Seems to be a lack of photos recently and as the capers have nearly finished flowering and the seed pods are opening I picked some this morning to take pics of. The seed pod starts off in the middle of the flower on a stalk, grows and grows to the size of a plum and then starts to split open. It's full of seeds and is surprisingly bright red. The capers that you buy to eat - either in brine or vinegar - are 2 different kinds, you can either pick the unopened flower bud or wait and pick the seed pod at whatever size you prefer. We've only ever brined the bud, not sure of the difference in flavour.

On a different subject, we woke the day before yesterday to the sound of an aeroplane and helicopter and the sight of a large column of smoke from the hill behind us, towards Berchules we think. The plane is like a crop sprayer but contains fire retardant foam and the helicopter had it's water bucket down ready for dumping water on the fire. They were circling round, collecting water and then another plane came, a spotter plane we think as it went round much higher up. They moved further away after a few hours, to where we could just see grey haze on the horizon, perhaps nearer Cadiar although it's difficult to tell with so many rolling hills around just which valley they had gone into. We heard aircraft until about 8 in the evening, but only saw the 2 lots of smoke. Yesterday, again very early, the fire plane flew overhead and as I write this a helicopter has just gone over. We get very little aircraft noise and in the summer it usually means a fire - just looked out and the fire plane's gone over again too. Luckily, gone straight and high so where ever it is, isn't that close. (fingers crossed!)