The netting on top isn't as good as it could be, in fact it's cobbled together. I hate cheap netting, which this is, mostly because I hate paying good money for something which is mostly thin air. I suppose I should rationalise it as the bits which aren't the thin air are the bits which give it it's value. 
was extraordinarily helpful and shifted loads of raspberry & blackberry weeding which I, in truth, have been avoiding. Big respect.
and the Wilburys caught a bit of sun.
what better way to spend Easter Monday morning than actually cycling, on a route I used to do regularly.
Birkenhead Park was visited by Frederick Olmsted who incorporated many of the design features into his design for Central Park, New York.
Much of the clearout consisted of piles of pots which I put there as a temporary measure when we moved house two & a half years ago. The rule of thumb is now that black pots live at the allotment and others live at home.
Then the kettle went on and boiled on the embers ; what economy!
and rhubarb to speak of and they're both going great guns.
This is an annual ritual which Wilma Wilbury has just about got used to!
and dig-dig-digging it. Look how much bindweed I got out of section 3 this morning.
Buying small in February means I get lots for the money and can grow them on in the conservatory so that when it's proper planting-out time I've got loads of big healthy plants. That's the plan and it usually works. Even better if I had a greenhouse.
The paraffin lamp beside them is an original Aladdin, at least 60 years old and a family heirloom.
It was the only source of light in the first house I can remember as a child. Even in my teens when we were living in a council house (without central heating) that lamp was placed in the bathroom an hour before anyone wanted a bath, just to warm the room up (a bit).
Leeks were just fine 
but winner of the "Bring it On, I'll Shrug it Off" prize goes to the rhubarb. 
Can't wait to see how the big clods of rhubarb I transplanted last year do.
and also where he is buried in downtown Honolulu.
A small custom has grown up of toasting his grave with a wee dram. I did that on my visit and will be having a wee dram in his memory tonight on Burns Night. (The Memorial cairn you see behind me in the first photo was erected by the now-defunct Burns Club of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, in 1934 to commemorate the centenary of his death).
Now let me tell you about Eugenie Fraser. Born Yevgheniya Ghermanovna Scholts, in Archangel, of Russian-Scots parents she died only in 2002, aged 96, in Edinburgh. Her obituary is on Times Online and her story of her life is available on Amazon. As a newborn baby in 1905 she was taken by sledge, swaddled in furs against the Archangel winter, to the house of an old family retainer, Nanny Shalovchika. Nanny professed herself content that she had now nursed four generations of the same family.
But the point about Nanny Shalovchika is that she was 105, born in 1800. She remembered seeing Napoleon’s troops fleeing down the roads of Smolensk after the battle of Smolensk in 1812 (she was already 12!), and had a son killed in the Crimean war.
In the lives of just two people, one of whom died only six years ago, we can reach back right to 1800 (David Douglas was born in 1799). History is indeed sometimes almost close enough to touch.
More on Douglas shortly, including his own gloomy assessment of his life expectancy, back in 1826.
But for the meantime, tomorrow, was serfdom alive and well in the UK as late as 1961?
Robins seem to like it too. One ate so much I'm surprised he could still fly.
which was a staple of isolated homesteads across the USA and England throughout the first half of the 1900s. My parents kept theirs and used it regularly until they had central heating installed, because it was a source of heat as well as light. I still have it and it still works (very useful in power cuts!). 
You've already seen him travelling across the Continent with the Hudson's Bay Express to York Factory but he'd had adventures aplenty before then in an almost unexplored part of North America. Remember, this was only 20 years after Lewis and Clark.
:
I had a massive strimming session today so most of it now looks halfway tidy. There’s more to do of course and I need to get some manure delivered so I can spend a happy weekend shovelling.......
But I did get back to the allotment today, with a newly repaired strimmer and made vast amounts of strim, strim, strimmy progress. Mid-way through the afternoon Chris & Susan (who share the entrance and other half of the double-width plot) arrived, with concern about was I all right, had noticed crops going unpicked, vegetation climbing to the skies etc. Explained that I’ve had a travelling summer and an allotment neglected at a critical moment, of which there have been many, never gets back under control until autumn. I was quite touched at this concern.
And now it feels, courtesy of a mega-strim, that it is heading back to the straight and narrow. I did begin to consider whether keeping the allotment was truly viable; I’m 60 in 18mths time and intend to do more travelling so don’t want to be constrained by my cabbages, so to speak. But nor do I want to walk away from something I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in, and which I do want to maintain as an active energetic interest for a zillion years to come. I think I do need to think rather harder about how much of it lies fallow next year so I can concentrate on doing the bits I have in cultivation rather better.
As ever, there are competing priorities:
Think I’ll start the Bishops off in pots next year cos starting them in the ground was no use whatsoever.
which went down very well with ice cream as dessert for Woody & Wilma Wilbury this evening. This is seriously good news because it means they’ve established properly and I should be able to get a decent crop off them next year.
But, given the choice of travelling where I've been and having a tidy allotment, travel wins hands down.
the sun glittering on the roofs of the house (being covered in tin) and in the bay riding at anchor the company's ship from England [the Prince of Wales].
They include a gallon of rum, for a four week journey!! But also - David Douglas's Underpants. The records include 2 pairs of white flannel drawers at nine shillings and eightpence each. Only two pairs of pants for a 4 week sea journey. They'd have been a bit whiffy by the end, altho once he'd got the gallon of rum down his neck I doubt he'd have noticed.
