A White Christmas! And time, once again, to ascend mead mountain. Does doing this more than once make it a ritual or tradition? Whatever it is, the excitement of uncovering a bottle of home-brewed mead, buried at the top of a mountain, really never goes away. This bottle had a full twelve months to mature…
Read MoreAll articles filed in allotment
mead mountain x2
pleasing things
found cat . . the last bean . . . the first squash! . . . and a new old thing.
Read Moreon show
Today I visited the Edinburgh and District Allotments and Garden Associations Show. I found out about the show too late to enter (not that anything I’ve grown would have won any prizes, mind, but I do have hopes next year for the “any knitted item” category). I really enjoyed myself — it was great to…
Read Moremore neeps . . . more beer
In a mysterious repeat of last week’s missives, today we have more neeps . . and more beer. If I am now inhabiting a turnip-and-beer filled time warp, there are probably worse places to be. Here you see my entirely non-literal rendition of the turnip tops and here, how the turnip roots feed down into…
Read MoreGQT *
Sarah (possessor of much gardening wisdom) popped round for lunch today. The weather was just right for pottering about down the allotment, and I took the camera along so you can see how things are progressing. The tomatoes and courgettes are ripening nicely, and at least some of the beans survived the Evil Slug Attack…
Read Morebirthday tea
Well, what else can you do when someone gets you a giant teacup for your birthday? This is how I spent yesterday evening. All I can say about where I’m standing is that it was until recently waist-high with weeds, and that I am very proud of how that wall now looks since last week…
Read Morespent
You know when you get so physically tired that you can barely even speak? Well, I’ve been there a few times this week. It’s not an altogether unpleasant feeling — I find that toiling to the point of total exhaustion has a pleasing brain-clearing effect — at the end of an evening down the allotment,…
Read Moreploughshares
It has been an insanely busy week! On top of the usual examining mountain that one must climb at this time of year, there has also been a whole lot of administrative gubbins that I’ve had to sort out quicksmart, as for the next couple of weeks my time is going to be taken up…
Read Moregreen. and white. and pink. and blue
If you are wondering why I’ve not mentioned our allotment, this is because I was hoping that ‘the situation’ that has unfolded around the allotment would have resolved itself by now. This is ‘the situation’: basically the allotment man at the council managed to double book our plot, and it was assigned to someone else.…
Read Morebeginnings. . . and endings
Interesting things arrived in the post this past week. First, some owls turned up — they didn’t say so, but I think they might have flown across the water from St Andrews (thankyou, Kristin!). Then a package appeared from Japan containing several Kit-Kats, all lurid packaging and intriguing flavours. None of the fabled green ones…
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