Vegetable Patch or Vegetable Garden?

The Choice Before Us

Gardening is hard work. Enjoyable, but hard. A vegetable patch, which requires constant care: planting, watering, hoeing,weeding, pruning and harvesting, and whose produce is by its nature almost entirely seasonal, is consequently very hard work.
There is a local saying, l'orto vuole l'uomo morto or 'the vegie patch will be the death of you', loosely translated.
With that in mind, here is how things are evolving da noi/chez nous.

Bufo bufo pays us a visit

Toad in a Hole

 This morning as I stepped outside to do some work in the garden I was confronted by a toad sitting on the cast iron bars of a drain. 

Possibly he was searching for water. So I decided to offer him some. 

Yellow Foxglove

An Unexpected Treat

We first noticed the long stalks with  blackened buds at the end of one summer a few years ago. Wild foxgloves at Le Ripe. Next season revealed them to have rather dirty yellow flowers, not the favoured blue or purple. 

After that we considered ourselves lucky to have native foxgloves yet unlucky that they were such an unprepossessing colour.

Ocimum Basilicum

It's not Summer without Basil

Once on a trip to Greece we noted the pots of small-leafed basil sitting, round and pretty, on verandahs. To our surprise we discovered that it was decorative basil, that the Greeks do not eat basil. Subsequently we introduced some Greek friends to pesto and it caused quite a sensation.