Almost tomato season

Thanks to Walt's watering regime and the good weather we've been having, the tomatoes are doing great out in the vegetable garden. The zucchinis are too. Cucumbers started producing but then stopped — I think temperatures just got too hot for them. They're starting to produce again now that it has cooled down slightly. We're still hoping for crops of eggplant, bell peppers, and jalapeño peppers later in the season.

As you can see above, Walt did some pruning on an apple tree next to the vegetable garden, just to lighten its load. I had done the same on the biggest apple tree a week or so earlier. Now we have to clean up.

It looks like we are going to have a fine tomato crop in August. There are several varieties out there, and they all seem to be thriving.

I wish I could say the same for my greens — kale and collards. Both have been attacked by a cloud of leaf-eating insects that I think are called flea beetles. I'm afraid the plants are all done for. I'll have to do a new planting in September for autumn and Christmas. I have plenty of seeds left.

Scratch that

Isn't it always the way? As soon as I posted about the dry dry dry and hot hot hot weather we've been having for what seems like months, yesterday turned out to be a rainy day. We didn't get enough rain to really wet the ground thoroughly, but it was enough to raise our humidity levels to record highs (that's just my impression).

At about 8 p.m., we started having thunder and lightning, but it wasn't very close and didn't last very long. The raindrops were big and fat. When it brightened up outdoors a few minutes later, I took the photos above and below out of one of our loft-space windows. We'd already had drizzly showers for much of the day.

I had a hard time getting to sleep after going to bed at 10, because of the heat and humidity. Just as I was dozing off, there was another little thundershower, with lightning closer that time, and loud thunder, but little or no rain. Callie started barking at the noise. Then at 2 a.m. Callie went wild barking again, and all the lights seemed to come on at one time. I opened my eyes to see Walt trying to chase a bat out of the room and Callie chasing around wildly barking at it. What a night!

By the way, here's another photo of that headless snake out in the vineyard. I'm posting it at a small size so you don't really have to look at it if you don't want to. You can click or tap on it to enlarge the image. I still wonder what killed it. Maybe it got run over by a tractor.

Callie gives the photo some scale. She was only slightly curious about the strange thing and didn't linger over it. As I said in a comment this morning on yesterday's post, this is not what would be called a grass snake in the U.S., as far as I know.

Sec... archi-sec

So far in July, we've had 5 millimeters of rain. That's two-tenths of an inch. Normally, we would have had six or seven times more than that. And it's been hot. Yesterday it was only about 86ºF, but the day before it was close to 99.

That's one thing about this area of France: the weather is seldom boring. You never know whether it will rain every day for weeks on end, washing out the summer, or whether you'll get long dry spells of hot weather like this one. We hardly had any rainfall in May or June either.

Certain plants

seem to be thriving

in these conditions.

 I've never seen

so many bright blue

wild chicory flowers

all around

the vineyard.

And as you can

see in the photos

above and below,

the grapevines

are bright green

and happy-looking.

I've been focused on

Paris for quite a while

here on the blog,

posting all the photos

I took there nearly

two months ago.

For the weekend, here

are some photos that

I took yesterday morning

on my walk with Callie.

And there is one very surprising photo in the bunch. Look at this dead snake that I saw out in the vineyard yesterday morning. Actually, it's been there for three or four days. I never in my life imagined that there were snakes of this size lurking in and around the edges of the vineyard. It looks like somebody cut the snake's head off with a shovel. Or do you think some animal like a badger might have killed it? It's at least three feet — close to a meter — long. And that's just what remains of the thing.

Here's a photo our house and two of the neighbors' taken from about a kilometer out in the vineyard. Ours is the newer house with the dark brown roof. The other two, with more reddish tile roofs, are old farmhouses. This photo is looking out over the Cher River valley to the highlands on the other side.

Views from a café, rue de Sèvres

Yesterday afternoon we sat out on the terrace/deck/front porch and attempted to enjoy the weather. And enjoy it I did, in a certain way. The temperature out there, on a porch that faces east, has a roof over it, and is completely open to the air, was 37ºC. That's human body temperate, 98.6ºF. It was the hottest day we've had so far this year, and maybe the hottest day we've had since 2003.

It wasn't so hot on May 30 in Paris, but it was starting to get uncomfortable under the sun out on the sidewalks of the city. I walked through the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, after looking around at Saint-Sulpice, looking for a café where I could sit outside and sip a cold drink. The Flore and the Deux Magots were too crowded. They are also really expensive.

A little further on I found a place where I used to eat lunch all those years ago when I worked on the rue des Saints-Pères and then on the rue de l'Université. There are two pictures of it in this post from November 2014 — it's Le Rouquet and has a white awning these days. It was empty last October, but in May it was packed. I found a table and sat down. I waited 5 or 10 minutes, but nobody ever came to take my order. So I just got up and left.

I walked on to the rue de Sèvres, past the well-known café called Le Sauvignon, and then another called  Le Sèvres-Raspail, where I remember having coffee or a glass of wine with Walt back in 1982. Again, every place was packed. On I strolled, until a little way past the Bon Marché department store and the Grande Epicerie grocery store, I came upon the place in the photo above, which was inviting.

Notice the menu just above the baby carriage, and look at the full-zoom photo of it (below) that I took from across the street.

All the other photos in this post are ones I took as I sat and drank a glass of white wine and a big glass of water at the café, called the ZéroZéro-Sèvres, as I watched people walking by. The photo of the line of empty tables is slightly misleading, because there were some people, including a crowd of Brits with several small children, occupying tables when I arrived, but they had all left just before I did. That's when I took the photo.

Walt and I have twice stayed in apartments in this neighborhood — in 1999 in a place at the intersection of the rue de Babylone and the rue Vaneau, and in 2002 in a nice apartment on the rue Mayet — so I know it slightly. I enjoyed sitting at my table out on the sidewalk and discreetly (I hope) taking photos of the restaurant and shops across the street. I was still just trying out my new camera (the Canon SX700 HS). I think the photo above of the menu posted across the rue de Sèvres at Le Petit Lutétia is pretty amazing, considering the distance. It's legible if you look at it at full size.