Garden Boy's birthday cake, that is.
But finally, today, I made it. And although it wasn't quite the aesthetic masterpiece (icing a little lumpy, cake very gooey so didn't hold well when cut) it was delicious - if I do say so myself. Not that I take much credit. I can follow a recipe like the best of them!
So thank you to Nigella Lawson and her Feast cookery book for the Chocolate Honey Cake... YUM!
Today I took Spike and Dude down to the allotment. Not to do any work, you understand, but just to check up on the poor neglected thing. We have had poorly tummies etc and to be honest I find it difficult to spend much time down there with my three little darlings. There isn't much to do that they want to do (dig weeds for 3 hours, boys?) so I spend my time fretting about them not getting nettled/ thistled/ stepping on my few remaining plants/ wandering off/ messing with the newts (newts!) in the communal water-butts etc...
But we went down today to look around, and, if you ignore the weeds that are thigh high in places it is actually not too bad. In parts. For example:
my butternut squashes, grown from seeds from a supermarket squash! Getting bigger all the time! And the borage which self-seeded from one we grew last year in the home-garden, which I transplanted - successfully! Hooray!
And the bed I did last time, and have since ignored: bordered with hand-me-down chives from a generous allotmenter and 25p tomatoes and sweet peppers (all of which said they would rather be in a greenhouse - which I don't have, so they have had to suffer the indignity of being outside in the real live weather!) which are growing nicely, and really could use a prop so they don't sprawl in such a slovenly manner.
And the calendulas are flowering very prettily... and the cosmos are getting nice and big, which means that not everything is being eaten by the slugs and snails... very promising!
After that I treated the boys to a trip to Butterfly World... nice and warm on a rather unpromising day. Full of beautiful butterflies, and I would have taken more pictures, but the camera batteries were dying and the focus was suffering because of that. The meerkats were a big hit too. They are such funny little creatures...
And last but not least, here is an update from the home-garden. The Cherokee beans and the Runner beans are getting tall and lovely. The Cherokees are producing beans, and the Runners are flowering like mad, but no beans from them yet.
Cherokee bean flowers and baby beans
Young Cherokee beans
Grampy's heritage Runner Beans, in flower
The mangetout and sugar-snaps, after a glut, seem to have quit almost entirely. I think some of them got something attacking the root systems, because they have totally died, gone all brown and crispy. Some of the survivors have also been suffering from leaf-miners. So they aren't looking too good, and not surprisingly, I guess, they haven't been producing well for the past week or so. Hmm...
