WE LOVE A BARGAIN!

After I had had my shower, I wandered around the garden in my pink robe, looking for something to photograph for Abstract Thursday, but then I spied Mr HCB. 

As many of you know, he is always up quite early and today was no exception - he tells me he was out in the garden by 6 a.m. but fortunately, he never disturbs me when he gets out of bed!  When I got up just after 7 a.m., he was already out in the garden pulling up weeds, tying in the butternut squashes, picking runner beans, courgettes and chard, watering the tomatoes and cucumbers and the flowers in containers and then planting some little lettuce plants I bought yesterday.  It makes me feel tired just thinking of all he does before I even get up!

Yesterday, I bought a pack of what is called “living lettuce”, which is meant to sit on your kitchen windowsill so you can cut the outer leaves for your salad and then it regrows so you can cut more. However, Mr HCB plants them out in one of his raised beds and told me that in this particular pack there were over 50 plants so for 80p for the whole pack, that’s a bargain, especially when a bag of salad leaves costs almost £2.  

Hopefully, once they have grown and if the slugs don’t get at them, we will have lettuce from the garden for the next couple of months to go with our tomatoes, cucumber and spring onions. 

He’s now in the garden picking blackberries - they are very early this year, I guess because of the hot weather, so I need to decide whether I’m going to freeze them or make chutney, as I did last year.  I also have about ten gherkins in the fridge, so I need to get busy and pickle them, but first, I think I need to dead head some of the flowers in the garden before it gets too hot! 

“The future is carved 
     out of the present moment. 
Tomorrow's harvest depends upon 
     today's ploughing and sowing.”
Chinmayananda Saraswati

P.S.  You can see the Tromboncino going mad in the background - it is now about 8 feet tall and Mr HCB tells me he is training it to come back down!