A couple of days ago I then ordered a weed puller from Amazon, and it arrived today.

I was a wee bit doubtful that it would really be worth the money, but it’s great! It pulls up a dandelion within a couple of seconds, and often with the entire root attached.

Parts of it are made of plastic, but it looks reasonably sturdy, so I would definitely recommend this tool to all gardeners!

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Our old greenhouse lost a few panes during Hurricane Bawbag, and somewhat bizarrely the insurance company decided it would rather give us a new greenhouse instead of replacing the two broken panes.

So today two guys from Evander turned up with a half-assembled greenhouse.

However, the one they brought was significantly bigger than the old one (same width, but much deeper), so they had to build it in a different location from the old one.

I’m well chuffed, however – I’ve been annoyed for years that the old one was too wee.

The old drawback is that I now need to move the fig tree and the grape vine into the new greenhouse, and the ivy out of it, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it!

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Det er nu rart, når vinteren endelig siger helt farvel, og man kan sidde udenfor i solen og spise morgenmad uden overtøj på.

I år har vejret virkelig haft travlt i den sidste uge – det er præcist en uge siden, børnene byggede årets sidste snemand.

Nu gælder det så om at få smidt nogle frø i jorden – hvis det går som det sidste par år, slutter sommeren nok midt i august, så der er ingen tid at spilde!

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Da der for en gangs skyld faldt ordentlige mængder sne i den forgange uge, besluttede jeg mig for at bygge en iglo til børnene i haven.

Alle danskere har vel i skolen og på TV hørt så meget om Grønland, at principperne for iglobygning er velkendte.

Phyllis virkede dog ret chokeret, som om det var noget meget eksotisk og mystisk at bygge sig en simpel iglo.

Måske glemmer danskere nogle gange, hvor meget Grønland egentlig fylder i dansk kultur. Jeg burde nok prøve at skaffe Nissebanden på Grønland på DVD, så Léon, Anna og Amaia kan lære lidt mere om det store kolde land.

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I’m a member of the Heritage Seed Library, which means that I get five interesting seed packets every winter.

This year’s delivery included achocha seeds.

I sowed them in my greenhouse, and the plant was really vigorous and tried to take the over the world.

In the end, it didn’t produce a lot of fruit compared to the amount of plant growth – just one small plate of achochas (see the photo).

Now I need to find out what to use them for. They taste like cucumbers, but the skin is leathery and they contain large stony pips, so they’re not good for eating raw.

Apparently you can stuff them and bake them, but they’re tiny – about the size of my thumb – so it would be a lot of effort for a small starter.

Any ideas?

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We noticed that a potato plant had started growing out of an opening in our composter (or our dalek, as we prefer to call it).

When I dug it out, it had grown only one new potato, but it was probably the weirdest-looking spud I had ever seen.

It clearly had a face, as can be seen on the photo, but it didn’t look anything like Jesus, as you would have expected from all the media stories about people seeing him in their toast or Ikea’s toilet.

It most closely resembled a troll, so I must conclude it was a Jesus troll.

We had it for dinner yesterday.

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During our stay in Devon, we went on a daytrip to the Eden Project near St. Austell in Cornwall.

It’s supposed to be one of the UK’s main tourist attractions, and most visitors did look very happy.

I thought it was an eery place, however.

Basically, it’s supposed to be “a living theatre of plants”, and its “mission is to tell the world the story of plants that changed history”.

I guess it does that very well (although there seems to be an emphasis on plants used in herbal medicine), but it also achieves it literally: There are no animals!

Compare it to the delightful Randers Regnskov in Denmark, and the difference couldn’t be greater.

Randers Regnskov is teeming with life, but Eden’s huge greenhouses are strangely quiet – no insects, no birds, nothing.

To me, it breaks the illusion completely: No matter how well they reconstruct a Mediterranean landscape, an indivisible part of that consists of the background noices made by the animals. How can you believe even for a second that you’re in a rainforest if nothing’s moving and the fruit is rotting away uneaten on the branches of the trees?

To be fair, the place is not completely dead. There are plenty of Cornish ants, and I also spotted a robin next to their banana plantation, but that just made the absence of tropical fauna even more painful.

I wonder how they keep the place so barren. Not only are there no animals, but I didn’t see many weeds, either, and in a tropical climate you’d expect every square millimetre to be overgrown within a fortnight.

I think I hated the place so much because it was so stunning. The greenhouses (or biomes, as they call them) are enormous and full of the most amazing plants.

If they handed over the site to the people behind Randers Regnskov, it could become a true Eden.

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Last year Phyllis was quite upset that I forgot to grow potatoes, and my life was only saved by a few plants that appeared out of nowhere (or rather, I must have left a few tubers in the ground the year before).

So this year is to become the year of the home-grown potatoes.

However, which varieties should we grow?

It’d be nice to grow something that you don’t often see in shops, such as these Mayan potatoes.

Any recommendations?

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When we bought our house two years ago, we started planting a lot of stuff and generally doing up the garden.

One of the first trees we planted was a crab apple of the cultivar John Downie, which we chose because it was said to be the best crab apple for making jellies.

Alas, it also turned out to be very susceptible to apple scab, and although we could to some extent control it with an antifungal spray, it was clearly spending all its strength fighting off the disease instead of producing apples, so I have now removed it.

I was surprised by its lack of root when I pulled it up – the poor thing clearly didn’t even have enough resources to send out roots!

Anyway, we now need a new crab apple tree, and preferable one that is as resistant to apple scab as possible.

I don’t think any fully resistant trees are available in the UK, so I’m thinking about either a Red Sentinel or a Pink Glow, or perhaps an Evereste.

Can anybody here recommend one?

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Sidste år købte jeg tre pakker stokrosefrø, blandede dem, såede dem i vindueskarmen og plantede dem ud.

Mange af dem er nu gået til, og andre er stadig ret små.

Men dem, jeg plantede ved siden af paradisæbletræet, gror, som blev de betalt for det!

Rækværket på billedet er lidt lavere end mig, så de er omkring 2 meter høje.

I dag åbnede den første blomst sig så.

Knopperne var lidt gullige, så vi havde egentlig forventet gule blomster, men de viste sig at være hudfarvede (eller ferskenfarvede, hvis man skal være venlig) men gul midte. Jeg véd godt, de ser lyserøde ud på billedet, men det er lidt misvisende.

Det bliver noget af et syn, når de alle står i fuldt flor!

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