I heard it through the grapevine...

Hi y'all!

Well, either I was wrong when talking about my brown gardening thumb, or we are just incredibly lucky! When we moved in three years ago, whe did a bit of a redo of the garden and had someone install a lounge area with a wooden pergola. The guy did his best, but we put a sunsail over the construction which was waterproof, and the elements tug at the beams with some heavy rain and storm, so it's definitely not level. But life's path is seldom straight, and so is the pergola... We like it anyway. 

In the meantime we changed the sunsail into one which is permeable to water and fixed the beams, but they're still a bit crooked. To cover that, and because we like it, too, we planted three grape plants. First I thought, they are only for wine making or decorative, but you can actually pick and eat them straight from the vine! Well, I must admit, that one of the plants didn't make it, and the second one (white grapes) is doing quite poorly, but the third one (red grapes) kind of exploded during the last few weeks. Last year it did pretty well already, but this is no comparison to this year. I guess I could totally live of grapes for the next few days.

Zooming in you can see that there is much more to come...

And here I proudly present this year's first harvest (minus the ones which didn't make it into the bowl, but went straight into me instead...) 

I am unbelievably happy! Let's see, if I have to preserve some of them (e.g. in a cake, as a jelly/spread or as a Crema di Balsamico reduction), but I suppose they're best comsumed just pure as they are. 

To show you that these grapes are no exception to the rule of my brown thumb, please find below an update of my little lemon trees:

When my lavender finished blooming, I had to cut it in order to regrow strongly. While doing that, I made a few cuttings to see if I can propagate them. After one or two weeks, they produced tiny little roots, and therefore, I put them in soil yesterday. Will I be successful? I do hope so! 

(Isn't that picture beautiful? Yes, indeed.)

Anyway, you can't have too much lavender, and bumblebees and bees love it, too!

With that in mind: Don't get discouraged if something doesn't work out in the first attempt. Sometimes it just takes a while :-) 

Take care, guys!!!