A gooseberry named Careless...

The shed arrived yesterday!...yipee! We didn't have enough time to put it up though sadly. Chris for some reason thought we'd need longer than an hour...can't think why we always manage to get our massive tent up together without too many problems/arguments/tears/blood...a shed can't be that much harder can it? 

But anyway we had a free day today so it seemed sensible to give it a whole day and not rush it, but as all great British plans we got well and truly rained off. I think we could have bared the rain but small boy in rain on an allotment that turns into a slippery mud slide was just an ask too far. So my little shed is lying gracelessly under tarpaulin til we get a chance to to put it up. It will have to wait til after the Easter weekend now because we have family coming and easter hunts to organise, the house is awash with chocolate:)

Yesterday with the time I did have with the sun shining brightly (ha) I watched a real life buzzard flying over the allotment which I got almost as excited about as the crows that were dive bombing it. Funny, that as beautiful and amazing as I found it to see, all the poor crows saw was big trouble.

When I stopped being all David Attenborough I also managed to plant my strawberry plants that I bought last year for the bargain price of 50p a plant. I got a few different varieties that cover the early, mid and late fruiting period but then I started to wonder about pollination, like you do and got a little puzzled. If a bee (hopefully a few) comes along and pollinates one plant then moves onto the next which is a different variety do the runners from that parent plant then become a mix of the 2? Will it still be an 'Alice' or will it be a 'Honeoye-Alice' (or whatever combination) will I have confused strawberries? Does it really matter as long as the bees come along and do their thing and we get strawberries at all? Apart from making nonsense of spending quite a long time (almost an embarrassing amount of time) searching through the sea of strawberries to get the mix of plants I have. Oh I have so much too learn!

I also planted a gooseberry bush that I bought from my local city farm which has a great little garden centre (as well as a fantastic cafe!) I've been going to Heeley city farm for years, first when my big boys were young and now with small boy, the only difference being middle boy was terrified of the pigs, small boy loves them with a passion. It is a true test of parenting quite how long you can actually stand and stare at a pig before you have to resort to cafe cake bribery:)  

I still have a bay tree that I bought from the the farm when my eldest boy was tiny, it has moved (in its large pot) with us 3 times now and is still a beautiful and useful tree all these years later. I don't know if the little gooseberry will last as long as that but it is called 'Careless' and how could I resist a plant with a name like that? I don't even like gooseberries...well I am trying to retrain my taste-buds, I don't think I like gooseberries but I've never had my own gooseberries. I quite fancy getting a red variety at some point, somehow red fruit appeals more to me. But for now a gooseberry named Careless and a strawberry like Alice will do me fine:)

Right better get those eggs hidden before I'm tempted to eat them all myself...