Well hello everybody . Long time absent but here in thought . Partly bedridden these days by my progressive neurone related problem. But with Mr Primrose,s help I have just sown six pots of tumbling tomatoes for our patio and we hope to have more tomatoes & beans later. Hope everybody is keeping...

Wrll it certainly feels like time to pack away our patio table and chairs into the garage for the winter. Hardly been used this summer.

Well at least your cats don't seem to regard them as fair game to chase and kill! Our previous cat was a keen fisherman. Raided a local pool somewhere in the neighbourhood and returned home with a massive Iive. koi carp in his mouth. We had to fill the bath with water quickly to try and keep it aliv...

Well the two "courgette" plants Mr Primrose bought at a plant swap fund raising event have turned out to be butternut squashes! He,s mortified but I,'m not sure there,s any way he could have identified one small seedling from another. At least we,ve been spared doing secret surplus courget...

How delightful!. Let's hope they turn out to be layers. Just enjoy them while you can. They grow up so quickly.

My birthday is extending in duration as I,m still receiving cards which were mailed a week before my birthday date.!

Many thanks folks for your good wishes.. It was too unbearably hot here yesterday to even be outside but husband produced a really tasty Chinese crispy duck lunch with all the trimmings. The major problem with getting older is that the hands of the clock seem to whizz round faster every year!

IF you look at today's housing stock you realise how few of them were designed or built with the longevity of their potential occupants in mind, ie no wide doors, no downstairs toilets etc . I do hope that the government and local councils will bear this mind when designing the thousands of new hous...

I wonder if the earlier Avian flu crisis, forcing breeders to keep their birds under cover for quite a while, may have forced some potential poultry owners
to have second thoughts about keeping them. Nobody can enjoy having to keep their birds shut up when they're used to roaming freely

Our climbing beans continue to puzzle us. The French beans are producing by the bowlful and we're giving some away as freezer now full yet our runner beans are full of flowers yet hardly a single beans has grown. So far this summer husband had picked just two badly formed misshapen runner beans. Hav...

Welcome! Ants arnt necessarily a problem like slugs - for example they don't eat your crops but if you're worried about them I find one of those Ant Bait Station discs available from hardware counters in supermarkets will generally kill them off within 24 hours. Just keep them covered if using outdo...

I worked in Southall for many years before retiring Clive yet never came across The Workhouse which I must investigate. possibly because most people who didn't live there drove straight in in the morning and straight out at night. The grocery shops are fascinating with their huge range of ethnic foo...

Husband today harvested 3 splendid. elephant garlic bulbs, obviously self sown from the tiny bulbils that often appear around the bulbs. We now have about 9 more little bulbils to sow in a quiet corner and leave to grow into maturity. I've lost track of how long this takes so they may outlive me! CA...

Westi, Registering a Power of Attorney sometimes seems the only way to get through on these issues. A couple of months ago my husband had to register a P of A with my mobile ohone company to resolve an technical issue I couldn't sort out myself. I hand the ohone over to him to talk to them - it was ...

I,m not sure it really matters what you do. The plant will produce to the best of its energy, whether in height or width. We can all try to be purist but the most satisfied growers will probably be those who make allowances for their individual conditions. I've always grown my tomatoes close togethe...