A Wintery Reception

 The Snow Thaws 

With a downpour of cold sleeting rain, a sudden surge of 10°C to melt the rigid loam in my pots, enabling some digging and planting quickly before the next possibility of a freeze. There's signs of winter around the yard, the usual garden guests looking for an easy meal or a refreshing drink. Buds appearing to start the spring yet the first day of winter is now upon the yard. I'm so keen to be picking my own apples I may show exuberance in my selection of orchard trees, now perusing the space wondering what I'm going to do with 100kg of apples and some plums. The BBC website is good for recipe and food ideas and I belong to a couple of online cooking app clubs which is fantastic for finding and sharing recipes. The BBC goes from a range of amazingly fancy and posh dinner party worthy, Come Dine With Me eat your heart out, to really basic budget student cost of living feed the family for a 5er a week type of menu plans. It's quite a good read! The apps I find pretty much any country and any person with a phone also any diet lifestyle choice option included. I love to see peoples inventive ideas on the table and the way that they photo and record their own recipes for food gives me a smile. It's fab too when they share where the idea for the recipe is from, like my grandmother taught me this recipe, or if I threw a mega dinner party we'd eat this, or when I moved to a different country this recipe made me feel more at home, or when I left home this is how I survived type thing. A way to socialise and compare notes on dinner is one of the things that we can be human about, people need to eat so let's be civil about it too. My mini orchard is my proudest achievement of 2022 feeling leads to thinking of quite what it is I started in my small back yard. Lot's of people start back yard projects and there's so many things people think of, I'm sure my apples won't go completely amiss. Not trusting the Bees to be 100% reliable in finding my blossoms this summer I'm considering nurturing some especially for the job. I signed up to work with the Trust to find the best way to do that, it's a learning curve. I only knew 4 of 11 answers correctly on the entrance exam so some further studying is obviously necessary! I passed though and am on the way to 'Bee-ing' more successful. Winter flowers are on my calendar and the Winter flowering Honeysuckle Bush has caught my imagination and swayed me thusly. Highly scented white blooms on bare branched stems in mid winter flowering in the snow like a wintertime perfumers dream.

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