Our Summer Garden: Bay, Bananas, Grow-bags - and Babysitting!

I posted some photos of our garden and the new grow bags at the start of June in this post here - so as I have been busy with babysitting granddaughter Sofia (a labour of love!) yesterday and mooching around the garden today weeding and admiring the progress of the grow bag veggies I thought to post a few photos of them.

There are plenty of flowers on the tomatoes and courgettes, and there are even a couple of green tomatoes putting in an appearance. I've staked the tomatoes today, as they were starting to keel over. There's a bay bush that's grown like a triffid in the past month since being repotted to a bigger home - it's hard to credit it started out as a windowsill plant from the supermarket for 99cent three years ago.

Also the banana plant has come on in leaps and bounds and hubby has split it and put two of the dozen suckers (that's what they're called, baby banana plants - not a term of abuse!) in a barrel that previously housed a nice palm that didn't make it through last winters record sub-zero temps. It's already put out two new leaves so it seems to like its new home.

So we are planning to get some new plants for the bed where we lost all those palms last winter - now the area's been cleared of weeds and the irises and allium have died off there are sad gaps and we need to fill them up with some hardy perennial shrubs and plants that will give cover and colour. We have some fuchsia and lupins and lavender in the bed, and a few lilies that have seen better days.

I took these photos of the garden this evening, and there's also one of Sofia who is nearly 5 months old and as cute as all babies are at that age. I spent yesterday babysitting while her mother was at work and her dad played cricket in Kerry. A good granny-bonding day!

Thoughts on summer sun holidays - and the Irish "summer"

In July I went to Spain with teenage daughter for a short break, as our eldest son has lived north of Barcelona in a seaside resort town for the past eight years. We have been there almost every year, and we only go because he's there, resort towns and package holidays generally not being my thing. However it is a great place to just chillax and unwind after the stresses and strains of the Irish "summer", which we look forward to throughout the bleak winter months, only to be disappointed yet again.

What I left behind....at home....


...and from the plane in Shannon....

No wonder we can't muster enthusiasm for the killjoy environmentalists who go on bemoaning global warming, as we'd love some to have some here, thanks very much, during what laughably passes for our summer months. We have had virtually non-stop rain since the end of June, after about two nice weeks in the middle of June. July was the wettest on record, and August looks equally dismal. So we have little to look forward to for the rest of the so-called summer.

Kids are bored, teenagers mutinous, and parents driven to distraction trying to keep sane during the school holidays. Newspapers are full of tips on how to keep the kids entertained during the Irish three-month long school holiday, which must be the longest in the world. (No wonder Irish teachers say when asked what they like about their job - June, July and August!). Irish kids are probably no different to kids everywhere in the Western world, spoilt by a plethora of Playstation and Wii and Nintendo DS game consoles, and go into terminal catatonia at parental suggestions that they go for a nice walk/cycle/read a book or something equally improving that doesn't involve MSN-ing, Facebook-ing or Bebo-ing each other. (Come to think of it, in this house those are mostly parental activities so maybe I can't afford to preach!)

....and what I saw on arrival!

Back to sun holidays - I only ever went on one package holiday to the sun; that was to Tenerife when I was 22, and it was my first time ever flying, so it was a first in many ways! I was with a group of 9 or 10 other midwives, we had just finished our training and were ready to party. I had a ball but even then was a free spirit who wasn't quite ready to be regimented in the package holiday modus operandi. I had been round Europe a few years earlier Inter-Railing and that was one of the best holidays ever, and I would love to do it again now that the age limit is gone. Time was you had to be under-21, then 26, and now with life-long learning the norm, they seem to have acknowledged that we can be perpetual students!

This year I was meeting the same friend who had done the Inter-Railing trip with me as she was in Barcelona the same time as I was visiting Spain, so we planned our reunion, and as she had her teenage girls in tow, it was a hit with my teenager as well. We had a wonderful two days in Barcelona, and she spent two days on the costa with us as well. As we caught up on the years, we both agreed Barcelona was a great place to visit and the Costa Brava a great place to spend some down time on the beach recharging the batteries for the rest of the year.

Since coming home just over a week ago it has been virtually non-stop rain and flooding, and as you can see in the photo over here when I say floods I mean monsoon-like rains! Today is the August Bank Holiday Monday and is usually associated with sun and traffic jams on the way to the beach, but alas today is par for the course and another wet day. It is also cold enough to warrant wearing jeans and a jumper (sweater) - not a tee-shirt day at all. We are debating ordering our winter heating oil in August as if this continues we will be putting on the heating pretty soon.

I met someone in the supermarket today who is just back from a sun holiday in Spain and we agreed that it didn't matter where you were, it is essential to get your sunshine fix to face down the winter here. Someone said on Niamh's post (where I was a guest blogger last Friday - take a look!) regarding Ikea and their whole concept of cheap'n'cheerful home furnishings (which I wrote about in my last post), that in Scandinavia with its long dark winters people spend more time indoors so home becomes more important and change is more common than in hot countries. Maybe there is something to that. When we lived in Africa so much of our life was spent outdoors - garden or balcony/patio - that the interior was less important than it is here. Or maybe I am not enough of a houseproud "hausfrau"!

I will post my holiday pics on a sidebar Picasa slideshow, for those remotely interested in having a look, and will blog a bit on Barcelona which was absolutely wonderful, it has to be one of Europe's best cities and I would love to spend longer there exploring and wandering. One day, maybe one day...

Barbecue Days - Reflections on the Irish Summer

I haven't blogged in almost two weeks and perhaps I have been waiting for something momentous to happen in my life. All I have done since Immrama is worked during the week and relaxed at the weekends - messing about in the garden when the weather is good and looking at the plants instead of weeding or doing something useful. You can see some of the plants in full bloom now, the lily was short-lived but spectacular, and the banana trees bring a bit of tropical memory into our lives. I still marvel that they thrive every summer while they die off at the first frost.

We had some lovely fine weather after the Immrama festival and decided on the spur of the moment the following weekend to get a new barbecue. Off we went to Toss Bryan's in Fermoy, a nearby market town in north-east Co. Cork, only about 15 miles from Lismore but a world away as it is across the county border, with its fierce GAA inter-county rivalry which manifests itself whenever Cork and Waterford are playing each other in hurling. Then the red and white of Cork pits itself against the blue and white of Waterford and local loyalties come to the fore.




But I digress. The barbecue has a unique place in Irish life, as we are a cold northern European country with erratic and unpredictable weather patterns when we can have all four seasons in one day, but we like to think we have a sunny Mediterranean outlook on life. Hence the first sighting of the summer sun is guaranteed to bring out the inner hunter/gatherer hidden deep in the psyche of all Irish males (or Irish-based ones, as hubby isn't Irish!) and they rush to grill any piece of meat within reach. This sometimes results in mass food poisoning when "cremated on the outside, raw on the inside" occurs, and there are terrifying public service ads on the radio every summer attesting to the hazards of such wanton folly.



It's a bit like the Irish response to the sun when all caution is thrown to the winds and we strip down to skimpy shorts and tops, resulting in the transformation of alabaster-white flesh turning an alarming lobster pink over the course of a day or two, with the trademark bra-strap stripes, and the promise of pain to follow as we won't risk missing out on a minute of potential tanning by applying anything with a higher SPF than about 5. We also revel in that peculiarity known only to the Irish male as the "man tan" where the arms and neck go pink and perhaps brown, or freckly, and when this manly specimen bares the torso on the beach he appears to have a t-shirt on, such is the demarcation of the man-tan!



We have been home for twelve years now, and have always had charcoal barbecues, perhaps a touch of nostalgia for the ubiquitous "jiko ya mkaa" or charcoal stoves we had in Africa, there of necessity rather than choice. We eschewed the gas barbie as being too easy and not quite pukka, not the real deal and maybe we were a bit too smug about our allegiance to the labour-intensive charcoal. Waiting an hour to get the glowing coals seemed quite normal, and you can't beat the all-pervasive smell of chargrilled food. We had gone through two or three stoves in the past decade, as the coal just seemed to burn through the base or the cast-iron was too heavy for the legs and they just broke, and we ended up putting the base up on blocks. It was high time for a move upmarket and we agreed to go for a nice gas barbie with lava rocks to replace the charcoal and give that smoky flavour.

Hubby is one of those decisive types when shopping - unlike me who can dither for Ireland, and spend days and weeks agonising over the merits of one item over another before (almost invariably) deciding on the item I saw first - he will enter a shop and leave within 10 minutes having completed the purchase. I can't get used to it after over 30 years, and it has me convinced that men really are from another planet when it comes to shopping. (It's the same with clothes, and that is definitely a gender thing, as the boys are exactly the same, in and out of Dunnes or Penneys in minutes, whereas teenage daughter and myself can browse for hours though I am no way a shopaholic!)



Within minutes we were the proud owners of a fancy gas barbecue, with lots of bells and whistles, figuratively speaking, and we went home salivating in anticipation of the culinary delights that beckoned. First the thing had to be assembled, which, as every Ikea flat-pack veteran knows, involves how-to leaflets, with odd diagrams and even odder piles of equipment. This is strictly a boy zone and I leave them to it while I marinade the meat and prepare the salad, spuds, garlic bread and fried rice, which is what we had with our inaugural barbie this summer. Imagine, not having our first barbie until late June! That has to be a record as the earliest we had one was in an unusually warm March some years back. Somehow global warming has passed Ireland by - if it's out there somewhere, no-one's told us about it, and we certainly haven't got much to show for it. There are days like during the torrential thunderstorms this week that we'd happily say - bring it on!

We had barbies every day for that week, with hubby at the helm with the new BBQ weapons of mass destruction to hand, though he drew the line at the canvas apron they all came wrapped up in. The barbie even thoughtfully has a beercan/glass holder! We thoroughly enjoyed eating alfresco every evening, pretending we were in Spain or Africa or anywhere that good weather is a given, with a midweek glass of wine almost de rigueur. Then last Sunday the good weather broke and we had a week of humidity with monsoon rains, thunderstorms, flash flooding and all the ensuing havoc. In other words, normal life resumed, just in case we were getting too complacent! Our barbie has gone back to the shed, and we look forward to its next outing, in the hope of an early release! Carpe diem really does apply to Ireland and its weather, and perhaps it should be a motto for living our lives all the time.