Another really lovely day – starting in North London with mincepies for breakfast at a Forum friend’s and snaffling some excellent spare cookbooks (my favourite winter reading material!) and ending with an impromptu roast dinner with my Mum, which included testing out my saffron in a poached pear recipe. Verdict: as far as I can tell on the one dish, this saffron is gorgeous – so much more depth of flavour than the one I have bought in the past. I need to try it in risotto too.

I got up to the plot for a couple of hours in the afternoon and generally just pottered about. I had two robins for company while I was weeding: they got really excited when I started digging up the oca. Several of my prize worms are now missing.

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from the oca. These are ones I planted out in July after some time in pots. Of the 2 plants I pulled up there are a load of tiddlers, so perhaps I didn’t leave it long enough? The biggest tubers are just under the surface and the peach ones are far less knobbly than the pink and white ones, some of which are just a jumble of knobbly bits. The rest have been covered in plastic bags and a bit of carpet as I guess the plants don’t need light any more and this might keep any deep frosts/rodents off the tubers.

After some huffing and puffing I got the potato bag of oca into the shed – again more as protection from either frosts or mice. These were planted at the end of March so I’ll be interested to see if there is any difference in yield or tuber size…

Then, and this is a clear sign that I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I made a start on clearing all the dead bits off the strawberries. I got about half one bed done, and it does look a LOT better, though it’s a really dull job. If I get some time I’ll have another go tomorrow and see if I can’t get one of them finished off. I’d quite like to have a fire too, with one of the piles of blackthorn lying about.