Autumn Vegetable Tagine

While I don't really want this to turn into a food blog, there's nothing like a great recipe to pull me out of blogging apathy and get me posting again, and this one, which began as a half-hearted attempt to use up some aging veg from the fridge while Eddie was working late last night and ended up one of the tastiest dishes I've cooked all year, is a cracker.

The onions and garlic are in and drying, the courgette plants are fruiting their last, and, even though my own crop failed completely, the shops are full of gorgeous pumpkins. (I find it so strange how they sell 'carving pumpkins' cheaper than the pumpkins in the vegetable aisle, don't you? They're just as good to eat! I love how you can get so many meals out of a £1.50 pumpkin!) With all these plus sweet potatoes and dried fruit, this Moroccan-influenced dish is absolutely seasonal, it's awesomely healthy, it's quick and easy to make, and the flavours... the flavours are aromatic, sweet and wonderful. Enjoy as a midweek family supper or posh it up for something more special. If you don't have harissa paste, flavour the couscous simply with lemon juice and seasoning, or add cumin, garlic, paprika and chilli to taste as a substitute.

Autumn Vegetable Tagine with harissa couscous
(serves four)

• Fry one large chopped onion in a little oil until soft. Add 2-3 cloves chopped garlic and a tablespoon grated ginger, and soften for a minute or two.
• Add a teaspoon each of cumin, ground coriander and cinnamon, then stir in two sweet potatoes, diced (approx 300g), and around 300g pumpkin or winter squash, diced.
• Add four chopped tomatoes, a handful of sultanas (chopped dried apricots would also work nicely) and just enough vegetable stock to cover, and simmer around five minutes.
• Add a courgette, diced, and simmer another ten minutes or so until all the veg are soft.
• Meanwhile, put 200g couscous in a heatproof bowl. Mix a heaped tablespoon harissa paste with 400ml hot water, pour it over the couscous, and cover.
• Toast a handful of flaked almonds in a dry frying pan until they're just turning golden brown here and there. Set aside.
• Add a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, to the veg. Cook another couple of minutes to heat through. Check seasoning.
• Sprinkle some lemon juice over the couscous and fluff up with a fork.
• Serve the tagine with the harissa couscous, and topped with the almonds and some chopped parsley.

Great Garlic

My garlic harvests to date have always been rather pathetic - small bulbs and few of them. But this time round I tried overwintering my garlic - planting it last autumn and harvesting, well, now, and I added a sprinkle of onion fertiliser to the soil before planting to give it a bit of a boost. It's been a great success!

The garlic (Provence Wight) grew strongly from the off and looked great by spring. Despite a bit of rust (no doubt exacerbated by the wet weather) they've been going for it all season, until recently when the leaves began to die off, signalling harvest time.

 
Digging veg up in the mud is never pleasant, but it became clear there was no point waiting for dry weather... When the sun came out late yesterday afternoon, we went for it.

Twenty minutes later, it was pouring again. Hmph.

But we were there by then, already getting drenched, so we dug the garlic anyway, and brought it home caked in mud. There were a few losses - some were just rotten and pests had moved in, others were pathetically small for reasons unknown. Some lost their protective skins as I dug them up and the stalk pulled off - is this because I left it a bit late to dig them, or because of the wetness and rot, or a combination?

But the vast majority are big, plump, firm, healthy bulbs - by far the best result I've had with garlic. Lots of them have a white mould on the outside - my first thought was the dreaded white rot, which I know I have in my soil - but the bulbs seem otherwise big and healthy and have good strong root systems so I guess that's not the case. Hopefully it'll just go away as they dry.

The whole house stinks of them!

After a couple of days indoors for the worst of the mud to dry off (I'm going to move them to a wire rack to improve ventilation), I'll hang them in the summer house to dry for a few weeks, then trim them and clean them for storage. I'm a garlic fiend, but this lot should keep me going for a while!

Green Garlic

At the allotment recently we noticed we must have left a few garlic bulbs in the ground last summer - they were popping up again like little bunches of spring onions. With each clove in the bulb now growing separately, they wouldn't have space to form decent bulbs packed together like this. But this 'green garlic' can be lifted and used just as it is.

Green garlic has a milder, sweeter flavour than mature garlic bulbs, without the bitter edge. Apparently you can occasionally pick it up at farmers markets and posh greengrocers and it's becoming a bit of a trendy ingredient! Some gardeners plant extra garlic just so they can get some early in the season.

I'd never used it before, but wasn't going to pass up the opportunity now. With quick reference to a few online recipes, I sautéd seasoned chicken until just golden and threw in the whole bunch of green garlic, white and green parts, chopped finely, with a knob of butter and a splosh of wine. I cooked this for five minutes or so, finished it off with a splash of cream, and served with spaghetti and purple sprouting broccoli.

Deeeeelish.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I am enduring day eleven of intense sore throat, swollen glands, stiff neck and upper body, exhaustion and misery. Apparently antibiotics won't help me, and nothing else is either - rest, plenty of fluids, vitamins, garlic, throat sprays and gargles, high-antioxidant tea... I've been eyeing the fancier immune-sytem-boosting supplements in the health shop too - Manuka honey, bee pollen, elderberry extract, echinacea, special probiotics, beta-glucan, colloidal silver... One person swears by one and another swears by another, and it all seems rather a gamble when each is so expensive (I've been disappointed by echinacea once before - do I really want to spend £15 trying it again, however many people say it works?)

But healthful foods are, happily, easily available to us all here, and there's one flu-busting food which is supposed to boost health and healing more than any other. Chicken noodle soup.

Huh? Which chicken noodle soup? Made by what recipe, with what ingredients? Surely the instant packet stuff can't be that great for you? Are the noodles essential? Can't I just eat chicken? I have long been suspicious of this claim, but in fact, studies have shown that eating chicken noodle soup can cut the duration of flu or similar illness by half, and another study even compared commercial brands to show that Knorr's instant chicken noodle soup was the most healing! So, well, seeing as I've had plenty of time on my hands, I've been thinking and reading about this a lot, and actually it really does make a lot of sense.

The base for most (if not all) chicken noodle soups is, of course, chicken stock, plus onions, garlic, carrots and celery. Onions and, particularly, garlic both contain anti-viral and anti-bacterial compounds, and strengthen the blood and the lungs. Carrots are rich in beta-carotene which assists production of infection-fighting cells in the body. Celery is packed with vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fibre and, unusually, stands up well to cooking, keeping most of its goodness when other green vegetables would lose it. Add chicken to the mix for a rich source of protein, which promotes healing, as well as zinc, which supports the immune system by helping the body to make better use of vitamin C, and cysteine, which stimulates the immune system. Noodles serve to fortify the dish, adding extra energy when it's most needed, and egg noodles provide even more protein. Add some chilli - the capsaicin which makes chillies hot is a powerful decongestant which loosens and liquefies mucus - and you have a cocktail of great nutrition ideal for someone fighting illness. Furthermore, making this into a soup means that it's easy to eat and digest, especially for the sick and those with agonising sore throats, and the (largely) liquid delivery makes the nutrients super-accessible, meaning they're fast-tracked into the system. Genius!

Of course, it doesn't stop there, either. It's easy to add extra vegetables, such as tomatoes perhaps for their many antioxidants, red peppers which contain many of the same health-boosting compounds as garlic and chilli, or chopped leafy greens for iron. Many people extol the medicinal properties of certain herbs when fighting colds, and you can, of course add herbs to your heart's content too.

Does an exhausted sick person want to stand in the kitchen cooking up soup for ages? No, of course not. But thankfully this is quite quick to make (about half an hour), and when I sat comfortably at the table to do all the chopping I actually found it quite therapeutic. And luckily a large batch keeps well in the fridge for a good few days, and would freeze well too ;)

Nome's Chicken Noodle Soup (not just for sick people!)
(makes five big bowls, or eight little ones)

• Bring 1.5 litres chicken stock to the boil. (Beware the high salt level in some stocks - choose low-sodium if possible, dilute with water to lower the salt, or use home-made.)
• Add one large onion, two large carrots and four or five sticks of celery, all chopped, plus 2 teaspoons mixed herbs and a generous grinding of black pepper.
• Simmer for 10-15 minutes, until soft.
• Blend with a stick blender (use your judgement and make it as chunky or smooth as you like).
• Add a red pepper and a chilli (or less, or more, depending on your taste), finely chopped.
• Break up two nests of dried egg noodles (to make the noodles shorter and easier to manage) and boil in a separate pan according to the instructions on the pack - usually about 4 minutes. (It's important that they're cooked before you add them to the soup, as they absorb so much liquid.)
• Add two chicken breasts, chopped up small, to the soup, along with 2-4 chopped cloves of garlic (adding it near the end like this means it is less cooked and its health properties will be stronger, but the taste will be stronger too so watch out!)
• When the chicken is cooked (only 3-4 minutes if you've chopped it really small), check seasoning, drain the noodles and stir them in, and serve.

I opt sometimes to sprinkle mine with nori - a widely available seaweed - for extra iron-rich goodness too.

Well, I've been eating chicken noodle soup for lunch for several days now, and no, I'm not better. I am improving slightly and slowly, I think. But well, it's delicious, I do feel good eating it, and I know I'm doing the right thing by my body by nourishing it with loads and loads of goodness - it's got to be helping at least a little! Forget the expensive supplements - these basic building blocks of health are accessible to us all and are the very first thing we should turn to when illness looms.

Using Up Potatoes: Giant Rostis!

Every potato harvest inevitably comes with a few specimens damaged by sunlight, slugs, the fork that dug them up, or even by couchgrass roots, which burrowed a few holes through mine!

These should be separated from the undamaged potatoes and used first, as they're bound to go off sooner.

In an effort to use up our damaged spuds, of which we had really quite a few (and getting a little bored with mash) I thought I'd try to recreate a dish Eddie sampled in the fabulous veggie restaurant Terre a Terre recently:

(Disclaimer: My rosti may not be the same as/as good as Terre a Terre's, and certainly didn't look as good (theirs is pictured)... But it's still delish!) I altered it a bit to use up some watercress I had left over from something else, and it packs in even more flavour. Actually it's a really good dish to use up large amounts of spinach, watercress or any other similar leaf, as well as potatoes. You'll want at least 100g leaves per person and you could use much more if you wanted, so it's a good one for those bags/bunches of leaves the supermarkets and market stalls reduce at the end of the day too... It's a great, simple dish for one (though a bit of a juggling act if you're feeding a whole family) and a really tasty supper.

Giant Rostis with Watercress Sauce

• Finely chop an onion and fry gently until really soft and golden, but not browned.
• Grate around 200g potato per person, put it in a sieve or a clean tea towel and squeeze as much water out as you can.
• Throw a couple of chopped garlic cloves in with the onion to soften.
• Preheat your oven to 180C. 
• Put the grated potato into a large bowl and season well. Add the chopped onion and garlic and gently combine (try not to break up or mash the potato too much!).
• Divide the potato mixture into bowls - one per person. The shape of the bowls will shape the rostis.
• Heat some oil in a non-stick frying pan, tip the first rosti in, and fry on a medium-high heat.
• Once it is golden brown underneath, flip it over and do the other side. When that side is golden-brown too, put it on a large baking tray and do the next rosti...
• When all your rostis are nicely browned, pop them in the oven to finish cooking in the middle while you make the sauce. (Maybe a more skilled or patient chef than I could cook them entirely in the frying pan, but because they're so big it seems to me they'd need this extra oven-time to cook right through.)
• Meanwhile, wilt your leaves (100g-200g per person) down in a large saucepan with a knob of butter, salt and pepper, a splash of lemon juice and a little nutmeg. I used 2/3 watercress, 1/3 spinach, but you could use spinach only, or any combination really. I'm willing to bet chard, young kale, beetroot leaves, sorrel and any other similar leaf would work too (although sorrel really loses its colour when cooked so you might prefer to add it raw when pureeing).
• When the leaves are cooked down, keep a couple of spoonsful aside for the garnish, and puree the rest (a wand-type blender is good for this). Add a spoonful or two of cream cheese (or a splash of cream and a little parmesan) and taste. Add more seasoning, cream/cheese or lemon juice if you so desire.
• Poach (or soft-boil) your eggs.
• When the rostis are done in the middle (ooh, about 15-25 minutes, depending how long you fried them for!), spread the sauce on each plate, top with a rosti, then a spoonful of wilted leaves, then a poached egg, and finally a generous handful of grated cheese!

To me this is great just as it is, but hardcore carnivores could be appeased with a sprinkling of crispy bacon bits or chopped ham. A nice piece of fish - especially smoked fish - would complement it very well too.

Winter Seedings and Buried Treasure!

I feel all springy - what a strange time of year to be bringing seedlings into the world. The seeds I've been sowing last week and the week before are all popping up into the autumn sunshine.

Nero di Toscana kale:

Claytonia:

And radishes:

The turnips on the allotment are all coming up fast too, and will need thinning soon. I just hope I wasn't too late and these all put some good growth on before the temperatures drop too low.

Yesterday we planted out our autumn onions (Radar), shallots (Yellow Moon) and garlic (Provence Wight) too. I bought this collection from Marshalls and was very pleased - they came quickly and seem to be very healthy and high quality (and they were one of the few places that hadn't already sold out - phew!) After years of weak and tiny onions, I finally also bought some special onion feed to try to boost their growth. We simply scattered it on the soil and raked it in before planting. Fingers crossed we'll get a bigger harvest and it'll strengthen them somewhat against the white rot and snails that always kill a few!

And look what we dug up while we were preparing the soil for our alliums. I wonder what it was for... I can't believe after nearly six years on this plot we're still finding buried treasure!

Summer Harvests

We've harvested our onions recently, and they're spread out to dry at home. A disappointing result, as usual, despite the fact I bought a 'giant' variety this year! There's definitely something lacking in our soil, despite the generous dressing of manure we gave it in the spring; next year I'll have to invest in some onion fertiliser.

I was also surprised that several onions suffered white rot as usual, despite the Armillatox fiasco... (On which note, I'm pleased to report that there is indeed no trace of the Armillatox in the soil now, and no smell or taste of it in the onions! However, I won't be bothering again since it doesn't stop the problem...) Perhaps I'm wrong and it's not white rot but just a few weak plants going bad, but they do seem to have all the right signs; yellowed leaves, white mould underneath, and weak or rotten roots.

Our shallots (on the right above) and garlic are harvested now too - it's a pretty good garlic crop, and there are more to come, although a few bulbs seem to have disappeared!

We've dug up our first few potatoes, and boy, was I surprised! I was pretty concerned about them because when we returned from our holiday the foliage had all died down and I hadn't seen a single flower! I guess I just wasn't paying attention...

These are Kestrel - a 'second early' variety that's particularly good for roasting, baking and mashing. They've got some pretty bad scab in places, but it's only cosmetic. We scattered some potato fertiliser from the Organic Garden Catalogue over the bed before planting and it looks like it did its job! These babies weigh up to 360g each!

Fat hen swallowed our French bean bed while we were away, but as we weeded we found a great crop of beans hiding in the jungle. We also found a surprise late handful of broad beans when we cleared the plants - I thought they were finished ages ago! I pureed them with some lemon juice and a spoonful of fat hen pesto, spread them on toast and topped them with cheese for lunch one day. Mmmmmmm.

And we're now harvesting our runner beans. The beans are setting well in this damp weather and there are hundreds of them! But somehow I don't think we'll be winning any shows with these crazy shapes...

Good Friday

Spent a fab afternoon at the plot on Friday, catching up with weeding and planting.

I've been a bit nervous about planting my potatoes, since last year's crop was so disappointing after late frosts bit it in May. But with all this warm weather and with May just a week away now I thought it was time. Even if we do have early-May frosts, the potato shoots will probably still be safe underground! We've planted all Kestrel - 54 of 'em. Every year I try other varieties and they never seem to do as well as Kestrel do, and after a couple of serious disappointments I felt like playing it safe this year. They've been chitting on the bathroom windowsill so long now, they were raring to go!

We also weeded the strawberries, which are flowering busily now...

...the onions, shallots and garlic...

...and the salad beds, which I'm very proud of. Apart from a couple of little gaps, they look almost professional!

And check out the giant radishes starting to swell down there:

We gave everything a good soaking too of course - much needed in this lovely sunny weather! And we cleared the last of the leeks and a few old carrots, cut a big bagful of asparagus, and picked this small and slightly-sprouting cauliflower - the first from our 'everlasting cauliflower' plants - much of which we nibbled raw right there at the allotment!

I also took the opportunity over the weekend to pot-on some peppers. Like the tomatoes, they were previously two-to-a-pot, but now they're all in their own pots. And despite a very slow start, they seem to be doing okay.

We've ended up with just one Jalapeno (the only chilli I dare eat), two 'Kaibi Round No 2' (very early sweet red peppers which hail from Bulgaria, bought from Real Seeds), two sweet 'Doux tres long des Landes' (long, thin, sweet red peppers recommended from Mr Fothergill's 'Vegetable Explorer' range), four 'Dedo de Mocha Sweet Aji' (rare smoky-flavoured variety from Real Seeds) and five 'King of the North' (early green peppers, also from Real Seeds). Now I just have to figure out where I'm going to plant them all!

You'll just have to wait...

I've been rubbish at taking photos recently.

I haven't taken any of our garlic and onions, which have settled in extremely well in the good weather we've been having and are growing away enthusiastically already, some several inches high.

I haven't taken any of our dozens of thriving seedlings, which are spending some milder nights outside in the plastic greenhouse already.

I haven't taken any of the ten big bags of manure we're spreading this year to revitalise our soil's fertility.

I haven't taken any of our various pepper seedlings, which finally sprouted after weeks of waiting.

I didn't take any when I potted on the tomatoes the other day, or when I sowed a new batch of squash and chard seeds, or when I planted out the winter purslane and some new rosemary and lavender plants I got from the market.

I didn't take any of the horseradish roots I dug up, nor the horseradish cream sauce I made for our roast dinner on Mother's Day.

I didn't take any of my failed first attempt at pickling beetroot, when I misguidedly topped-and-tailed the beets and they lost all their colour and flavour when I boiled them.

I left the camera at home when we (and some lovely friends) weeded and manured the strawberries and dug a trench all along one side of the allotment to try to keep the couchgrass out (I'll sow the trench with marigolds too and sprinkle with organic slug pellets, to try to stop the snails before they reach my crops!).

I forgot to take any pictures of our first asparagus harvest before I chopped it up and put it in a rich, buttery omelette... and I forgot to take a picture before I ate it.

So I'll just have to update you another time...

Busy Busy Busy

Eddie and I have had a week off together this week - aaaah, bliss. And what great weather for it! Of course, we've taken the opportunity to catch up with everything in the garden and the allotment, which has meant a pretty busy week!

I've sown all my seeds for March at last - there's just some chard, corn, squashes and beans left to sow in a few weeks' time. I've sown purple sprouting broccoli, calabrese, swedes (Angela and Marian), sprouts (Evesham Special), spring cabbage (Offenham), courgettes (Astia F1), squashes (Sweet Dumpling, Butternut and Crown Prince), plus summer savory, catnip, rosemary, tarragon, sage, Thai basil, red basil, and dozens of marigolds, poppies, poached-egg plant and cornflowers. And some more Angelle tomatoes to replace the seedlings that we lost.

My seed collection is getting a bit silly. Am I the only one that accumulates tons of half-packets of seeds past their use-by date? I don't want to just throw them away and I don't want to use them in case they don't work! I've tried to thin them out a bit this year but my seed drawer still looks like this:

It's sorted into families: peas and beans, flowers (annual and perennial!), herbs (annual and perennial), tomatoes and peppers, brassicas, curcubits, salad veg, and miscellaneous! And I keep two big bags of silica gel in there to keep moisture low - I don't know if it does any good but it seemed worth a try.

Also, on the plot, we've dug several beds over and planted our onions (Stuttgarter Giant, in an effort to get some decent sized bulbs this year!), shallots (Picasso) and garlic (French Cledor), and sown parsnips (White Gem, which always do really well for me).

And it's not just us that have been busy - there are plenty of signs of life appearing on the allotment too. We have radish seedlings...

Spinach seedlings...

Broad bean shoots...

And look!

Asparagus! In March! We usually don't see it until the first or second week of April. I'm very excited!

The pond is full of frogspawn...

And the purple sprouting broccoli is finally sprouting...

Ha! I want to say spring is definitely here, but 'British Summer Time' begins tomorrow!

Pie!

Well, I have learned to make pickle, chutney and jam this year. I thought I'd top it off by learning to make a good old-fashioned double-crust pie. I bought Angela Boggiano's lovely book "Pie" months ago and have been meaning to try it out, and with leeks finally reaching a decent size on the allotment, her chicken, leek and tarragon pie seemed perfect!

I found a set of individual pie dishes in our local charity shop and used those, instead of making one big pie like the recipe suggests. And of course, I made a few other changes too...

Chicken, Leek and Tarragon Pie
(serves four)

• Place a 1.5kg chicken in a large saucepan with a chopped onion, a chopped carrot, a tsp or two of tarragon, black pepper and a big pinch of celery salt. Add enough water to cover, bring to the boil, and simmer for 45 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. (Actually, I had a pack of diced chicken to use up so I put that in instead - and it was much quicker too.)
• Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside to cool.
• Continue to simmer the stock, until it is reduced by half.
• Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil and a knob of butter in a pan, add a small chopped onion and two chopped leeks, and saute gently until soft. At this point I added a big handful of sliced mushrooms too.
• Turn the heat up high, add 150ml wine and cook until reduced by half. Stir in 2 tbsps flour and mix in very well.
• Pour in 150ml cream and 150ml of the stock, and a splash of lemon juice. Season to taste.
• Shred the chicken into small pieces and stir into the sauce mixture along with another tsp of tarragon.
• Preheat the oven to 180C.
• Now line your pie dish(es). I confess I bought my pastry, and chose puff rather than shortcrust as recommended - I love puff pastry! Leave a little overhang round the edge on the bottom crust, and don't forget to cut round your dish for the top piece before you fill it!
• Fill the pie with the chicken mixture, brush round the top edge with beaten egg and lay the lid in place. Crimp the edges together with your fingers to seal, then trim any excess away and brush the top with more beaten egg to glaze.
• Place in the oven for 30-35 minutes, until the pastry is crisp and golden.

Wow! Not bad for a first-timer, huh? The flavour of this pie was soooo good - the wine and cream and lemon and tarragon really make it something special. And what made the meal even better was that I served a load of other NomeGrown goodies with it too - roast potatoes of course, and I took the NomeGrown onions and carrots from the stock and added garlic, chard and peas for a delicious medley of vegetables on the side.

A Day Without Learning is a Day Wasted

This is how our allotment looks at the moment:

Gah! But don't be fooled; it's not all nettles and fat hen. There's asparagus, cauliflowers, broccoli, calabrese, herbs, leeks, swedes, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, runner beans, beetroots and all manner of courgettey squashy things in there too. And check out those sunflowers!

This past week we've dug up most of our potatoes. It's not a very impressive harvest - I guess those late frosts did more damage than we thought - but they'll keep us going for a while, and I suspect there are a few more more deep ones to be found when we have time to dig over the patch a second time.

We also brought home our apple harvest; three times what we had last year! Although one as you can see has been munched by a maggot.

And we brought home our garlic too; thirteen small but lovely bulbs. One of them had gone to flower, and what a funny creature! At the top of the flower stem was a bunch of tiny garlic cloves, exactly the same as the ones that form bunched together in the ground! Who knew? I'd never have guessed they grow cloves both at the bottom and at the top of the plant!

Well, you learn something new every day!

Onions and... Garlic!

This is our onion and shallot harvest. Well, most of it - there were a few onions still putting some effort in, which we thought we'd leave in the ground a bit longer. We lost a fair few to white rot, and a lot of them are still quite small, but well, we've had worse.

And the really good news is... we've actually managed to produce some garlic this year too!

All right, they could be bigger, but I think they did quite well considering the forest of weeds that has swamped them for most of the summer. And they smell sooooo gooood. When are you supposed to harvest garlic? I forget. There are plenty more where these came from!

Camera back in action - where do I start?

So. Here's what we've been up to the past few weeks.

We finally dug the bottom end of the plot - the only bit we'd never tackled so far! It was full of old tree roots, and not very nice soil, and we've had it covered in plastic for two years now while we tried to forget about it... Now it's dug over, manured with our lovely compost, and home to 30 new raspberry canes. I'm a bit worried I planted them too close together (as per usual), but time will tell. Picking the fruits could be a spiky experience!

We have planted a new strawberry bed: 9 each of three varieties for a longer harvest period. Today I popped the garlic in between the plants - it's supposed to keep some of the nasties away. I just hope it's not too late to get a decent garlic crop too...

We planted three rows of broad beans back in February, which today are just peeking their noses up into the (patchy) sun:

And we've weeded the pond. Turns out water mint is just as invasive as its landlubbing cousins; it was really difficult to extract the plant pot, and when I finally got it out there were still new mint sprigs looking at me from all corners of the pond. I spent ages trying to pick them all out without disturbing the FROGSPAWN(!) - at least they came out fairly easily.

We've dug the horseradish too, in that lower left corner. I don't know what possessed me to plant horseradish so close to the pond. I watched the whole pond shake as Eddie pulled up one of the long roots! Planning on roast beef and Yorkshire puddings this week so I can put some of what we dug up to good use! And in the top right corner is the asparagus bed, newly weeded and manured. We usually see the first asparagus shoots in the first week of April, but I get the feeling it might be a bit later this year...

And there are our baby tadpoles, taddling away. The water is pretty murky at the moment - it'll be great when the pond life gets going again and things start to clear up.

It's also good to see our miniature apple trees budding all over! We got one delicious apple last year - hopefully more this year! Alas, some mysterious fate has befallen the pear tree, which has been reduced to a dry little stump, and I don't think it's coming back :(