Elephants and Yarn

We had a lovely productive weekend, a fab visit from a good friend and her boys on the Saturday and a day out in the garden getting sorted on the Sunday.

We chopped back our over wintered habanero chilli plants to get rid of some of the aphid damage from last year, there's already new growth on one of them :)

Then we braved the very cold weather to get the elephant garlic planted and replace some of the polythene panels on the greenhouse.

Abi found some garlic cloves in the old bed that had started to grow so we've relocated these.

Hyuge elephant garlic cloves

Abi being shown the ropes by Steve. I think he has some hopes of sending her out to do the emergancy repairs this year ;)

My pretty purple sprouting broccoli, nearly time for picking :)

One finished greenhouse ready for some hard work this year.

The rhubarb just starting to peep through

The morello cherry tree has lots of buds on this year.

The horseradish root is looking nice and healthy too.

One solitary chive making it's way up from what I thought was a dead root ball. This is from the original chive plant which was planted from a shop bought herb in 2007 :)

In other news, my new obsession is yarn. Really, I'm obsessed. I know it, I'm embracing it ;)

I've been purchasing some lovely hand dyed yarns from the interwebs, they come looking like this

To get them into a workeable centre pull ball of yarn I purchased a Nostepinne (although I got mine from Ebay for a smaller sum than that ;) ) I've spent a good portion of today playing with it and have wound 6 skeins of yarn into balls.

It was very therapeutic to do, and although I have now been offered a long term loan of a wool winder I think I might continue with the Nostepinne for small amounts of yarn.

Now I just need to persuade Steve that he needs to make me a swift ;)