Growlygracepress's Blog

It’s all very well thinking it would be great to have a massive asparagus bed but when you see a great deal on crowns and double up on the order then when a big box arrives I am faced with the inevitable act of digging and preparing trenches. I decided to buy crowns because it dawned on me that the asparagus I was raising from seed was going to need care and shelter for at least two years before I put it in the ground. So now I am going to stick it in the front garden and have lovely ferns.

My next bit of brilliant thinking was I want to take photographs of tulips so I had better buy some and plant them and with in minutes I had ordered a big collection of parrot tulips which I now need to plant in to the ground.

Last year I thought it would be funny to feed a crow with bone shaped dog biscuits ( I always have dog biscuits in my pockets) and with in days the crows were finding me they fly close to me to get attention and I carry a little tin of bird food and dole it out to them. Sometimes I can get them to follow me to the allotment, sometimes they visit the allotment and this week they found me waiting for a bus. The crows sometimes land on the tops of cars and freak out people and just pretend not to know them and this makes it worse.

So I am going to have tulips, asparagus and crows.

I am going to go to the allotment and continue the digging I started in the brassica cage. I have evicted all the rubbish Brussel Sprouts and I plant some cabbages and kale. I am continuing to plant salad leaves, kale, onion sets for spring onions in the unheated green houses and I am reading the seed catalogs searching out early carrots and peas for the poly tunnel. I have cleared out the vine leaves and I will plant seed potatoes in the tunnel and I will decided whither to take out the remaining chillies.

I was making chutneys a few weeks ago and I noticed that I approached the actual making of them much like book making. I had all the ingredients at hand and I just made a ‘batch’ no measuring just buy hand and eye. I wanted a tomato and onion relish and it should look and taste like that. Red, sweet, mustard seeds, onions a little bit of sour. It was as satisfying as making a book. Actually it was better and I think it’s because the ‘proof’ as it were was that I used the relish immediately as it had barely cooled down with bread and cheese and it was great. Where as a book languishes around the work area until it has a buyer or is given way and the new owner gives it purpose.

So it’s going to be batches of books, clearly labelled, numbered, with purpose and intention.

This is what I am doing to do. I am going to finish putting back my work room, this means making decisions that I have been putting of about the storing of materials and equipment. I am going to write out some targets with the dates and times I wish to accomplish them. I am going to write out a short and clear statement about what my intentions are and how I will know I have achieved them. Baby steps.