After a brief spell of lovely weather, we are back to layering up again. We even had a flurry of snow which thankfully didn’t last for very long.

We haven’t been to the allotment this week, partly due to the weather and partly due to having other things to do. We had some electrical work done one day when the conditions weren’t the best for having no heating for most of the day. Maybe it was a taste of things to come when our electricity supply runs out! 

We are refurbishing two of our upstairs rooms so one day we made the most of our indoor time. Martyn painted the walls of one room whilst I started stripping wallpaper off the other.

One advantage of the cool, or should I say cold, temperatures is that the flowers are lasting longer. The hyacinths and hellebores are still looking lovely.

Other plants are gradually joining in the floral display.

The skimmia has had buds for a while and they are now braving the elements and opening.

Individual flowers are tiny but lovely when seen in detail.

The perfume they produce will tempt any hardy pollinators to the pollen loaded anthers which are held out invitingly.

When I cut back one of our camellias a couple of years ago, I popped some of the trimmings into a pot, I wasn’t expecting them to root but thought that there was no harm in trying. Two of the cuttings took root, one was planted out in my sister’s garden and the other is sitting in a plant pot on the patio waiting for me to decide what to do with it. It has flower buds, and the petals have fallen from the parent plant planted in the garden behind. I think it deserves a bigger pot,

It just goes to show that it’s worth trying things that we are told are difficult or impossible. Many years ago I did the same thing when cutting back a magnolia. One of the resulting cuttings is now in my sister’s garden and is now a fully grown tree.

We came home to a disaster one day as our amaryllis/hippeastrum had toppled over. The flower head that was at its very best snapped off. Such a shame! Now we will have to feed up the bulb and hope for a reflowering next year.

The onions that are stored in the summerhouse are showing signs that they will soon start to grow so I am trying to use up as many as I can. I’ve made various soups but thought that I would have a try at onion bhajis.  I think I’ll try a different recipe next time as either my large onions are larger than their idea of a large onion or the recipe for the batter was a bit mean. I added some fresh coriander to mine.

I’ve frozen most of the bhajis but we had some with a turkey and parsnip curry. This used some more of our onions and some parsnips. I used creamed coconut instead of yogurt and tikka masala paste.

I used some of our leeks and potatoes in a chicken casserole but for some reason I forgot to take a photograph!

Finally, I’d like to make a plea. I’m getting a massive amount of spam emails from websites that I  have followed. These originate from old posts that I have commented on and requested notification of new comments. Spammers love to make comments on old posts in order to circulate adverts or links that they want to generate traffic for. I combat this in Blogger by only allowing unmoderated comments of posts less than five days old. On WordPress you can set it up so that anyone commenting for the first time needs approval and you can also ban any links in comments. The problem is that most of the spam emails are coming from abandoned blogs, so if anyone has abandoned their blog, I’d be really grateful, as I am sure others would be, if  you could please edit it so that it doesn’t allow comments

Thanks for that – as always stay safe and well.