Fruit

I have had two pickings of strawberries (of a handful of berries each), with more to come( Strawberries and peas )

The feathery (and rather invasive) thing in the wildflower trough has finally opened its flower-head fully and demonstrated that it definitely isn't corn-chamomile, or anything else that I have sown previously. It has clusters of unscented white umbellifer-flowers. I shall need to root it out at the end of the year, as it is too tall and dominant for my purposes. I was only really keeping it to see what it was going to turn into. The plant at the other end of the trough has white and yellow daisy-type flowers and dagged leaves, and I have seen them growing locally in people's gardens, which is doubtless how it got into mine -- this one is also too tall for my environment, since it is reaching the washing line! Both plants are thick with blackfly, which I am tolerating there but attempting to keep clear of everything else.

The first flax is in flower. I have had a lot of trouble with it flopping this year, and ended up tying it to a supporting stick, even though I didn't feed the plants. They have grown very tall and quite possibly suffer from lack of water. The towel-tomatoes are now flowering, even though they aren't yet in their full-size pots (or really of a size to be).

I have managed to give away six marigolds, have potted-up three, and still need to deal with a couple more badly overcrowded pots!

Twenty Years After: it really is the beginning of the final episode this time

After getting distracted by "Aramis no Bouken" I plunged into the final part of the Soviet "Twenty Years After" with a certain trepidation (oh no, it's going to come to an end) and no idea what to expect, having no memory of this part of the novel at all.
(It does strike me as being slightly worrying that I have now managed to write two fanfics for it without actually having finished the story myself, but unless further big chunks of backstory appear in the remaining section it shouldn't invalidate anything in what I have already written, all of which takes place at an earlier point in the plot than this!)

It looks as if the last part of the serial is going to be all about how the protagonists back in France get themselves out of the political consequences of their actions in England. We saw d'Artagnan and Porthos get arrested at the end of the last episode, and now Aramis and Athos are wondering what became of them. ( Read more... )

Edit: well, that turns out to be almost *all* the remaining chapters of the book (the duel of Aramis and Athos being mixed up with a vast chunk of armies and political manoeuvring in canon). But the book does at least explain why Mazarin is apparently walking around in a greenhouse; d'Artagnan and Porthos are shut up not in a mediaeval tower as shown on screen, but in a pavilion wing in an orangery, and not for months but for a grand total, according to d'Artagnan, of eighty-three hours of frustration ;-)
(And I am also touched to find out that in the book it is Aramis who is outside the walls with horses, whereas I was beginning to fear in the film that he had simply gone to ground to save his own neck as the final survivor...)