The waiting game

As you know, I don't do gardening.
Anything that is vaguely green in our house has been nurtured by Blight-of-my-life. It will only have survived through her efforts and in spite of my malign influence.

The stuff that I do in the garden isn't horticulture, it's civil engineering.

Recently. I've also been doing what is best described as 'rough carpentry', at the allotment. I've been hammering in pegs and nailing together bits of wood to surround the various vegetable plots, to accompany the posts and wires that will support the raspberries.
I was really looking forward to the raspberries. They are probably my favourite pie filling, so I needed very little encouragement to make the necessary preparations for their arrival. Unfortunately, due to some kind of clerical malfunction, our order for the plants got lost so we've missed this season's delivery.
Ah well....

One of the other plots is for asparagus. This is not a vegetable for the impatient, as it takes about three years to get anything like a sensible crop from the plants, but if the taste of a fresh-from-the-soil, home grown asparagus spear outclasses that of shop-bought it may be worth the wait. Last season's spuds from the allotment were an order of magnitude tastier than anything from Tesco's, so I'm hopeful.

Knowing how slow asparagus is to develop, there was considerable excitement the other day, when the first green shoots were detected. Well, actually they're a sort of purple rather than green, but you can't keep a good cliche down.