Chat noir dahlia - still flowering, still wow!
The hydrangeas have turned this nice deep red. The spiky flowers in front are pineapple sage; they look great with the light shining through them.
BIG year for chesnuts. I've been down to the tree in the park, hoping to find a handful, and came back with a whole lot. I've never seen so many as this year. Having a really hard winter and a long hot summer must suit them, also the person who used to pick them up no longer lives there. Chestnuts were one of the staple foods of Tuscan and Umbrian peasants in lean years. They made a flour out of them and baked a sort of cake, castagnaccio, with pine nuts and raisins, no sugar. Apparently it is an acquired taste. There is also a sweet Torta di castagna which sounds a lot more like a cake as we know it, with chocolate and cognac and almond meal. Claudia Roden has recipes for both in her book The food of Italy. I might try the sweet one now I've got enough chestnuts. I wish the early settlers had planted more edible chesnuts; they went mad on horse-chesnut trees, which are attractive trees but not nearly as useful.
The South Island of NZ has gone over to digital TV. I was watching the TV news last night, and it was announced with tones of bewilderment and disbelief that 14% of households had made no arrangements to enable TV to be received in their living rooms, and horror of horrors, they would now have to wait for at least three weeks to get it installed! As if TV was absolutely a necessity of life in the same way food is. Well. I am one of the 14% and have no plans to go over to the digital wonderland. I hardly ever watch TV now; I pay for my Internet connection and find youTube much more interesting than free-to-air TV. The only thing I'll miss is Maori TV, which has programmes about all sorts of non-mainstream topics, and NO ADVERTS. Even foreign-language films, which are nowhere to be seen on any national channel. It's funny, clever and thought-provoking, all things I couldn't claim for the main channels. So ave atque vale, digital TV.
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