Blue and purple

The blue Swan River daisies finally fully opened (after surviving a considerable battering from heavy rain) yesterday.


Purple chilli flowers:


The first ones are just starting to set. So far as I remember the ripe chillies are actually bright red...

I have been carefully pollinating all the chilli flowers by hand, according to my old greenhouse habits where they never set naturally, and am continuing this with the dark-leafed chilli in the hopes of avoiding cross-pollination if possible. Naturally I am using a different hand/fingertip :-D

"The Blade Itself", Joe Abercrombie

The First Law is that it is forbidden to speak with devils. The Second Law is that it is forbidden to eat the flesh of men. There are definitely people in Joe Abercrombie's universe who do the latter (and seem to gain uncanny powers thereby), so we can assume that there are probably people who break the First Law as well, and that devils exist to be spoken with...

The review extract on the front of the book calls it "delightfully twisted and evil"; Goodreads calls it "grimdark". I'm not sure what either of these are based upon, unless it is by comparison with the Young Adult diversity-positive fantasy faeverse. What you've got here is a world that feels real rather than just generic ( Read more... )