The June Garden, Birthday Cakes, A Little Crochet And Various Other Things.

It's all a bit random (as usual)...

June tends to be a busy time here, the schools finish for the summer holidays at the end of the month so there's a lot to pack in before then.

A's school had their sports day last Monday (previously postponed due to rain).

She won her heat of the egg and spoon race, woohoo! Here she is zooming gently across the finish line, her legs almost as white as her socks!

N was rather bored by it all but fortunately he'd brought along the latest addition to his fire engine collection (70p from a charity shop that morning) and I helped add some decorative touches during the less exciting races.

Here's another story offering from A, it's to be a book entitled The Girl Who Loved Art. Well, they do say that most attempts at a first novel are autobiographical and this is pretty much true for this effort though the inclusion of green shoes in her outfit is rather fanciful.

We had quite a dramatic hail shower during last week.

Much of the garden briefly turned white, rather an unusual sight for this time of year.

I ventured to Tescos. I was tempted by these rather pretty owl mugs and a bargain set of lovely big chunky glasses.

I was also taken with the attractive packaging on their own brand chocolate. I've so far only sampled the milk chocolate and it tasted very nice, up among my top three brands I would say. All these bars (and more) are currently on special offer so are a good buy.

And I've finished joining the squares of the turtle blanket. The border is underway then it will be "the ends" again though fortunately there aren't as many of them as on my last blanket - a result of fewer colour changes plus some attempt was made to sew them in as I went.

Also last week we celebrated A's sixth birthday.

This was the on-the-day birthday cake, with pale blue icing as requested.

N approved of the nice little pile of presents.

Later in the week we had a party for nine of her friends.

Party goodies (with a space left for the pizza and sausage rolls!)

We were soooooo lucky with the weather. I'd booked a bouncy castle and up until midday it still looked like everything might all be blighted by yet more rain, but the afternoon turned out to be gorgeous - look, blue sky!

The party cake was a chocolate one with smartie flowers (again as requested). It was also dairy and egg free so that all party goers could have some. I used the recipe linked to here for the cake, and soya marg to make the butter icing.

Now for a little tour round our June garden...

Starting at the garden path we wander down to have a closer look at the first of the pink peonies to flower.

Lovely!

Turning round and back up we pass the kitchen window, the sill of which is adorned with a little kingly plaque and some Irish holiday stones. I like to think this is Aragorn as I was reading The Lord Of The Rings when I aquired it and its partner (hidden in the veggie patch, I'll need to hunt for it) which looks like Gandalf. The first of the Lord Of The Rings films came out a few years after I'd bought them, I think I prefer the film version of Aragorn (cue some time-wasting Googling of Viggo Mortensen playing Aragorn...)

Right, continuing up the garden we pass the lupins.

I removed some flower heads which were a little pass their best, there should be plenty more to come later this "summer".

Further up the garden the geraniums are popular with the bees.

Now we're almost up at the shed and looking back down towards the house (only half of it is ours). The cobbled horseshoe path is a lovely feature, it was here before us. We added the stepping stones to give us dry access to the shed as the grass can get very soggy.

The shed, complete with some bunting I mentioned making in my third ever blog post. In front are two of our four raised veggie beds. Hubby takes charge of these. Peas are planted in the one closest, I'm eagerly anticipating gobbling them all up.

Behind the shed lies the other two raised beds and Gandalf, somewhere...