Raffle Winner!

I just received a rather unusual phone call, from the organiser of Growing Communities, which runs the weekly organic farmers' market in Stoke Newington.  In the free raffle held there today, mine was the ticket which secured the goose egg.

We shall collect it next week.  As anyone who's seen one will know, goose eggs are very large.  I suspect that it will therefore become next Sunday's breakfast omelette....

Happy Birthday to the Wugster!

One year closer to retirement as of today....yesterday evening we went for a meal at the San Marco, our local family-run Italian restaurant; we haven't been there for a couple of years, but il padrone recognised us anyway. We had a very nice meal: linguine mare for me and linguine carbonara for Judith, with mussels and pate for starters and a shared dessert of bosco di frutti. Plus mineral water and a bottle of Gavi di Gavi wine. Cheers!

Frogspawn!

I was remarking, only a few days ago, about the absence of wildlife this spring. Birds have disappeared not just from our garden but, it seems, from the neighbourhood as well -- Judith says she sees the occasional chaffinch, robin or blackbird when working at home, but the flocks of sparrows and goldfinches that used to mob our feeders have gone (who knows where). Not even starlings seem to be attracted to the fat balls we hang out.

Into the bargain, this is usally the time of year we'd be looking forward to seeing frogspawn in our ponds, but for that to happen there have to be frogs -- and I haven't seen any since last summer. Again, Judith says she's seen a couple of frogs in our garden pond, but there's no evidence (torn-up vegetation) in either the garden or the allotment pond of the nightly batrachian grapplings that have to occur before frogspawn is laid.

But then we went to the allotment this afternoon, and (roll on drums) the frogs there had done the bonking! From the evidence -- not altogether clear in the photograph below -- there appear to have been at least three couplings; if past evidence is any guide, there should be a lot more over the next few days.



(In other allotmentment news, the curious young fox which attended our activities last autumn -- it didn't quite sit on your lap, but it stood very close and watched what we were doing with a keen interest -- seems to be back. Its most notable activity this afternoon was to sit in one of the beds on our plot and eat half a dead rat, before burying the other half in one of the beds on the plot opposite ours. I did not feel inclined to take a photograph of any part of this.)

Photographing Vegetables

All of our carrots and some of our leeks, dug up this afternoon and photographed just after they were freshly washed. It will be noted that some of the leeks and most of the carrots are rather miniature, in the carrots' case so small that they wouldn't look out of place in one of Judith's dolls-houses. (They also show signs of carrot-fly strike, which is a real bugger.) Look closely at the right-hand end of the carrot display, however; two carrots in a very loving embrace.

More New Growth in The Spring

Our pea and broad bean seedlings have been booping vigorously along since they were last photographed here -- less than a fortnight ago! They have been moved outside the greenhouse to harden off, and may even be planted out at the allotment this afternoon....