Got my blog back

and very relieved I am about it too.

Where on earth to start?

Beans. I got a big order of beans and pulses from Piko Organics this week. Half of which is stored beautifully in glass preserving jars and the other half is still in the cardboard box. I did use some to make Black Bean soup today though. Black Bean soup (the recipe is here somewhere if you check out the recipe label on this blog) is one of my favourite things because it tastes a bit sophisticated (lime and coriander on top and sherry in it - may sound very ordinary to you but it aint sausages) and it is good because no methane emitting animal meat. Though we do spoon sour cream on top. Once I've got over the cost of red peppers in soup making season and got two meals out of the recipe, then it gets quite good budget points.

Today Favourite Handyman worked on the poultry palace. Delivery to smalltown is less than 13 days away now.

The sun shone today and yesterday. This is a first for a long time and a seriously utterly wonderful thing.

I've been re-reading Companion Planting in New Zealand by Brenda Little. I really need to buy my own copy because in the interim since I last had it out of the library, I've put brassicas, garlic and strawberries together. Turns out brassicas and strawberries really hate garlic and suffer in performance in it's presence. When the soil dries out a bit, I'll be transplanting the strawberries into a new bed and complementing it with borage. When I've grown the borage. I've got just two tiny kale plants left there which can go but I narrowly missed planting four broccoli plants with the garlic. The book didn't comment on yams. I'm going to put yams in with both my garlic beds. Only time will tell.

My potatoes are sprouting nicely. Just homeless until I find a pile of cheap buckets. Their original spot has been re-assigned to onions and carrots and chamomile.

I have lots of spring bulb foliage up but no flowers yet. Though the flower stems are up on the freesias and starting to come up on something else unidentified but possibly a crocus (or a bluebell).

Flowers are out on some onion weed. Onion weed is up in chunks of the lawn around the compost and our biggest tree. I used my dried onion weed in the stuffed pumpkin meal I made last weekend. I think drying it first might be the way to go as it yields little flavour for it's size when thrown in raw.

Favourite Handyman made me an excellent cloche today. It is an old vegetable box (strong transparent plastic) for a fridge which came with some toys for the children. They never put toys in their boxes anyway so it's mine thank you. FH drilled holes in the base (which is now the roof of the cloche) for ventilation and now it is protecting one of my spinach seedlings with the idea that it will be warmer and grow faster.

Tomorrow I might sow seeds. Better go and find out if that is lunarly suitable. Which will most likely determine whether I am lunar follower or not. But less likely to stop me sowing seeds if it is Sunday and the sun is shining and no one has an earache or broken bone.