky tickets" in a little case hand knitted by Fran!
I made lunch for John and Sam, and in the afternoon I had time to go into the garden and saw it was time to pick the first big lot of strawberries. There were a lot more ready than I'd thought, I had to carry a lot back home in my shirt as the container was overflowing. When I was processing them in the evening I thought I really ought to weigh what I'd picked .... they were just short of 6 kg!
The ice cream carton is full of strawberries in sugar syrup ready for freezing, in the glass goblet are strawberries with lemon juice and sugar.
[This morning I went big shopping at Tesco's, mainly because I wanted to get some jam sugar to make strawberry/gooseberry jam - would you believe it, Tesco's had run out of jam sugar! So I got some preserving sugar instead and a bottle of pectin and made 7 jars of jam that way.]
These are the bunches for yesterday's Luncheon Club. I got them ready after delivering John to the Leicester Royal Infirmary in the early morning for his biopsy.
Our friend Brian came this sunny afternoon and got the hay ready for baling, which he expected to do tomorrow after lunch but then changed his mind and did it a little later with the help of one of his sons.
Quite a few branches had to be cut off several trees, the mock orange, bird food birch, climbing rose/mountain ash and a sticky-out branch of the dead wisteria against the garage so that the huge baling machine could get past:
When their work was finished and baler and tractor were noisily making their way home all the girls [minus Dotty] from the enclosure fled off the drive to behind the house for safety:
I'm still struggling to get things done in the garden but there are compensations, bits of it are looking fine and give me lots of pleasure - like the ducks picking around the greenhouses while I was weeding in there,
the first flush of sweet peas [now in the house with a knock-out scent],
the huge [more than 6 inches across] blooms on the white clematis in the centre of the formal garden,
the pink peony showing two more gorgeous blooms than the customary three,
the rose "Fru Dagmar Hastrup" in the middle of the second large diamond bed looking and smelling sweet before producing great big red hips for the winter,
and the first big diamond bed filling out with the delphiniums and roses about to bloom - life's not too bad after all!
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