Today is, as I found out this morning, International Cat Day - taking place annually on August 8. And because that is the perfect excuse to not write a long blog post today, and instead delight you (well, hopefully) with a cat picture, here you go: 

Madame is, not surprisingly but still a little sadly, getting old. She's always had some food intolerances, but those got much more severe last year. After several months of searching for a possible cause, we did find out that it's probably the thickening additives in the canned cat food that she reacts to... and that ruled out about all kinds of available canned pet food (in combination with the kinds of meat she cannot have, there's about nothing left that would work for her).

So we switched to mixing her food ourselves, which means buying meat and adding in all the vitamins, minerals, and other things that are necessary to achieve the right amount of everything. Definitely not a low-maintenance cat - but she is much better now, having less issues with scratching herself, and also no more bad gut issues. The past few days, though, she seems to have hip pains :( and we hope that getting her some more aids to get onto her fave spots without jumping, and providing her with some nice warm spots, will help.

Growing old is not for cowards...

In the back of our garden, there's a few special thistle plants: Weaver's cards. They are quite similar to the wild card plants, but their heads are a little more cylindrical than conical, and a bit firmer.

And to my delight, they are now blooming: 

 It's not looking too spectacular, the flowers - but I think it fascinating how they start in the middle and then the flower strip, consisting of a lot of single small blossoms, goes both upwards and downwards.

This year, I'm quite happy with the successive flowering of plants in our garden - there's been no gap yet, with something attractive to the bees always in bloom. At the moment, it's the lavendar that takes prime position, though it's not the only thing getting attention. 

There's still a number of plants I'd like to have in the garden, or have more of, but I have sort of accepted that this takes time. There used to be foxgloves and calendula, but they have disappeared, and I'd love to have them back. Probably that means some seed buying, or some seed stealing, at some point in the near future. And then maybe it will work this time around, maybe not - eventually there will be plants that thrive with the soil and amount of attention they will be getting here, and then it will be fine. 

Meanwhile the little lemon tree has decided to make more leaves again. I'm very happy about that, as it had been flagging for quite a while, even though I had tried to get it enough (special citrus plant) fertiliser, and have it watered correctly (it did not like getting too dry at all, and actually wants much more water more frequently than the instructions everywhere had led me to believe). But even though it's supposed to like hard water, it did not do too well with it (so now I use rain water), and the special fertiliser also didn't cut the mustard. The leaves it made were relatively few, and they were more yellow than green.

I finally figured out that it lacked both iron and magnesium, so I provided both - what a good thing that we had an iron oxide (for making iron gall ink) and chalk (for bouldering) that are the two key ingredients in iron and magnesium fertilisers. I had to guess for the amounts, and delivered some more magnesium a few days ago, but at least the iron has arrived, as the new leaves are a nice dark red (as they should be, or so the Internet tells me). 

Regardless of its plights, and the fact that it does not look very pretty (rather irregular and not decoratively tree-ish), it has taken its job of making lemons quite seriously, and we've been able to have home-grown lemon for quite a while now. It is also getting ready to try and make some more, as you can see on the image!

So... any plants or flowers you would not want to miss in your garden, or urban green space like your balcony?

A few years ago, we stopped mowing our lawn - which, back then, was consisting to about equal parts of grass, wild thyme, and moss. It still has these three components, but now a lot of flowers are blooming in the ex-lawn. Most prominent are scabiosa flowers, with their distinctive pink pollen - and we know our neighbour's bees come to visit them a lot, as he tells us they come home with pink pants.

The flowers are not only making the bees happy, though. There's also some flower heads that are lacking their half-ripe seeds, and some of the stems of these flowers are broken. And here's one of the reasons:

There's a pair of these, and they stop by quite often. They are very shy, though, making it hard to get a decent picture of them even with a tele lens... 

Yesterday had a bit of extra excitement added - when I came home from bringing the post to the post office, there was more buzzing than usual in our garden. There's usually a lot of bees hanging out on our flowers, so there's a bit of a sound carpet there all the time - but this time around, the sound was coming from the willow fence, and that is a place that's not usually abuzz.

The reason for it? There was a bee swarm on the fence, almost next to the garden door.

(I wanted to post a video of the swarm, but it refused to upload... sorry, folks.)

It's more or less the typical time for bees to swarm - which is how, back in the day when they were still wild bees, they proliferated. When there's enough food and the weather is warm and dry and the old queen has been laying a lot of eggs, the workers go ahead and get some new queens started. And then the old lady takes a good part of her bees and flies off to find a new home, leaving the cozy, well-equipped place to the young one.

Because it's obviously not the queen's job to find the new home, she hangs out with most of her staff protecting her. Meanwhile, scouts are flying out to find something nice to live in. Once they come back successfully, and a committee of bees has agreed that the new home is acceptable, the swarm goes there to start a new life.

Well. Add in some hundreds of years of domestication and breeding, plus the relatively new parasite (the varroa mite), and what worked for the wild bees in theory does not work for the modern honey bee anymore. The swarming out does, yes, but there's not so many places where they could settle these days, and even if they find a hollow tree trunk or something similar, the odds that the hive will survive the winter are about... zero. The mites will take care of that.

Fortunately, our neighbour (who has bees) was home, and he had a spare box, and a catching bag, so he came over and got the swarm to give them a new home. That was a nice addition of a little excitement to the afternoon for all of us - me, the neighbour, and the bees!

It's getting spring-timey in earnest - the cherry trees are in full bloom now: 

There's also a good amount of flowers doing their job: 

And the little cat is, of course, also enjoying the good weather. She's been having some health issues recently, some of them related to food intolerances getting worse as she ages, and some of them probably related to stress with other cats outside, so it's nice to see her relax and enjoy some sunshine. (We're working on both her health issues, and there's been some improvement already, but Madame does not find all the food that is good for her delicious enough for her palate. Sigh.)

Well, that time passed quickly...

There was colouring of eggs, and nice leisurely breakfasts, and some cooking, and some meeting with friends, there was the first ice cream parlour visit of the year for coffee and, you may have guessed it, icecream.

I finally managed to sow some more seeds, and there was even time for a bit of gardening. Like always, though, there's a bunch of work left to do, and the Easter holidays could have been twice as long without us getting bored.

Now it's back to work, but at least I have a nice view on the tulips blooming in the garden - the first ones are already sticking out of the lawn and in full bloom. (Since we are not really mowing the lawn anymore during spring and summer, I stuck some of the tulip bulbs that were not thriving in their former place into the lawn last year - and it looks like they are much happier there!)

There's a bunch of other flowers too, and the neighbour's bees are visiting them with gusto.

Oh, and speaking of bees - now is the time when they also need water, so if you want to help your neighbourhood bees, you can provide them with a source of water where they can safely land and drink. A flat bowl with rough surface will do, or a large jar with enough wood sticks or twigs stuck into it that the bees can land on the wood and crawl down to the water.