> These folks turned up over our place the other week. There’s a big hot air balloning centre in Harxheim, about 7km as the crow flies (or as the balloon’s…
> Toddled off to my first political event the other evening. Not that I can actually vote over here, but whatever.. Wolfgang Bosbach, one of the Head Honchos from the…
> That’s for sure. These are the vineyards on the “other side” (i.e Hesse – boo, hiss…) side of the Rhine, with the Niederwald Memorial topping it all off. (Helen…
> They didn’t have stuff like this when I was a kid. The State Horticultural Show in Bingen has something for all ages. This is a kiddies’ playground in the…
> Pretty sloppy security at the Landesgartenschau (State Horticultural Show) in Bingen the other week. This chappy appears to have got through all the barriers and clambered up to the…
> The Landesgartenschau in Bingen is chock-full of surprises. This guy is BIG. I was somewhat disappointed that his eyes weren’t headlights that light up at night, though……. Click here…
> At the Landesgartenschau in Bingen (Told you you’d be swamped…) Loungers and chairs sprinkled all around the park. Just the nicest idea (Mr Helen would subscribe to that idea…
> Talk about streets paved with gold….. Went on a quick 8km stroll before breakfast the other day – up to the top of the hill, across to the Ebersheim…
> There’s been farmland at the top of our village since we moved here 30 years ago. Crop rotation means that you get annual variations on the sugar beet/grain theme…
> Toddled off to the Landesgartenschau in Bingen with Ms jb, Helen and Mr Helen yesterday evening (cut-price tickets as from 5pm…) It’s an absolute treat. Apart from some stunningly…
> “It was GREAT” I said to Ms jb. “You would have hated it, though…” Just got back from the 10th annual International Hako Races in Dexheim. A HaKo is…
>One of the 3 or 4 hairdressers in the village. (I’d hope that this is the “before” image….) “Struwwelpeter” – Shock-headed Peter or Scruffy Peter (Mark Twain’s translation) – is…
>This is Marek, a cool young guy from the end of the road. I was pottering about in the garden the other evening and he was there in a flash,…
>Mixed marriages are tricky things at the best of times, but sporting events tend to apply unusual stress to any relationship. We don’t have a problem at our place –…
>Odile Landragin is legendary in these parts for her stunning herb and aromatics garden. So legendary, in fact, that the local paper has assigned her the elevated status of Official…
> In my book, it’s OK to be a tad mistrustful of big Life Science companies. A big companies, actually. But I have a very soft spot for Boehringer-Ingelhem, with…
>… when your national football team beats the team of the country you’re living in. Which is what happened the other night when Croatia comprehensively and deservedly stuffed Germany 2:1…
>This is how much of the asparagus is grown around here. (That’d be “Spargel”, the blanched stuff that you have to peel, as opposed to the green stuff that you…
>There’s some seriously underdeveloped talent around here if this painted window at the Nieder-Olm Primary School is anything to go by. All that’s missing is a goat playing a violin…
>Big event at the moment is the European Football Championships (rest of the world read: soccer) being jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria. They don’t have a chance of winning,…
>7 year old Sophie from up the road turned up on one of her frequent visits the other week to proudly inform us that she’d won the Reading Contest for…
>There’s the Federal Horticultural Show – the Bundesgartenschau – held biannually and it’s such a huge prestige object that cities are queueing up to apply for the honour of hosting…
> …wird ausgeschenkt” Or “Get your wine under the sign of the vine” The tradition of the “Strausswirtschaft” dates back to 794, when Charlemagne (King of the Franks, Holy Roman…
>Volker Eckert’s vineyard definitely isn’t on a corner. In fact, it’s on the Hauptstrasse, the main road that runs through the old part of Klein-Winternheim. But semantically, it couldn’t fit…
>Dexheim, one of the small villages nestled in the countryside to the south of Mainz, is best known for being home to one of the few US military facilities that…
>A hop, skip and 30 minute drive from here is Wintersheim, a wine growing village surrounded by a forest of wind turbines. The REAL reason for going there is Dätwyls,…
>.. I wouldn’t have been crawling around on my belly to get a decent perspective of the wild tulips. I could have just bent down, taken a snap and no-one…
>Gau-Odernheim, which is a hop, skip and a 20 minute drive from here, has the largest mass habitat of Tulpa Sylvestris. the Florentine or Wild Tulip, in Germany. They were…
>Not really. Before we all get frantic and de-mothball the lawnmowers, this is winter wheat. Sow it in autumn, it germinates before winter sets in and then takes a low…
>It’s time to get out into the vineyards and finish off the pruning. Do it to early and you risk frost damage. Leave it too late and you risk bleeding…
>If you ever get over to our neck of the woods, this is a worthwhile day’s outing – the Rheinsteig, a 250 km hiking track from Wiesbaden to Bonn. Not…
Mainz Daily Photo 