Tuesday 24th April 07

Well I got up before the boys left for school. When Gill came back we decided there was no time to go back to bed as when we get up again she wonders where the morning has gone, and today there's too much to do!

I needed to go to the allotment and try to get the first of the potatoes in. I spent nearly 3 hours there, did loads of weeding... mainly dandelions which are flowering all over the place and a few invasive thistles coming in from the edges. Also managed my lovely compost heaps.... in order to put some compost in the two potato trenches I dug and planted, just the first of 13, as each variety will go in a different row.

Home for lunch and then went to St Nicks to pick up the applications for the York Rotters part-time management post, which we are to shortlist on Thursday. On the way into the site, met a woman who was staring into Osbaldwick Beck which flows into a culvert and goes under St Nicks, she was Sylvia from the wildlife trust, the person responsible for wet environments, and she had recieved a report of a mink. Her interest in verifying this stems from the fact that mink eat watervoles, and there are currently no mink on the River Foss system and therefore the voles aren't threatened, but could be if mink appeared.

I picked up the 22 applications, photocopied an article in NewScientist about packaging waste for them, and also picked up a report about food waste packaging recycling.. compostable plastics I think.

Home and all too soon had to go to school as our youngest had reportedly had a headache and had burst into tears, so we'd been called to take him home. As soon as I had got him home I had to cycle back to pick up the other one. After this did some compost management, dug out and turned two of my bins, including one that had the bony remains of a cat, duck and rabbit, nearly totally composted apart from the bigger bones which went straight back into the current working heap.

Gill did a lovely tea of quiche, allotment potatoes, broccoli from the lottie and a kiwi jelly pie with some of the two trays of reject kiwis I was given last week.

Spent most of the later evening chatting with my old friend currently residing in America... didn't feel like doing any work or blog, but did email BBC Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth with some 21st Century Proverbs that Gill had written.