Lettuce be lovers..............

We've eaten produce from the garden every day this week - sometimes twice, if nothing else to keep the rampaging lettuce crops under control. The Boy has gone a bit crazed, bringing out new trays of seedlings (mostly lettuce) from the greenhouse nearly every day to fill in the every decreasing gaps in the already overburdened borders, raised beds and pots. With the warmer weather, everything is sprouting really fast - I can't get down the path beside the garage without fighting my way through a jungle of potato plants (now in flower, so not long til the first crop), the greenhouse is full of tomato, radish, pepper, aubergine, okra and strawberry plants, there's chard, curly kale and broccoli, cavolo nero, celery, leeks, garlic, shallots, spring onions, beetroot,carrots, blueberries, strawberries, cherries and plums outside and courgettes, squash cucumbers sprouting in the compost bins and herbs fairly burgeoning on the potager.

It's just unfortunate that all that's actually ready at the moment is lettuce - 10 different sorts, it's true, but lettuce all the same................to be fair, we DID eat the first of the peas on Sunday, stewed up in that particularly delicious Spanish tapa-like way with little bits of jamon and garlic, but since then it's been lettuce. All the way.

I've been doing the proofs for a staff evacuation plan for one of the clients today. They're a small company operating in a support role on an on-shore oilrig somewhere in one of the less stable parts of the world. They've suddenly decided, what with terr and the war thereon, porcine and avian flu and being in a pretty jungly sort of a place where insurgency and coups are, shall we say, the norm, that they need a staff evacuation and Crisis Management plan. The Boy has gathered together pretty much everything there is to know about any sort of emergency, both natural and not and has spent a week writing a coverall policy. There are pages and pages, covering flood, hurricane, tempest, plague, wildfires, earthquakes, civil unrest and the rest. What it boils down to in essence is: Managers: Keep a helicopter on standby on the roof and get in it at the earliest possible opportunity. Staff: Kiss your sorry arses goodbye.

I corrected the grammar and syntax of 64 pages this afternoon, sitting in the sun on my verandah. That was the introduction. I lost the will to live at about 4.30 and had to eat a couple of slices of banana cake. I have five more similarly sized sections to correct and he's STILL writing it. Still, what we'll get paid will go some way towards the huge second home tax bill we have to pay for the other house this year, which seems to have increased by a phenominal amount since last May. I may have to insert the babelfish and ring up the belastingsdienst to see what the hell's going on.

In the meantime, there's always lettuce...................

I don't know if I've done this right, but.....

I've been writing a blog that wasn't a blog for the past fourteen months, whilst studying abroad. The BTWAB came about because I had no internet access at the house and because I was too mean and stingy to go to the internet cafe and pay for the privilege, so I used to type a diary every day onto the laptop then, once a week, load it onto a lollystick and send it home here to Bugville where my friend Mr Bursar would disseminate it to interested parties. By the time I finally came back to Bugville (three weeks ago), it amounted to some 140,000 words, I'd become addicted to the actual process of 'getting something down' every day and my readership had become addicted to reading it.

Here we are then.

It's a cold, wet old day in Bugville in deep contrast to yesterday when The Boy and I spent the day in the garden, readying it for the glorious summer we're (perhaps) going to have. We borrowed Little B and Mr Bursar's power washer and wooshed three years of mould off the verandah which doesn't sound too exciting, but when we'd finished and it was back to woody not mossy and we sat there drinking wine in a self-congratulatory way, we were quite excited. Such is the stuff of life for the Pinnywearer.

The Boy has filled the greenhouse with teeny little trays of salading seedlings, the peas are planted out, the back raised border is dug over and ready for brassicas and beans, the tom plants are coming on apace, the little raised beds are full of green shoots and the spuds are earthed up. There's a new cucumber house, the butternuts have sprouted and the courgette plants are perky and healthy, as we will be when we've chewed our way through that lot later int he year.

The Boy has added a new recipe to his repertoire. He is a fine cook, in the Jamie mould, having had to hone his skills or starve to death whilst I was away, but he tends to stick to the same things. No sin in that, says I, but ragout, risotto, slow roasted meats and sausage, mash and onion gravy get a little dull after a while. Yesterday we introduced him to the fine art of the salade tiede, comprising frisee from the garden, eggs poached from scratch without the aid of a plastic egg poacher, a fine vinaigrette flavoured with fresh tarragon from the herb patch and crispy bacon lardons. As this dish requires skills and timing to get it right (don't dress the salad too early, don't overdo the eggs and remember to dry and trim them whilst still keeping them hot, keep the bacon warm and get them and the warm dressing onto the egg p.d.q), it was a pretty startlingly good first attempt. We ate it with rye bread and followed it with a Coq au vin blanc, leeks from the garden and steamed spuds with parsley butter.

Today, I've been watching the rain sheet down, doing the ironing and getting the expenses plugged into the spreadsheet as the VAT is due at the end of the week. Darling giveth and he taketh away..............