I haven’t been putting anything except my frondy carrot tops into the compost bin for a while as the bin was very full. Putting a few bricks on top has now pushed everything down about 8 inches, so I can start adding more. As well as the kitchen scraps from last night’s dinner I also added a wonderful-smelling bag of coffee grounds.

Leaving the lid off the bin to let the delicious coffee fumes spread a little, I moved onto the next job: harvesting the last of the carrots. Always a fun game as you can’t really tell what success you’ve had until you start digging. That big orange top might only extend half an inch down – and in two different directions. Or, as happened: the completely unassuming one in the middle, which hadn’t pushed its top far above ground, turned out to be a big fat 142g whopper.

All the carrots were dug up, cleaned and lined up for their photo shoot inside, which took, oh I don’t know A MILLION YEARS. Then I took their tops off, bunged them into the fridge and took the tops to the compost bin. I bent down to pick up a stray carrot frond from the grass and discovered that it was attached to a tiny 3-legged 2g carrot I’d evidently dropped. But I ain’t about to spend ANOTHER MILLION YEARS getting a photo, so you’ll just have take my word for it. Or come and look at it sitting on my desk looking like a little orange alien.