The thing with our Mistress is that she doesn’t know when to quit. Last year her pumpkin patch was doing well, until Aristotle ran through it and damaged all the bits that were trailing from the planters, killing them all. Then there was the year she grew cauliflower and broccoli, and they were all eaten by the caterpillars. There weren’t many peas and they didn’t taste great. The fennel did ok, but no one but our Mistress would eat it. That would be enough to put most people off, but now she’s off again. She is focussing on the positives. The carrots haven’t been too bad and we all like those and she can grow fairly spectacular parsnips so I’m guessing they are easy! Oh I forgot her attempt at sweet potatoes, which might have worked if we’d lived a couple of hundred miles further south. This year, the carrot beds have been moved to where she hopes they will get more sunlight and been given better soil. The parsnip bed is ready for planting and she’s branching out (if you’ll pardon the pun) into potatoes, which she doesn’t really eat many of. She grows everything organically, which is why it’s a bit more hit and miss… or in her case miss and miss. Stage one of the exercise is complete, or it would be if she hadn’t run out of compost! She needs some more for the potatoes. Next week she needs to move on to stage two – which is the first of the planting. We don’t really mind as we get to spend time outside ‘helping’ her, although I use that term loosely. I seem to trip her up, Wilma plays in the soil and Ari stands on two legs so he can eat anything interesting that we can’t reach. Only Shadow potters off by herself not getting in the way.
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