For some reason I'm not being allowed to give this post a title...

Hurray! Look what I found this morning! It seems like everyone else has been eating strawberries for weeks but up here things are slower and we have only had two or three a day. But with a bit of sunshine this weekend everything is speeding up.

My squashes are beautiful and I picked the first Costa Romanique courgette today. Its hard to get a sense of scale from this photo but please believe me that its huge!

I now have some teeny tiny baby cucumbers so this year am going to try removing all the male flowers and see if I can get some bigger fruits. And some of the wild raspberries near my house are turning ripe so it won't be long before the annual jam making and sweating over hot sugar begins again.

By the way - how long does garlic need to dry out? And how do you know when its done?

Construction Work and a Murderous Deed

Well I'm now back in Scotland finally which is a great relief as I'm not used to non-Scottish climates! All my plants were doing well and I have some of the largest strawberries ever seen by man in my fruit bed. Mr Butternut wants to eat them now but we are just waiting for some sunny days to redden them up.

Now I'm up north staying with family and yesterday helped my dad weed his vegetable plot and we constructed a very impressive looking pea tee-pee type-thing and planted some more seeds. Photos will follow...

Another thing - is it wrong to feel evil glee at murdering slugs? When I was home at the weekend I nipped out to water the lettuces and found the most enormous slug I had ever seen - no joke, it must have been about 15cm long - drinking out of my beer trap. I thought, 'hey ho, you look like you're enjoying that, fancy a swim?' And so I nudged it in but it keep trying to climb out and I thought 'NO, I will not be beaten!' and so I held it under the beer for a couple of minutes with a look of evil satisfaction on my murderous face. And yet it wasn't enough so I reached for my scissors to cut its drunken body in half when it finally went off to the massive lettuce in the sky and I did a dance with delight.

Does this make me a terrible vegetarian?