Yet another vide grenier...

   Twice a year, our village holds a vide grenier. Strictly speaking, I should be out there behind a stall given the amount of stuff we've accumulated. But no, instead I'm Madame Super Shoppaire, out there as soon as I've had my breakfast, racing down past the church and the school to where the first of the stalls are.
   Here's what I managed to find this time.

   I cannot resist vintage postcards. Not sure if it's the photographs, or the tiny, perfect hand-writing or the way that the stamp is sometimes stuck on the picture side. This little lot cost us about three euros.

    A medieval painting. Genuinely medieval. Must be. Cost me all of three euros.

 Almost none of our plates match. Instead I collect those made by the Sarreguemines company, which feature different flowers. One euro.

  A present for my sister (and now she's got it, I can blog about it). A classic black beret with this glorious label inside. It was made in Carcassonne sometime in the 1950s or 60s, I'm guessing. Also one euro.

Rhubarb, rhubarb...

   Our garden is always a work in progress. A couple of years ago a good friend gave me some rhubarb crowns. Sorry but, as we're about to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee and we've just been in the UK, which is rife with red-white-and-blue everything, the idea of a rhubarb "crown" makes me think of...probably safer if I call it a "root."
   By the time I'd read that you can't move rhubarb roots around willy-nilly, I'd planted them in the wrong spot in a mostly floral border where their neighbours are iris and, well, last year anyway, sunflowers. There they stay and I've come to love their early emergence in spring after what professional gardeners call the "depressing brown slime" period.

   They're quite sculptural really.
   The sad thing is that I've never harvested them because their green stems never did turn the reddish-pink of the rhubarb I know and love. (No prizes for guessing I've just discovered how to change type colours).
    And then I read about green rhubarb...so out I went with my little knife...

  
     The leaves went in the compost (yes, although they're poisonous, you can compost rhubarb leaves) where, true to form, they've turned brown and slimy. The green stalks have been cut and frozen to be made into chutney sometime soon. Two whole kilos worth.