Apple ducking

Ste Marie-Madeleine
Yesterday's weather: mostly miserable but not too much rain.

Happy Birthday to Jon's Dad, Douglas

Sitting here and looking out of the study window, I see the red squirrels are at the top of the apple tree again. Every now and then they knock, or possibly throw another apple out of the tree. They don't appear to be bothered whether we are in the garden or not. Jon was throwing apples back up at one the other day for quite a while before he got fed up and moved into a nearby tree to sit and watch until we had gone indoors.

This makes walking under the apple tree quite a dangerous prospect just at the moment. If it isn't the squirrels throwing apples we are bombarded by angry flies who are gorging themselves on the squirrel's discards.

We do regret not being able to harvest the apples for ourselves but there are so many and most of them are too small to do much with. The tree is extremely old and hasn't been properly pruned for many a year. It's on the to-do list along with 499 other little jobs!

We have collected some good-sized apples from the tree which caused me to resurrect a recipe for apple scone which had been tucked away in a little book where I have been jotting down recipes since before we married. That makes about 34 years of recipes and the book is falling apart. I should probably add another item to the to-do list: Write up the recipes in a new book before it is too late and we lose them all forever. So that makes 501 jobs for later.