My normal thinking towards plants is ‘if you can’t eat it, I am not much interested’. Granted, this is just one end of my potting bench in the tunnel, but how many of these can you actually eat?

Now we have eaten various flowers in the past, nasturtiums for one, marigolds for another. We have made nettle soup too - I had some for my birthday a couple of years back (yes it was nice before you ask!). I really wonder though how many of these you can actually eat. Sunflowers? I doubt it and there sure won’t be enough for sunflower oil…

Livingston Daisy? Nope. Callendula - possibly. Rudbekia - no idea! At least there will be no shortage of flowers in the house garden. We bought some perennials last year and these are establishing nicely. Hopefully these annuals will impress all the dog walkers and passers by!

The Callendula and Rudbekia will need potting on very soon. They should then be at just the right stage for planting out at the end of May when all danger of a late frost has passed.

The right hand tray of Rudbekia, cucumbers, alpine strawberries and the Livingston Daisy belong to a good friend who is dabbling in gardening in the polytunnel with me having lost her greenhouse to may way for a very in keeping extension to their old cottage.

What I am impressed with though (apart from the progress of my seedlings) is the photo editing side of flickr. Flickr is where I host my photos for the blog and a couple of forums (fori?) and I only tonight ventured into the editing side of the website. Quite good don’t you think?

Given the success of the Bertinet white loaf, I had a bash at a 50/50 white/wholemeal loaf using his recipe again. This was certainly a success too and with the reduced salt tastes great. The loaf below is from my second batch where I doubled up the quantities to make two loaves.

What can I try next? I am tempted with his Puff Balls - a big ball of crisp dough into which you insert a salad! Watch this space….

We regularly made all our own bread, but kind of got out of the habit of doing so last summer - there was too many other things to do and little time for kneading dough! Both parents and friends have breadmakers (and love them) but seeing the Rayburn is on in the evenings and the ovens in it are hot, it makes no sense for us to burn more leccy when we are paying through the nose for oil!

I have been trying to use Richard Bertinet’s recipes, but have managed to get into a right mess doing them by hand. His dough is VERY wet, and on each try I have ended up with webbed hands. I have always had to surrender and fling on more flour to dry up the dough.

I was luck on Saturday to collect a Kenwood Chef from Jen in Dunbar through Freecycle. I have been considering one for a while now and after blagging a dough hook from my wee brother I had a bash at his recipe in the Chef and all turned out perfect!

The bread was slightly salty having 1/2 oz of salt so this will be reduced next time. I am going to have a bash at a wholemeal loaf next time using a 50/50 white/wholemeal flour mix.

The flour came from Heatherslaw Mill between Ford and Etal in Northumberland. It’s about an hour’s drive for us but fortunately my parents were passing it last week after having been visiting friends in Hexham - Don’t say Brown, say Hovis!

I wish I had done mine more often.

I have been trying to do the rear differential oil seal on the Land Rover for a few days but I could not get the castellated nut off. I had blagged a slot on the local garage ramp for this morning so I could get my weight behind my wrench - I was struggling lying underneath it, trying to push upwards and no amount of WD40 helped.

I imagined my rear axle was completely dry of oil due to the dodgy oil seal but there has been an increasing vibration in the rear end over the last two days. This morning on the way to the garage it was very bad. I ended up driving at 20mph because it was like sitting on top of a badly loaded spin drier!

It turned out that the ramp in the garage was still occupied but their pit was free so I drove over it and descended with my tools. I was both pleased and disappointed to see that the rear propeller shaft universal joint was about to fall to bits. Pleased because it was clear what had been causing the vibration and disappointed because I did not have a replacement and it was just another job to add to my list.

I removed the prop shaft and laid it on the garage bench. Next time I passed the bench, the required parts to fix it had been laid out beside it! I then managed to remove the castelated nut but only with the aid of a high pressure air line wrench. It was well and truly tight! Now the workshop manual says something like: “remove castelated nut, withdraw pinion, remove oil seal. Refitting is the reverse procedure.” I thought I would be half an hour …..

Could I get the oil seal out? No. Could the guys at the garage? No. Brute force….. then we realised it was a non-standard diff and we had broken it but attacking it with a big screwdriver and hammer. I now had two choices: order a new broken bit which might arrive in a day or two or try and lay my hands on a second hand diff. I opted for the latter because I have 2 contacts for such items. First call was to Hugh’s “Land Rover Emporium” Hugh did have a diff but was on his way to Aberdeen and would not be able to get it to me for a couple of days. Second call was to Graham who we have recently discovered - he has about 40 old Landy’s in a farm steading and various portakabins full of parts. Graham had a second hand diff which he had taken off a low mileage Coastguard Land Rover and it was mine for £40. The problem was that he is about 25 miles away and my Landy was in bits.

My third call was to near neighbours who are also Land Rover addicted. I needed to scrounge transport! So I had a half mile walk from the garage to the bus stop, then a bus trip to my loan Landy, then home to feed the pigs, then 25 miles to Graham to collect my Coastguard diff. I had hoped to pick up a good second hand rear prop shaft too, but sadly it was not to be.

Drive back to garage and hope that new diff is the same ratio as the old one….count the teeth on the crown wheel on both and very pleased that they were the same. Then I had to strip off the old diff & remove the rear half shafts ready to fit the Coastguard diff. It was at this point that I noticed that the Coastguard diff did not have an oil filler hole! Now I had read about this in a Landy mag, but stupidly did not check when at Grahams. Now the diff would fit, but I could not get the oil in! The guys at the garage were not phased “just drill a hole in the axle” was the comment… Drill a hole in the axle? No chance! “No, drill a hole in the axle then weld a nut over the hole and screw a bolt into the nut with a copper washer as a seal - we do it all the time!” And that’s just what we did. I was left to drill a hole in my precious axle though - Ronald did the welding despite having cracked his sternum in a stock car at the weekend.

That whole process took until about 4pm, then there was the universal joint on the propshaft to refurbish. this looks quite simple but is actually awkward and needs to be done accurately if the job is to last. The problem was that one of the cups on the sprider/cross piece had obviously fallen out several miles ago and the finger on the cross had been bashing against the hole in the yolk and dented it - this meant that fitting the circlip which hold the new cup in place was quite tricky and it took a few attempts to get it to sit in properly. I still don’t think it’s 100% and might well buy a new propshaft just to make absolutely sure.

The garage only took £20 for their pit hire/spare parts/welding/advice/banter. If I had stuck the Landy in a garage and asked for the oil seal to be done (a new oil seal is £1!) I would have ended up paying for a replacement diff, propshaft and fitting parts asnd several hours labour at £30 an hour and been without transport for several days. So whilst today was an absolute nuisance, it sure could have been worse. I learned a lot about my Landy and quite enjoyed doing the work, despite having my head in my hands on more than one occasion.

If only I had greased the nipples on the universal joint, perhaps the circlip would have stayed put, and the universal joint would have stayed intact…so remember and grease your nipples regularly, or have someone do it for you if you have trouble reaching them.

(Sorry for the lack of pictures in this post but I was covered in oil from stem to stern and dared not touch my camera!)

During the winter we watched A Victorian Kitchen Garden on DVD and I was inspired to have a go at making a hot bed for my cucumbers. The hens needed mucking out today and my cucumber seeds are through so I went up the the big tunnel after lunchtime to start.

The very first thing I needed to do was ventilate the tunnel - it has been a glorious day but with a slight breeze. The temperature inside the tunnel was 80F! I was soon down to my shirt sleeves for the first time this year. I finished in the tunnel in the late afternoon and when closing up all the vents the temperature inside was still 70F.

So, making a hot bed! I have never done this before so it’s a bit of an experiment. Perhaps the fresh chicken manure will be too hot for the cuc’s roots, but only time will tell. It’s going to have a few weeks to settle down anyway before the young plants will be ready for planting out. Even then I will probably have to cover them with fleece ‘cos they are tender wee things.

I began by digging a trench down the middle of one of my clean, weed free raised beds, making sure to chuck the spoil on the right hand side. I then forked over the base of the trench ready to dig it out again.

I then dug out a second cut and chucked the spoil onto the left hand side this time. You need to keep the spoil from each cut separate so you can back fill properly. The base of the trench was then forked over again to break up the heavy clay.

Then I went and mucked out the hens - the first barrow load of fresh muck went into the bottom of the trench and after being lightly compacted (don’t tramp it down too much - it needs some air to help it rot down) the spoil on the left hand side was used to cover over the first layer of muck.

Then it was back to finish mucking out the hens and bring in a second barrow load of muck which was laid on top of the freshly backfilled soil and tramped down a bit (it was beginning to mound up nicely!)

I think you can now guess the next step! Yep cover the 2nd layer of muck with the spoil on the right hand side. I thought it was beginning to look very professional at this stage

Notice my new spade - a present from my folks which they spotted in that well known German discount supermarket…the one beginning with A….£6 I think they said it was but its very useful - nice long handle made from FSC wood.

Here’s the completed hot bed with the sides all tidied up and a thermometer stuck in. It will be interesting to see just how hot it does get - it was at 20C when I was leaving but I had only just stuck the thermometer in so I would take that with a pinch of salt!

Once the temperature settles down and the cucumber plants are established enough to be planted out, I will plant 4 along the top of the ridge. Cuc’s like squashes don’t like moisture around their necks so being high on the ridge should prevent this. When I am planting them out I normally sink the plant’s pot in the soil beside the plant - this makes watering much easier and directs the water right down to the roots where it’s needed rather than it running all over the surface of my heavy clay soil and evaporating.

I will try and note the temperatures here from time to time!