Springtime, Part II

Last week we blogged about spring in Ipswich, so this week we'll focus on springtime closer to home. We've had beautiful weather this week, which is wonderful. But one effect of nice weather is an increase in spiders. A massive spider made its way into our house--the living room, to be exact--last week, and it was frightening. I didn't find any suitable anti-spider spray on base, so I asked Nigel, our gardener (responsible for the beautiful tulips in our garden, pictured above), to recommend a spider solution, and his answer shocked me. He said they don't actually spray for spiders in England. If a spider enters the house, they simply pick it up and throw it outside. Oh, the culture shock! We didn't realize we'd have to exercise English Patience by welcoming spiders into our home!
Many fields in our part of the country have recently turned into "rolling fields of mustard," as Jacob so poetically phrased it, and we were interested to find out the purpose of the flowers: they're rapeseed (brassica napus). In addition to being absolutely breathtaking in its flower form, rapeseed is a very useful substance. It has 2 interesting uses (in addition to the less interesting uses): First, it's used as a biofuel. Rapeseed is used more than any other plant as the oil base of biodiesel in Europe. The second interesting use is as a cooking oil. Rapeseed oil is actually more healthy than the ever-popular olive oil, with less saturated fat and far more Omega 3 and Omega 6 than olive oil, and rapeseed oil also contains Vitamin E. The flowers are also interesting in that they don't exhaust the resources of the fields they're planted in; later this year the same fields will yield something else, like sugarbeets. The countryside is literally flooded with these flowers, and we were interested to find out why!

In closing, here is a photo of springtime in Cambridge this past Friday. We love living so close to Cambridge that we can drive there after Jacob gets home from work and get home before it's dark!

Here's a teaser: next weekend we're going to Paris! Maybe the next post will be "Springtime in Paris," je ne sais pas. (: