That big jade plant

Here are two more photos of the big blooming jade plant. I hope it doesn't die after flowering.

Jade flowers

I mentioned a while back that my big jade plant bonsai was covered in flower buds. They had appeared on the plant two or three weeks earlier but only one or two buds had developed into actual flowers. Over the past week, I wondered how I could get the plant to produce more flowers. I couldn't put it outside because our morning temperatures were down near freezing.

The only thing I could think of was watering it lightly every day for a week. It was pretty dry. And it worked.
There are now more flowers on the the plant. They're not spectacular — they're tiny —
but there are about two dozen of them now.

The road through the hamlet

Can you see the airplane flying above us? — Our Citroën rolls through the hamlet just three or four times a month. Mostly we drive the Peugeot when we run errands. The Citroën is our garbage truck, though; we load it up once or twice a month with all our recyclables and haul them to a local drop-off recycling station. It has a bigger trunk.

Looking west (above left) and then east toward our house (above right) from the same spot out in the vineyard.

The dirt road through the vineyard turns into a paved lane starting at our house and running down to the river road, which leads upriver to Saint-Aignan or downriver to Montrichard (and beyond, in both cases). That's our Blois neighbors' maison de campagne above right.

Trees and trunks

Not a forest fire, just a sunrise (left) ; the same sunrise seen through poplar trees (right)

Troncs de vignes : a certain number of the grape vines die every year and are replaced

A twisty apple tree ; a pine cone, called une pomme de pin in French