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We went to the allotment earlier this afternoon, to dig up some parnsips and jerusalem artichokes to go with the duck we'll be having for dinner tomorrow. (This was of course after I'd been to the consumeroid horror that is the local Tesco to stock up on wine -- red to accompany the duck, white for other times -- and beer. And various assortments of nuts -- nuts are so a Christmas thing in the UK.) Although the temperatures are back above freezing, there's still plenty of ice and frozen snow on the ground, not to mention great thick caps of ice on the water tanks and the pond. (The surface of the pond could at first sight almost be mistaken for a sheet of glass: an illusion attributable to the top centimetre or so of the ice having melted and the light being reflected from the ice layer it covers. We hope that any frogs hibernating in there will survive the freeze.)
A photograph of the reflecting pond is one of the images displayed here. The second is of an ice sculpture formed partly (we theorise) by freezing water sloshing out of some plastic basins as they toppled from where they'd been stacked, and partly by a leak from the tap attached to the water tank, where a nut that perhaps needs another quarter-turn to tighten it fully is allowing a thin spray of water to jet out.
The other two photographs are of the real actual wonky-shaped parsnips that we get from our allotment. This wonkiness is due to the stoniness of the soil, which prevents them producing the nice straight thin cones preferred by supermarkets. We could, if we felt so inclined, sieve the soil minutely to remove the stones, like one of our fellow allotmenteers does for his parsnips; but (a) crop rotation means that we never grow parsnips in the same bed every year and would therefore have to minutely sieve them all, and (b) sieving of that minuteness bespeaks a level of tidiness of which not even I am capable. Well, actually, I probably am capable of it....had I nothing else to do at the allotment but sieve stones.
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