We did go to the allotment last week but I didn’t take any photos. I had intended taking a photo when we revisited the plot later in the week but we never had a return visit.

I cut down the old growth of the autumn raspberries and started tidying the bed so I was going to take a photo when I had finished hopefully that will be sometime this week.

Martyn, had another fire so managed to clear most of the debris from cutting back bushes. The laurels were cut back last year and the ‘prunings’ had been piled up for a year so were very dry and burned quite quickly.

We had a couple of walks around a local park where there were carpets of crocuses. The roadside was edged with yellow crocuses which surprisingly were untouched by birds.

We made our usual weekly visit to Nostell but there was nothing new to photograph and I thought by now you would be fed up with photos of ducks, swans, trees and Ruby chasing her ball.

Looking from the house window it’s looking very spring-like. 

The miniature daffodils are coming into bloom. We only grow the small varieties in the garden but have several different types.

We have a large bed of hellebores many of which are self sown and so the colour palette is quite limited.

Some plants are spreading further than I would like and so before long we will need to do some thinning out.

Most of the flowers hang their heads but some cooperate with the photographer and pose for a photo.

There are lots of crocuses in the small bed shown below. They were quite a surprise as I don’t remember planting them. A few crocuses are growing at the allotment that I certainly didn’t plant. I’m guessing that there were baby bulblets hiding in compost that we tipped out of pots and that these have been quietly growing to flowering size.

The odd hyacinth is starting to flower in the tubs on the patio.

It may look spring-like from the comfort of indoors but once you step outside you soon realise that winter hasn’t yet released its grip. Although it is a bit early for us to sow seeds, we have a few herbs, onion and shallot seeds growing under our grow light. The idea is to grow the herbs on a windowsill until the temperature improves.

Last week as usual our meals made use of some of our home grown vegetables. 

I made a turkey stir fry using our onions, garlic, and from the freezer some sweetcorn, peas, red peppers and French beans.

A vegetable cottage pie used some of our potatoes, carrots, leeks, garlic and frozen French beans. I just used potato and cheese for the topping.

Into a chicken vegetable and quinoa dish went our onion, garlic and carrot.

If you live in the UK I hope that you are enjoying the turnips in your salad. To explain to my non UK visitors we currently have a shortage of tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce in the shops. One of our illustrious ministers suggested we should not be eating food that is out of season and be content to eat turnips instead. Apparently bad weather in countries that we import some foods from have had bad weather and our farmers have delayed growing salad crops to save on fuel costs. If things continue we will need a security guard on the allotment.

That’s another week and, nearly, another month that has flown by. As always until next time stay safe, stay well and stay warm.