Garden Delights

My parents' allotment has been featuring rather frequently on here lately, even though I don't know anything at all about gardening.

Without that garden, I would miss out on a lot of wonderful and delicious things, such as the cakes, salads, jams, jellies, chutneys and liqueurs my mum makes from their own produce, sometimes adding bought fruit.

The other day, I received a veritable bounty of garden delights when my parents came to my place for Sunday dinner:

Some calendula and other flowers (sorry, don't know their name; one is a corn flower I think); they lasted all week and looked even prettier after one or two days;

in the jars: strawberry and apricot jam, black and red currant jam, rhubarb chutney, gooseberry jam, strawberry and elderberry jam, and more currant jam. The rhubarb chutney is delicious with meat and even fish, while I use the jam mostly to stir it into pure yoghurt or put one or two teaspoons on my muesli. 

What's in the round glass bottle, you may ask?

Strawberry liqueur! Pull the stopper, and you smell summer bottled-up - it is wonderful!

Thanks, mum, for all these garden delights - how good is that, to reap the benefits without having done any of the actual gardening work? :-)