Seeds and flowers

Sowed my two precious pink Swan River daisy seeds, being careful not to drop them when I opened the packet! Also a pot of dill. I was tempted to sow more coreopsis since the pot seems to have been sitting there forever without doing anything, but in fact it has only been a week...

( Lettuce, rudbeckia, sage, honesty )

The pot-marigolds (the over-wintered ones) are now in full flower in the sunshine and looking almost glowingly golden :-)


And the mystery Linaria (so-called by me) is still flourishing with blooms, as it has been doing I think ever since last July(!)
Although these ones are pink, as opposed to the pure white ones we had in June.

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The bathroom clock has kept getting stuck at around 11am (failing to get its minute hand past its hour hand against the force of gravity, I think) ever since I put the clocks on, so I gave it a new battery -- the problem is that it was continuing to *tick*, but the hands just quivered instead of actually advancing. It sounded as if it was working but wasn't!
(I suspect there is still quite a bit of juice left in that battery, though -- certainly enough for torchlight...)

Rhubarb pie -- and Mordaunt

NB Mordaunt (the son of Milady by her second husband) in Twenty Years After is played by the Count of Monte Cristo :-D
(a.k.a. Viktor Avilov, evidently making the most of his sinister looks)
I recognised him almost immediately, whereas I'm not sure I should necessarily have recognised d'Artagnan playing Fernand (a.k.a. Mikhail Boyarsky) if I hadn't been primed to await his appearance!

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I had yet another go at the 1920s rhubarb pie that I keep optimistically attempting, and this time I made a full-size one with three sticks of rhubarb and a whole egg, but only the juice of a tiny bargain lemon (about the size of a lime: they were on special offer, and since I mainly use them for salad dressing it seemed a good home for fruit that would otherwise be wasted due to being 'sub-standard'). But I really do think the baking instructions on this one must be wrong.

( Accidental success )

(It wasn't actually pure butter this time round, which might or might not have been significant; in my periodic check on the margarine shelves I discovered that there actually *was* a margarine product that was made of local vegetable oil instead of the ubiquitous cheap (and destructive) imported palm oil, just as they all used to be back before palm oil got pushed as the next big industry ingredient. Flora has rebranded itself as "now free from palm oil" and "made with natural ingredients" (the two are not in any way synonymous; palm oil *is* natural, just as organic food contains 'minerals'!) and I felt it deserved to be rewarded for the effort, so I bought some. ( Read more... )