It’s May and everything is happening in the garden. The large pots of summer bedding went outside the gites yesterday and the hanging baskets are up around the health suite. Tomatoes, courgetttes, peppers , lettuce all in and the potager ‘veg garden is all tidy and ready for some seed planting.

We have a lot of cherry trees here and have always had bumper crops - until last year. Too much rain when the trees were setting fruit meant no cherries for us. We are getting so well up on the ‘right’ kind of rain now we can almost have a sensible conversation with our neighbours about it ! ! ! This year we have cherries again. Usually we say that there are more than enough for the birds, the insects and us - this year it’s a reasonable crop but we will still be looking a bit higher up the tree than normal to get our share.

Chery ripe Cherr ripe Ripe I cry!!!

Luckily the trees don’t all crop at the same time - another tree will be ready today. We eat cherries fresh of course but we can’t eat them all at once so I wash the cherries and then put them on trays and into the freezer - the best way of holding their flavour - I keep the stones in as that adds flavour too. I will use them as desserts during the summer - yummy ! ! !