Thursday 11th March 10

A quiet indoor morning until I cycled round to the bread shop, got lots of 'Yesterbake' but also two veg pasties and two 'Yorkshire Pizzas'.

I then did loads of work in the garden... got a lot more sawdust sieving done... and filled several more sacks of fine sawdust, for compost toilet cover, several paper sacks of larger chunks of bark, small sticks, and bits of burnable stuff... it just needs to dry off. Also several sacks of material which is too small to bother drying off for fuel, but too big to make compost toilet cover... but perfect for ordinary compost heaps, which is where some of it headed... and all the rest went into plastic sacks for future use. So, the logpile waste all mixed up is useless, but split into 3 streams it is very useful, and it's worth spending time on (perhaps 8 hours every 6 months) to get it sorted.

Down the garden I tidied up two raised beds, the ones made of bay-window radiators. Both of them need refilling or topping up before planting up for this year's crops, but needed old roots removing and the soil de-compacting... and I found the yams which I put in last spring as tubercles the size of peas, now up to hens egg size. I'll replant them quite near the surface of the soil so they don't head down right to the bottom of the raised bed... they had put themselves about 10 to 20cm down as it was! They are very brittle and need gentle excavation to remove them... any pulling and they just break.

I came in after 6 as it was getting dark, and had a tea made up of leftovers. During the evening Gill and I made a decision about our summer holiday, which will be in South Wales, in a village called Mumbles, near Swansea.