While Lynn snuck out of bed to source cups of tea and toast, I churned out image after image of Gripple circuitry. I’d woken with a plan in my head and as an ever ready kind of a Scout, I just happen to keep a pad of grid paper by the bed for this sort of occurrence.

Having failed to find wire tensioners in Homebase last week I was pleased when my internet search uncovered a swanky new gadget for creating trellis constructions. It’s called the Gripple and I promptly ordered myself the starter pack of 4 Gripples, 4 Eye Hooks and a 30m reel of plastic wire.

This is where my puzzling started. Using only the above items, how do I (read: how does Lynn) create a fanned peach supporting wire combo with 4 lengths? We went for the 3rd aesthetically pleasing option and headed down to the plot.

I should perhaps have mentioned that we had chosen the weekend of the Severe Adverse Weather Warnings to partake in the peach transplantation event. It was a struggle removing the tree from the old plot with the famed light soil, a layer of ice had to be cracked away before the fork would gain entry and we ought to have thought about the difficulty of digging in our frozen heavy London clay plot.
But we didn’t.

I was keen to play with the new toys but my hands were freezing and I had to run up and down the plot doing high knee raises and clapping my hands before I could contend with the fiddly bits.

The design of the “tensulator” was very smart and when it work I was very impressed. When it didn’t work, I let myself down rather a lot and had one of those, throw yourself on the floor wailing, kinds of a strop. A bit embarassing.

Here I am, pre-wailing, trying to force the wire to go through the Gripple and out the other end so that I could loop it back. No amount of forcing was going to tease the wire through and the thing is designed not to let me pull the wire back out again and it wouldn’t.

Cue strop.

We had to cut it off in the end and Lynn took it away to the shed to perform some kind of surgery on it (or perhaps she thought if she left me alone I’d stop flouncing).

We managed to get this one on successfully in the end but another Gripple got stuck after looping it around and without wasting loads of wire we couldn’t cut this one off. It was in a locked position but couldn’t be tensioned and so the finished job looked a bit naff but worked in a fashion.

I don’t know why we had trouble with two of the Gripples, if I’d had a pack of spares I wouldn’t have got myself too worried but I needed all 4.

The working ones were very neat and it proved easy to build up the tension. Our posts now look decidedly wonky as the incremental tensioning pulled them into an apex.

I would like to have a handful of these in the shed for odd jobs but I’ll still remain concerned about their reliability.

My Dad left me his half tonne mattock after his last visit and a few swings of that saw my back in traction but also cracked the clay.

A robin swooped in to feast on some of the worms I’d just uncovered and reminded me how lovely it is to spend time down on the plot. With the feathering of snow also comes a peaceful calm that I rarely notice anywhere else. It’s a beautiful site.

The recent wet weather has made a huge difference to the clay, it’s incredibly heavy but you can at least force your tools through the surface. We got the peach in and it looked relatively cosy against its snowy backdrop.

Back at home we got to play with the connectable outdoor Christmas lights that Dobbies sent me to try out. We’ve never had outdoor lights before and the new acquisition left me rather popular.

My first attempt at laying them out was snubbed by all though.

I’d trailed them through the letterbox, creating quite a draft and a trip hazard combined, and the lights ran out before they reached the tree base but in my defense it was cold out there and I thought the twinkling effect set the recycling bin off very nicely.

We headed back to Homebase to research outdoor electric options and came back with an enclosed extension lead that we could position at the base of the tree and feed through a specially drilled hole in the window frame.

Our neighbours have kindly planted a leylandii which forms the perfect support for our lights. The kids were able to scrabble up and position the cabling while we stayed at the bottom prepared to catch them.

These Christmas Tree lights were very good quality piece of kit, the cabling is very solid and formed of 3 twined cables with generously spaced bulbs. There is a waterproof connector so that you can join multiple sets without leaving gaps in the lighting. We are quite tempted to go nuts and light up the whole house.

Mushrooms are tricky critters. The line between deadly poisonous and delightfully edible is a vague and fluffy one.

Take the Common or Shaggy Ink Cap as an example, classified in some quarters as an excellent edible it also takes centre stage on our poster of “Some Poisonous Fungi” and is tagged as “dangerous when consumed either 48 hours before or 48 hours after, drinking alcohol”. With a 4 day alcohol free window required, I would say that makes it permanently poisonous for me.
Mind you, it could be just what I need to keep me on the straight narrow in the sober run up to the Great North Wetsuit fitting escapade.

The Death Cap or (Amanita phalloides) is deadly poisonous, apparently responsible for 80% of all mushroom related deaths but it is damn hard to distinguish between that and the edible sister mushroom the Tawny Grisette or Amanita fulva. [Actually my book says it is responsible for 80% of deaths (full stop) and I added the mushroom related bit as I'm pretty sure mushrooms haven't knocked heart disease and cancer off the top rungs of purgatory.]
I’ve labelled the central fungus in this collection as a death cap but have since decided it is a tawny grisette. Just as well we didn’t bring it home or I may be tempted to test out my identification skills in a dodgy roulette style.

I’m afraid my allotment mushroom logs have not sprung into glorious fungal abundance, they remain as two derelict stumps with a stippling of doweling. This colourful collection were snapped on our weekend trip around Longshaw Estate in the Peak District.

We were there in search of the much sought after chip butty of Grindleford caff fame but got rather sidetracked by the mushroomy loveliness of the landscape. We weren’t the only ones, every time I squatted down to gill level, the park warden would pop out of nowhere to bagsy my find. He was supposedly taking a couple of baby wardens on a navigational skills walk but it seemed to have morphed into a tracking skills workshop.

I’m not really complaining, admittedly I don’t like being approached from the rear, especially when I have it partially exposed and facing skywards, but he did prove to be rather useful on the mushroom identification front. I’d be able to rattle off the names of all of them if only either of us had half a memory between us. As it is, we came home with only a vague recollection of names beginning with R and have spent the last 2 days ferreting through every fungal book to hand.

Here’s what we’ve come up with, in a very unreliable fashion, starting in the centre and then going clockwise from top left:
1. Tawny Grisette (Amanita fulva) or possibly the Death Cap, tasty or deadly – you take your choices.
2 & 13. Earthball
3 & 4. Dunno
5. Beechwood Sickener (Russula mairei)
6. Green cracked russula (Russula virescens)????
7. Sulphur tuft or honey fungus, another one of those edible or not choices.
8 & 9. Shaggy Ink Cap
10. Some form of Boletus
11 & 12. Possibly another form of overblown boletus

I’ve been coveting the great round marrow for at least a month, collating assorted round marrow recipes and gathering together the necessary ingredients for marrow jam.

I’ve never tried marrow jam but my Dad informs me that it’s “evocative” and the whole notion made the kids squeal with such horror that I just had to make it.

So the other evening I gathered every knife, saw and axe in the vicinity and set too with courgetty gusto.

I fought valiantly over the first slither but as it fell out onto the chopping board my crest was fallen. Deep orange fleshiness, indicative of a marrow impersonating pumpkin, threatened to scupper my child tormenting breakfast preserve plans.

I remained slumped for a while as the kids hooted and hollered but then I began to perk up some. I had a whole sack of squashy wonders that were earmarked for unsuspecting neighbours and surely a yellow courgette and patty pan jam would be at least as “evocative” as the absent marrow.

Most of the marrow jam recipes available on t’interweb require between 6 and 9lbs of deseeded and peeled squash. That’s way more torment than I required so I began to modify and combine the available combinations and techniques. This could very easily have been my undoing.

I warn all potential jam makers to skim read any recipe like instructions that slip into this post.
Do not repeat.

I started following the methodology from allotment.org.uk, chopping the squash up smallish and covering with a kg of special jam making sugar (complete with pectin) before leaving to do something over night in the fridge.

They came out pretty wet.

I then switched over to bbcgoodfood and continued with the latter stages of their instructions. This involved bagging up lemons carcasses, pips and peel in muslin and boiling away with the sugar and squash mix.

I got called away for an emergency Ikea visitation which delayed the boiling bit for a few hours but I wacked it up high on our return and let it bubble furiously in attempt to turn the courgette chunks mushy. The sugar appeared to caramelise under the assault but the courgettes remained unscathed.

By this point I’d been cooking the jam on and off for 20 hours and I was getting a bit desperate. The gloop wasn’t even remotely interested in setting and the internet suggested I may have destroyed the pectin in the special sugar by over heating. Curses!

I bottled it up regardless and it now sits in the fridge, taunting the children.

Two days later it still hasn’t set.
The yellow courgette slices spin happily in a golden yellow amniotic fluid, I think it is taunting me.

I can report that the taste is pretty good actually. Very marmaladey. A sharp gingery lemoness, that is really quite appealing. I may have another go soon but in the meantime I need to concentrate on getting rid of the pumpkin.