Just couldn't be doing with it...

Brassicas go into a raised bed

I hope I don't give the impression here that trying to get stuff to grow on an allotment is a care-free jape, in which the protagonists - us in this case - skip merrily from one bountiful crop to the next, nary a care in the world as all around nature provides a soundtrack of pastoral idyll. But, just in case I have done, let the following stand as a corrective.

Restaurant Review: The Herb Garden, Newcastle upon Tyne

When doing these restaurant write-ups I've spent a bare minimum of time talking about the actual interiors of the buildings in which we've been sat. I'm generally a good deal more interested in the stuff on the plate than the carpets, lights and other bits and bobs you have to throw together to create something called a "room". Maybe my priorities are changing with age, or maybe it's because recent meals out have involved a repetitive -ad nauseaum almost - diet of chemistry lab stools, exposed brick and filament light-bulbs, but The Herb Garden, sited in a railway arch just round the corner from Central Station, may just be the first restaurant in which I've enjoyed being sat there looking around more than the food itself. Not, I hasten to add, that there was anything drastically wrong with the meal we had; but the do-out is both pretty unusual and a real looker.

Green Is The New Brown

Broad bean flowers

A flat-out stunner of a weekend on the plot, and no little progress made. Blue skies all day long on Saturday and - bonus! - nearly all of Sunday too, contradicting more gloomy forecasts. The allotment is, slowly, beginning to look a lot greener and a good deal less brown, as plants of all persuasions begin to put on a proper bit of growth. The ground is alive with the promise of a decent harvest to come.

Bittersweet Plot Action

Strawberry flowers are out!

Both the great and the awful sides of allotmenteering were in evidence today. The good bit was that, amply aided by Kasia's mum, we got a load done and the place is looking damned neat and tidy, at least by our standards. The other side of things is that there has been further damage to both the water system and a number of allotments. As in the past, this was directed chiefly against committee members. The sheer dedication to such boneheaded gittery - these comedians must be getting up halfway through the night in order to avoid detection - is astonishing. Anyway, I haven't much to say about that which doesn't involve a vast and unending torrent of expletives, which would make for poor, and indeed demoralising, reading, so lets focus on what we got done.