The great escape

Last Christmas the English department at Mum’s school gave her a red amaryllis, which she brought home. There was no suitable setting for it in her library and one of her assistants tasked Dad with taking care of it. Mum’s not the one to whom you should entrust your pot plants while you go on [...]

Crowded monkeys

This is how the monkey nuts look this morning: as if they’d like to be repotted. But repotting involves going outside (which is something I managed to avoid completely between Boxing Day and Suzy’s birthday on 16th January) and getting cold and grubby. So you see why I didn’t repot them last weekend as planned. [...]

Jazz Hands Jr.

The second peanut made an appearance as soon as I shamed it on the electric internet. It’s like I Maytagged it or something.
Though the first plant is growing so fast that I suppose that there’s always the possibility it’s going to grow teeth and eat its neighbour. And then me.

Jazz hands!

One monkey nut continues apace. The other, not so much. I guess we’ll call that one compost.

Nuts, monkey and otherwise

One of the peanuts I planted has now germinated, pinging above the soil, split nut and all. I spent the first day or two trying to cover it up again with the compost, before finally confirming that it was ok, it was meant to do that. Like all patient gardeners, I’ve also dug about in [...]

Another snow day

Just as I was bemoaning the lack of anything blogworthy and the fact I’d not yet written anything in the new year, another pile of snow came to town. Not as much as before, but enough to keep Mum off school and my head turned to the window, seriously impeding any progress I may have [...]

Monkey nuts!

One of my Christmas presents this year was a monkey nut growing kit. Monkey nuts being, I was quite disappointed to find out, just another name for peanuts. Tip to gift-givers: next Christmas, I’d like the opportunity to grow myself a cute monkey.

The kit consisted of just three parts: a disc of eco peat made [...]