Wednesday 1st April 09

Woken by kids yelling as if being murdered downstairs, so sleepily rushed down to be met by two laughing boys saying 'April Fool'. Didn't quite know what to say, but all was good humoured!

Gill took our youngest to school and went on to her art class. I did a bit of emailing and Facebooking, and then got dressed and made some leek and butternut squash soup, and started building a logpile of dry wood outside the front. This one isn't going to fall down!

Had a good day, doing bits around the house and garden, nothing very focused but had a productive day. Shredded a load of twigs (mainly from John round the corner) and took apart a large clump of tough grass/sedge which Gill dug up ages ago. The soil had dried so I could crumble that off and pulled out the bits of the plant with roots, and shredded these too. The soil I added to my store of turf/soil/loam in one of my many compost bins. This is used to make potting composts, mixed with rich compost from fruit and veg, and leafmould, in varying proportions depending on what I'm using it for. I emptied one of my tumblers, putting well rotted stuff in a large plastic sack (for continued decomposition and eventual riddling and use) and unrotted sticks, paper and cardboard in a pile, ready for putting back with all the shredded twigs, sedge and a vast pile of cauliflower stalks, bad oranges and off potatoes. All this went straight back in the tumbler, filling it right up in one go. Compost bins are rarely empty in this garden! I took the temperature of one of my recently loaded pallet bins, just over 60 celcius in the centre... a veritable sauna for the microbes in there!

I also did lots more weeding, as we have an excess of deep rooted Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens) and easy-seeding Geranium species (some type of Crane's Bill) and the always-on-the-make Ground Elder (Aegopodium podagraria) which is perhaps the most invasive thing in this garden, apart from the encroaching compost bins... I pulled out some nettle seedlings, baby brambles, docks trying to sneak their roots way too deep for me to get them and dandelions trying to be as tenacious as docks. My fingers are now tingling pleasantly from the stinging nettles, a feeling I quite like.

I found one of last year's yams, just beginning to grow, and tried to dig it out, but it was so deep, the main body of the tuber was over 60 cm below the soil and it broke off, just giving me 50 or 60 cm of thin rooty tuber hardly worth doing anything with. I'll replant this bit, probably in a pot as it's easier to get the crop! I bought this as 'Angela's Cinnamon Vine', 5 tiny balls which form in the vine where the leaves branch off, it climbs several metres up, and produces a bigger tuber every year if left. So far my biggest tuber was about 70 cm long, after 2 or 3 years growing. The vine dies off during winter.

Gill called me in at 7.30 and reminded me it was tea time... I just get completely lost when I'm in the garden, there's always more to do than I have time for, and eating gets put down the agenda (or falls off the end of it until it's too dark to do anything more). I had a two bowls of leek and butternut soup, seasoned with marmite from a nearly empty jar, washed out with hot water to get the last of it. This with a hunk of bread and hummus and blobs of pesto, and some cucumber out of the compostables... one end was unsaleable, the other end delicious!

An evening not worth writing about, as I spent most of it writing...