Yesterday during our visit to Rüdesheim we wandered by a pretty good wine store called Dr. Nagler. We’ve bought many bottles of their Reisling over the past few years and also ate at their restaurant over Christmas. Very decent food and not bad prices either, especially to be on one of the main tourist streets.
Anyway, standing in front of the wine store were several grape vines f or sale. We had hoped to start growing some more wine on the front of the storage rooms but didn’t really expect to find the grapes already. So we will grow the grapes in pots for now and then replant them in the fall when we take down the other vines. If we take the other vines down now the wall will be very bare and we don’t really want that so we’ll just deal with cutting them back and hopefully get the whole area nice and green before the party…then make the switch in the fall.
We picked up Reisling and Muscadine grapes. The Muscadine is a more mature plant, supposedly 3-4 years old and 4-5 feet tall, and already has a cluster of grapes on it that are purple. The Reisling is 1-2 years old and about 2 feet tall. Now we have some reading up to do to make sure we don’t mess the plants up…
This morning we went to Sunflower garden center outside Frankfurt and had breakfast with the family. Because the store is open on Sunday mornings, we took a stroll around and found these great torches for the courtyard. We were looking at some square pillars which were €60 each. Kinda steep in our opinion. So we wandered to the shelf of terracotta goodies and found three circular torches, two about 4 feet tall marked down to only €15 and one about 3 feet tall which was only €9. Needless to say we didn’t pass up that bargain. Stefan actually had to stand guard over them while I went to get a cart 🙂
We’ve set them up in the courtyard and we’ll see how Ayla reacts to them. Hopefully she won’t try to knock them over or anything. Thankfully the lamps can be removed from the top so we don’t have that to worry about. Now we just need to figure out what we’ll do with our other terracotta pots and tree stumps around the courtyard and find something to plant in all the flower beds…
On our way to the register we also found lettuce sprouts which means we can try our hand again at lettuce this season. It may be a bit warm but we’ve had some strangely cool weather lately so perhaps we can pull it off.
