It turns out that the flower bulb I was given for my birthday is a hippeastrum. How do I know this? Well, thanks to Ray I knew it would be an amaryllis or hippeastrum, so when it flowered on new year’s day (what show-off timing) I knew what to google.

The flower is a Butterfly Lily and now has two open blooms, with long stamens that dusted my head with pollen when I lifted the plant from my desk to the table to photograph it.

Now I need to get back to Google and find out what the hell to do with the bulb when the flowers give up on me. If I remember correctly, I need to hide it in a box and forget about it. When it’s ready, it’ll come and get me, right?

A few days after I last blogged the avocado’s progress, I followed the given advice and nipped out the top leaves. The idea being that the avocado now focuses its energy less on the growing long and spindly side of things and more on the work of getting a bit bushier.

I’m not sure the avocado had read the same website as me though. The remaining leaves have just grown bigger and bigger, with little sign of new leaves thickening things up a bit. I think that the tiny leaves on the side may have grown a little, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Evidently we’ve entered into another slow-mo phase, similar to the very first six weeks it took for the stone to sprout.

Or those leaves are plotting to take over the world. Stay alert.

We have an occasional visitor to the garden who has a rather unusual beak. This long-beaked sparrow turns up from time to time in the crowds of sparrows who feed on the seeds hung from the laburnum in the front garden.

Despite the excessive length of the top half of his beak, he seems to have no trouble at all taking seed from the feeder and drops no more seed while doing so than any of the others do. He seems healthy enough, so I can only imagine he’s not particularly affected by it – and he can certainly stand his ground at the feeder.

Interestingly, my uncle showed us photos of a sparrow with a deformed beak on Boxing Day too, though it’s not as long as this one. A quick google also shows up reports from all over the place of not just sparrows with deformed beaks – and a bevy (or should that be “a hide?”) of ornithologists trying to work out why it’s happening.

This afternoon I’m turning my fingernails yellow as I chop, peel and cook 14.5kg pumpkin. The job should get done today, which is in sharp – and pleasant – contrast to the three tiring days the job took me for my last pumpkin harvest in 2007. Back then I had 32kg of pumpkin to deal with. Mind you, the photo set I made of the process has been quite useful for reference today.

Seeing as we still have bags and bags of pumpkin in the freezer from 2007, I think this next lot should help keep us going for the next decade or two.

It’s been two weeks since I last showed you the winklage of my avocado. The top winkle is now about six inches high and has pretty little red and green leaves growing at the top. Very soon I need to pinch out the top leaves, so I thought I’d better take a photo of this stage before I kill the thing.

The pinching out of the leaves should encourage bushier growth on the rather skinny stem, though to be fair to it, you can see the beginnings of leaves on it already. Then once the new leafage has established itself, it’ll be time to transplant the avocado into soil. Which will involve going outside to get a pot and soil in, oh, how do you say? The Deep Midwinter When It’s All Cold And Wet Out There And I’m Trying To Be Warm And Dry In Here. Good timing. Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, there’s still a few weeks in which I could kill this thing and thus be able to stay indoors. Or the tiny Austrian weevil I saw in the pot of my amaryllis could use this time to mutate into a humungous monster and jump out of the pot and eat the avocado and everything else on my desk. I should move my tub of rocky road in case that happens. It should be safe in my belly.

And I think you’ll all agree with me that the state of my avocado’s winkle is an interesting thing. Three weeks after the winkle first appeared, it is now less of a winkle and more of a trunk that should perhaps be marked as NSFW. However, on top there is now a cute new upstairs winkle! The little shoot that started off inside the stone has emerged through a crack at the top and is now a couple of centimetres tall. AND! It’s furry. I don’t know what else you could ask for.

The length of my avocado’s winkle is now reasonably obscene and as such, one’s eyes should be averted. There are things afoot in the middle of the stone now though, with a future shoot beginning to show.

I was able to grow pumpkins again this year – and when I say “able”, I mean that we’d made a small dent on the huge pile of pumpkin previously stored in the freezer, so there would be room for what I grew.

As it worked out, we didn’t have the best of summers, so my harvest this year was not as grand as it was in 2007. That year produced 34.75kg of pumpkin – not far of my body weight. This year, the weather, garden and I managed “just” 14.5kg. The biggest gourd was half the weight of the biggest gourd harvested in 2007. Clearly 2007 was my Year of the Pumpkin.

Still, I had fun and 32lb of pumpkin isn’t nothing. I also remember the exhaustion I felt after a whole weekend chopping, cooking, mashing, measuring and freezing 34.75kg of pumpkin. So the silver lining really is that I’ve saved myself a proportion of that!

The weights (L-R): 5.3kg, 4.8kg, 3.3kg, 1.1kg. Place your bets now as to which one will manage to ruin my clothing with its sticky super gluey sap during the chopping process…

Well, I guess it’s not bad going if it took me until halfway through the month of posting every day before I had a half past eleven “oh crap, I’ve not blogged anything yet” run-on sentence moment. I’ve been stuck in front of the computer all day, doing various things and then warring with some HTML late into the evening. I’ve not exactly won, but I’ve won enough. And that’ll do me.

That photo up there isn’t an optical illusion, the bulb really is the size of a fist. This was my birthday present from H&H and I’ve been instructed that it needs very little water, which somehow seems more of a challenge than needing to flood something. I can’t help feeling that there’s a very fine line between very little water and too little water. Anyway, I have no idea what the bulb is, so I hope I get the watering right and have the chance to find out. Well, whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s not edelweiss.