Dinners usually go to Lisa’s Dinners (as the details of this one have also) but I just needed to gloat a little. First allotment excursion in weeks; I am a little overwhelmed by all the weeds and spent a good 45 minutes trying to tie up my Jerusalem artichokes who decided to have a lie down when confronted with wind, but we came home with potatoes, broad beans, peas, radishes and lots of lettuce. The minute carrots were grown in pots on the patio, too.

Just a few teeny baby spuds and some minute broad beans (I was too impatient to wait while they grew) and some very peppery radishes, but how exciting! The potatoes were fantastic: Maggie went mmmmmmmm and kept asking for more (no, because I only dug up a few) and even Tamsin polished hers off! Growing your own is fantastic. Even if I did have to extract them from a sort of muddy soup rather than digging in the true sense of the word. It’s soggy up there.

I pulled the garlic last week, too, because it was rusty and getting rotten: not an unmitigated success, but I’m drying them out in the kitchen and some will be fine bulbs to be proud of. (The rest will become compost.) I’d intended putting the PSB in its place but I (blush) left it up there in small pots while we had a mini-heatwave and they all dessicated along with a tray of lettuces – had it been this week, they’d have drowned – and slugs ate the artichokes. I do feel a little like King Canute holding back the tide (of weeds) at the moment but I understand that is normal for veg gardening in June – and my modest aim at the beginning of this first year was that I wanted to get out more than I put in.

Thanks to you all for your good wishes: M is now almost completely recovered if quite unsightly. (Old ladies still recoil in horror but as they are the same old ladies who unfailingly tell Tamsin she’s a lovely little man, I don’t care.) She returned to preschool today, thus preventing me from using my planned title based on the fact that it was the longest day ever, groan groan.

We are heading south tomorrow for our trip to Ascot: my outfit is assembled even if I have failed to try the whole lot on simultaneously. No point now as I can’t go shopping again so it will just have to do. There’s enough champagne flowing at these occasions that I will look lovely through everybody’s soft-focus eyes by lunchtime anyway.

..and no blogging because I have been suckered into pesky facebook. Hours fly by and nothing is achieved (so no major change from the norm) although I have become quite Zen about the whole thing: in 3 short days I have moved from but what is it for distress to accepting that it just is. And I’ve made other people join me: can you be evangelical and Zen? And a concomitant revival in my twitter account, because let’s face it if you are going to share your inane day to day activities with the world, why not do it on a minute-by-minute basis?

[aside: may I quote from this week’s Observer TV guide? “BBC3…is seemingly staffed by the sort of idiots even an undergraduate would dismiss as unsophisticated…as tragically middle-aged and out-of-touch as all those thirty- and forty-somethings clogging up facebook in a desperate attempt to recapture their lost youth”. Ahem.]

We did have a trip to Worcester last week, home of the family Naan (and she’s put a lovely picture of T and me halfway down); had a lovely time. Bit nervous before as she was one of those friends I have known, like, forever* but never actually met. But within minutes all was fine, even if I was not allowed to look in her fridge.

Spent some time at the allotment over the weekend – Monty says it is now June (and he is correct) and so one is to plant one’s. Um. I am sure he had a proper word for them (but it’s late and I’m tired) – you know, the things that have been in the greenhouse because they will die if the frost gets them. Sweetcorn, squashes and beans, in my particular case: I have a cane wigwam for the beans. I cannot express how proud of myself I was when I constructed it.

*Note teenage facebook-user-type vocabulary.

Spent a lovely sunny hour and a half at the allotment with Maggie today. She painted on cardboard, watered randomly, dug holes and spacehopped. I couldn’t dig much as the ground is like rocks (rain forecast this week though so no more excuses), but that allowed me to potter about doing some light weeding and a bit of gloating. Gloating is important.

The first early potatoes are looking jolly nice (photo).  My garlic and shallots are looking lovely too although I have just this minute read Sarah Raven’s book which tells me garlic needs a wet spring or lots of water, neither of which it has had, so we’ll see what comes out at the end. I have broad beans, Jerusalem artichokes and mixed salad coming through well, although something is nibbling my peas. All in all I have about a quarter of the land properly cleared and another quarter roughly cleared and planted with spuds. A third quarter is destined to remain carpeted for the rest of the season – I am planning to plant squashes (currently in the greenhouse and potted on today) through holes in the carpet – so that just leaves me with another quarter, currently carpeted, which I need to clear reasonably well to put tripods on for beans, cucumbers and some flowers.

And then there is The Unclearable section at the end, all sapling trees and ferocious brambles, which I am pretending I haven’t seen. I have my compost bins there but it is otherwise a no man’s land.

None of this bears any resemblance to The Plan, but that was always going to be the case.

A weekend of ups and downs to say the least. Friday was the traditional bank-holiday trip to Homebase for some wood (woo) – we now have a shelf up above the shiny new fridge. I got 2 rows of potatoes planted on Saturday: gorgeous out in the sunshine and a friendly robin kept perching stereotypically on my fork handle. Yesterday was really lovely: the sun shone, I turned my compost (a bit smelly as it’s rather too “green” not enough “brown”, and I honestly didn’t realise before I started that next door had guests – hope it wasn’t too stinky for them) while Cameron and Maggie made a lovely lemon yogurt cake, then we all spent the afternoon in the garden with the papers, tea and cake: M watered all the plants and next-door has got some very small and sweet puppies who peeped through the hedge at us.

Today has contained more downs. We had a very unusual lie-in, which the fortunes punished by means of a completely out of control screaming child. I am still at a loss to know what it was all about, but not a pleasant experience and frankly I’d rather have got up at 8 and had a little more emotional balance to my day. She’s been out of sorts all day (and regressing potty-wise too; I do hope she’s not getting ill again), to the extent that she lay down on the floor and refused to move in the middle of the garden centre, where she had been playing perfectly happily just the minute before. Oh, such joy. Cameron flies to Germany this evening and can’t get away soon enough.

I obviously told my Japanese agency that I would be returning to work after Easter as I logged on this morning to find a manuscript awaiting me – despite not having re-contacted them since T was born. I’m going to give it a try and see how I get on (they know how to flatter, telling me it was from one of my regular authors and suggesting I have been missed).

I am neither mouse nor man, so why do my plans always get scuppered? After a weekend spent being clung to by a poorly Maggie (Saturday: very high temperature and general misery), making cakes and wrapping pass-the-parcels, rushing about cackling maniacally (Sunday: didn’t realise the clocks had changed until I turned the radio on at what I thought was 9.45 to find The Archers already halfway through) and hosting a tots party on Sunday afternoon (went very well: weather glorious so they could run about outside; cake pink; lack of catering uncommented on*), today was supposed to be my day. I am entitled to the odd day, I believe. I would take Maggie to preschool (nursery no longer), come back and wait for our new fridge-freezer, to be delivered “early morning” then get up to the allotment where I would take advantage of the sun to sow shallots, jerusalem artichokes and prepare for spuds and peas.

Huh. And gah. Tamsin is having a growth spurt so feeding and filling nappies constantly while refusing to nap for more than 20 minutes unless strapped to my front. Which is fine, but rather precludes activites like digging and, well, anything allotmenty. (Also ironing, so it’s not all bad.) The fridge-freezer turned up as expected, right on time once we had established that I don’t in fact live in the house over the road. It made it all the way to the patio – it would fit through the front door but not the internal one, and wouldn’t go through the side one at all – only I couldn’t get both patio doors open so there it has had to stay. In the process of fiddling with the doors I managed to lock the other one (that I had managed to open) irretrievably open.

3 pm. A locksmith is fixing the back doors but I ain’t going to get much planted or dug or even visited today. The fridge – enormous – remains outside at present, and I am feeling very cross and frustrated and like the day has been completely wasted. And Tamsin continues to demand a feed every half hour.

*I think – they might all be talking about me behind my back (“and do you know she didn’t even have sausage rolls“). Only C and I had wine, too, everybody else had tea.

This is my first Master Plan for the allotment. Given the small amount I have got dug and cleared so far,  and the almighty lack of digging weather (why was everybody on the radio yesterday harping on about the beautiful spring weather?) with time ticking on, I am currently working on plan #2, which has approximately the same areas of the same crops but arranged such that I can have a chap in to rotavate the top half of the plot (where I will plant potatoes and other things that don’t mind it a bit weedy). I can even leave the middle section uncleared and uncultivated until next winter if necesssary although I have yet to decide which veg will be sacrificed if I do so.

The lack of good-enough weather  – while I might be happy in principle to go and work in the rain, I can’t take the kids and our very heavy clay soil wont thank me for it – hasn’t stopped me sowing seeds: so far I have broad beans about 5″ high, tiny cauliflowers and 3″ tomatoes and have sown romanesco caulis, purple-sprouting broccoli, more broad beans, more tomatoes and aubergines, and sweet peas, all sown in an impressively short space of time as Tamsin currently feels she’d like to be held all the time please. Maggie planted the broad beans, which is fantastic as they germinate fast, grow fast, and she loves to pod and eat them.

I have a new nephew, so huge congratulations and lots of love to Suzanne, Chris and Mia and welcome to the world baby Callum!

Tamsin did her 16-week growth spurt right on time, so my weekend was mostly occupied with feeding her and changing nappies. She rewarded me with her first few giggles and learning to wave a rattle about. We did manage to fit in the purchase of a new fridge-freezer, and arranged for a man to come and look at our living room with a view to making us a bookcase. Busy busy. Of course it rained all the time so all allotmenteering was off; I am going to forget about growing spuds and take up ark-building.

 

And no longer a newborn blob but a fully fledged baby who can swipe at toys and everything*. She even watched the rugby with Daddy at the weekend while Maggie and I went to the allotment, which was absolutely glorious: cold, crisp blue skies, birds singing, completely peaceful. Until M realised that if she shouted “hooray” really really loudly she got a great echo from the walls. Sorry, all the rest of the plot-holders who were having a silent Sunday afternoon.

*Everything = eat, sleep, stare about and fill nappies. Not much else.

Is it bedtime yet? I’ve been up (on and off) since 4.30 this morning and it’s been a really long day. 4.30: Maggie, scream scream there’s a bug. 5.05: Cameron’s alarm. 5.20: Cameron out of shower and “creeping” about. 5.30: Cameron leaves. 5.45: Maggie I need my skittles (scream scream). 5.50: feed Tamsin. 6.00: Maggie comes in to get warm. 6.15: Maggie wriggling, kicking with icy feet, complaining about Jura being in the bed, taken back to her own bed with a drink of water and a prayer. Blessed sleep. 7.40: leap out of bed for a hasty shower before the Ocado delivery turns up at 8 – doorbell out of order so imperative to be downstairs.

At least M got to nursery on time for once, and we both had a proper breakfast. And we spent an hour at the allotment, getting another few square foot dug: I am considering advertising for a odd-job man to come and dig/clear for me so I can just do the fun planting and harvesting stuff. Or is that against the spirit of the thing? Spent a jolly 10 minutes playing hunt-the-compost-bin after the recent storms – but quite glad I don’t have the next plot over where a 100-year-old brick wall was blown over onto the greenhouse.