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....

New Growth in The Spring

Sown as seeds on the dining room windowsill just over a week ago, these two trays of pea and broad bean seedlings are now vigorously thrusting up their little heads in the greenhouse against the back wall of the house. Boop! as we say here.

2013 Parsnip Harvest

We dug up a few parsnips on Christmas Eve, to eat with our goose; but the weather since has not been at all conducive to spending time at the allotment, so it was only yesterday that we dug up the rest of the crop. (Indeed, the weather was so mild by comparison with the previous few days that I did the work in shorts and a T-shirt.) Few if any of these parsnips would meet supermarket standards for size, shape and colour; but bollocks to that. Cooking and eating weirdly-shaped vegetables is part of the fun of growing your own food.

The World this Morning...

Some pictures of snow-shrouded trees, just because. (Taken on the way to Seven Sisters Underground this morning.)

It seems to have Stopped Snowing....

Two views from the rear of our house, taken just after midnight on 21 January.





While, inside, Judith continues to work on the fiendishly difficult jigsaw of a red squirrel that I bought in the National Trust shop on Brownsea Island last summer....

It's Still Snowing....

Not that it's actually visible in this photograph, so you'll just have to take my word for it...

Eight Hours of Snowfall

It began snowing shortly before 9.00am this morning, and hasn't stopped since. It's getting dark now, but before it became too dark I went out and took these pictures -- of, in order, our front garden from just outside the front door; our house, at the bottom of Jansons Road; another view of Jansons Road; and the Maysie Memorial Garden (founded and maintained by Judith) at the top of the road.

The State of The Pond

There may just possibly be a frog or two lurking in this. (Some of them do overwinter at the bottom -- others bury themselves in the log pile.

A Bird in The Garden

Perched on a branch of on of our apple trees, this chaffich, in its winter plumage. Out of shot to the left is the seed feeder which it had been eating from -- the scuffing away of the snow from below the feeder port is the give-away.

Snow, Sunday Morning

Two views from the bderoom window, taken just a few minutes ago. A light snow was falling -- and is continuing to fall as I write -- although the snowflakes don't actually show up in the photographs (chiz chiz).

The Allotment in Winter

As you may have heard, we've had a bit of snow over the past few days, which has (as usual) brought the country to a grinding halt. (Albeit not quite as halted as during the Big Freeze of 1963, caused by a Siberian anticyclone which sat over us for the first two months of the year. I remember it well; and this afternoon the BBC screened an old black-and-white documentary about its effects from its archives, made and first shown when the Freeze was still in progress. It featured a hand-drawn global weather map showing what I suspect may have been the first appearance on British television of an El Nino event, although at the time no one knew what it was or how it could affect the weather on the other side of the world.) So of course we had to go to the allotment to check that things were all right, to replenish the bird feedery there, and to take a few photographs. In order, these show the frozen surface of the pond with its covering of snow (compare it with the photograph posted on 24 December 2012 to see how, in the absence of rain, the water has fallen back to its normal level); a general overview of the allotment from outside the shed; the foot-prints left by (presumably) a fox alongside what appear to be those of a small child; and, just for contrast, some catkins on a willow tree near the entrance to the site (with Judith's gloved hand as a guide to their size). Willow catkins, at this time of year? Indeed; but until the temperatures fell just a few days ago, it has been a very mild winter, which has doubtless fooled parts of the natural world into thinking that it's already spring. It will be interesting to see, next time we visit, whether they've shrivelled and dropped off.









(The birds at the allotment were obviously pleased to have their feedery replenished: there was a sudden upsurge in the volume of their twittering as I put out a new fat bar and hung up the refilled seed feeder. By contrast, the birds which normally visit our garden have utterly vanished -- not at all the sort of behaviour to be expected when the weather turns colder and natural food is harder to find. Judith first suggested that this might be due to the mildness of the winter hitherto, as mentioned above; but even in mild winters small birds flock to our garden for the seed and other treats we hang up. Then we noticed that the thick covering of ivy along the fence of one of the gardens which backs onto ours had been cut right back, thus depriving small birds of the nearby cover they need when venturing into the open. As a consequence, all we've seen in our garden since the middle of December have been a few blackbirds and robins, neither of which are seed eaters. The sparrows, tits, chaffinches, goldfinches and even the wren which used to visit have obviously gone elsewhere. Thanks a bunch, uncaring ivy-cutting neighbour!)