Wet Jalapeños

Fairytale stories in ink, giant edible spider webs, jalapeños, pruning and a terrible book printing service that can’t print books.

Inktober started this week and I’ve been illustrating the story I created to link the official prompts together. So far I’ve got elf-type creatures performing an incantation, it going wrong (or right in an unexpected way) so they’ve got a monster to deal with. I’ve never drawn characters before so it’s been an interesting exercise. I’ll post the whole lot here at the end of the month, until then it’s on Instagram (and Twitter, but that’s full of political crap too).

The garden is gently fading into autumn and Big Spider Season is definitely with us. We’ve had some huge webs across the path and I the greenhouse. I’ve moved a few spiders out of the way, and on one I watched it eat it’s now-broken web. They eat their webs really, really fast.

The jalapeños are still flowering and fruiting, there are about 20 little baby jalapeño nubbins on my two plants, and I’m keeping them well fed and watered to help them grow. Trick is to not get them too wet after midday apparently. I don’t like them much, but my husband does, so it’s a good little crop to have.

I was going to move an aloe out of the front garden because the evergreen lilac (slow growing, it said!) was smothering it. I had a quick go and decided nope so instead did a Monty Don and severely pruned the lilac. There are plenty of green buds on the old wood inside so it’ll recover easily. Now the aloe can get some light!

I made pear cake too, since there are lots of pears on the tree. It’s a European pear so they need various kinds of pissing about to fully ripen the pears, or you can just cook them. Bit of a flat cake but it tastes nice, so.

I bought some bought through Lulu and two arrived half blank. They’re sending replacements but I think there’s been a mixup over which books were misprinted, so who knows. They are not good at customer service. Avoid.