An August August

Our taters got blight. Which is sad but luckily we think they've grown enough to be okay underground for a bit. Nonetheless, it was disappointing, if oddly satisfying, to tear out all that greenery, bag it up, and move it off the allotments. Apparently, the whole allotment got blighted. Fortunately, it only affects potato crops - and tomatoes, possibly - so everything else is okay. And there is a lot of everything else! The sweetcorn surpasses the best peaches'n'cream of my childhood; the beets are the very purple of beets; and the beans doth runneth our plates over. Even the peas, which I doubted would amount to anything, bounced back late in the game to deliver a not-so-bad crop. They were an experiment in saving seed from which we learned a valuable lesson or two. Firstly, use organic seed; secondly, F1 hybrid +1 generation seeds do strange and not altogether wonderful things. It's not that the peas aren't edible and sweet and lovely and all that but there are way less pods, they ripened and went tough quite quickly and there weren't nearly the number of peas in each pod. Lessons learned.

I miss the boat and the lake. Aside from my sister's wedding (which was splendid and they were splendid and it was all around a great day), the highlights of our vacation had to be sailing with everyone and swimming in Lake Erie. I'll get by many a rainy English afternoon on those memories!

Our new flat was so much nicer to come home to ... I've forgotten how I ever could have found our damp and dark little back-to-back acceptable. Of course, price did go a long way to reconciling us for 4 years! But I think the light and space in our new flat are worth the extra.

I really should put some pictures up on this 'blog but now that we don't have the internet hooked up at home, that really does require an effort. Words will have to suffice for now.