No time to dwell.......

As Manchester United begin their year long reign as the second best team on the planet (by a country mile I have to admit!) I can now devote the rest of the summer to worrying about whether I'll be good enough to get into the tickets at this year's shows. More importantly I have to make sure I have 6 decent veg for the set of six at Harrogate to fend off the gobby Huddersfield (and Ingleton) contingent which shouldn't be too difficult.

It will soon be time to start harvesting my large shallots when they reach my desired size of 45mm. By measuring them each day with my new digital vernier I can tell they are putting on about 2.5mm in diameter every 4 days. I expect to start harvesting between the 7th to about the 12th of June therefore, but only if there are still fresh green shoots emerging from the growing point as in the photo below. If there isn't it means the shallot has started into its secondary growth cycle and will probably go double and be no good for showing. 



I haven't shown the carrots i'm growing in pipes in the greenhouse for a while but I have to say i'm quite happy with the way they appear to be growing considering i've never grown them this way before. The stump carrots 'Caradec' in the smaller pipes are also growing pretty well.

My Sweet Candle stumps are looking healthy in their enviromesh frames but then again they did last year too. It was only at pulling time that I realised I had 60 octopi ! I'm hoping the cups will concentrate water straight to the roots and prevent my borehole mix getting too dry.

My onions are at last starting to grow having been planted into the greenhouse border for over 4 weeks now. I'll never grow decent large specimens until I can get proper heating and lighting during the winter months but these should make a couple of pounds or so. After the longest day in June they'll start to swell and the more leaves you can have by then the bigger the onion will be. Using Dynamec this season for the first time means I have no sign of thrip damage yet.

The small canes and plastic clips have now made way for three larger canes around each onion and string to support the foliage and keep the onion growing upright to create a symmetrical bulb that is so important on the show bench

I may leave these until well into August as I shan't be wanting any onions for exhibition until the first week in September. By which time the football season will have started again and there'll still be a gulf in class between Man U and Huddersfield. Or Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea come to that!

Almost liftoff

Pretty much all the hard back-breaking work is now done in terms of shifting tonnes of sand, boring holes, lugging bales of peat, planting spuds and getting greenhouse frameworks sorted. A good job too as I've lost so much weight i'm now only 14stone 6lbs and am wasting away. From now on it's a lot of sowing, planting, feeding, tying up, tweaking and generally fannying about in order to make sure your stuff stays fit and healthy for the next few months.

I got 50 late sown onion plants in today, the so-called Frisco variety which is probably Tasco as Frisco appears not to exist. I planted them in this long bed through a weed suppressant membrane as I am still trying to eradicate bindweed from it.

My tomatoes are looking good as are the 'Bonica' aubergines I've planted in front of them. I've never had plants look this big and this healthy before so hopefully i'll be able to exhibit some for the first ever time this year. There is a danger they could get shaded out by the tomatoes as they climb up into the greenhouse ridge but we shall see. Ideally you want to be planting them in a separate bed with plenty of sunlight but as I haven't got that luxury I will have to manage. The bed was well rotavated and a good layer of horse muck put in the bottom which I hope will benefit both crops. The bottomless watering pots will also feed both.

And it will soon be time to put my gobby predictions into practise and sow my peas for Llangollen. The two inclined poles will be carrying my runner beans, the first sowings of which germinated today. I have some new plans on how to grow runners this season and will be going into this in June. The row where the spade is sticking out had a deep trench dug last weekend and an 8" layer of horse muck layered into the bottom of it. This is where I hope to be growing a couple of rows of the best peas ever witnessed at National level or else I'll run round the streets of Llangollen naked shouting Ian Stocks is my hero. In front of that are my bags of Kestrel and NVS Amour spuds.

All kinda exciting aint it?

Permission to swear Captain Mainwaring?

In a previous post I mentioned the plastic and mesh covers that I'd made for my long carrot drums. I remarked that they wouldn't win any awards for joinery. Well they won't win any awards for f*cking staying put in high winds either. I got home at lunch time today to find them on their sides in various states of disrepair, having scraped across the top of several carrots in the process. The wind was so bad it took me all my time to temporarily lash them down back in position so time will tell whether more serious damage has been done to my showing ambtions for this season! I really should have fixed them down in the first place. Ho hum.

It was a highly productive weekend otherwise as I got 12 pea plants planted for a show in early July. I mistimed these last season and had them ready the week before so hopefully i'll go one better this time. I also managed to get 15 bags of Kestrel potatoes planted in bags. It really is a case of throwing them together this season, a handful of calcified seaweed and a handful of Tev04 into each bag of unsieved peat and hoping for the best. I also have 15 bags of Casablanca and 10 bags of NVS Sherine with a dozen bags of NVS Amour to follow this weekend.



I spent a good few hours getting my celery planting positions prepared. I've struggled to get enough water to them in the past, and despite drenching the raised beds regularly I reckon most of it just runs away without getting to the roots in sufficient volume. Having noted how my tomatoes grow so well in bottomless pots and seeing how Medwyn grew his for Chelsea I positioned these large bottomless pots into the soil, really screwing them down deep. The soil was then scooped out and sieved free of all lumps and stones, and mixed with dried blood and nutrimate. Before replacing the boosted and sieved soil I put some horse muck in a bucket and filled with water overnight to create a nice wet slurry. A couple of inches of this wet dung was put into the base of the bottomless pots and the soil replaced, the celery being planted into this. Hopefully the bog loving plants will thrive after getting their feet into the horse muck and the pots will allow me to get water straight to the roots of the plants.

I'm growing 12 plants of Evening Star....

....although one of them shows no sign of the purple tingeing, being totally pale and a throwback to one of the parent lines no doubt.

Here is one of the finished beds. Note the sacrificial hostas in the background (I'll still apply a few pellets) and the smaller bottomless pots around the plants to start the 'drawing' process. I won't be collaring until 6-8 weeks before the show date. I will also erect some form of barrier over the plants towards August to keep celery blight off and will be spraying against celery leaf miner which has been a real pest for me in the past.

Elsewhere I got around to getting some strips of black weed suppressant material around the base of my parsnips. I'm told this will help fend off parsnip attack as when the spores on the leaves 'sporelate' (is that a real word Thornton?) they will land on the material rather than the growing medium and hence cannot get at the crown of the root. We shall see. I also won't win any awards for the tidiest looking parsnip drums!

Old pals act

A few months ago I put forward the challenge to my northern blogging cousins Unsworth and Bastow that we should all enter the set of 6 at the NVS Northern Branch Championships at Harrogate and have a little side wager on who comes out on top. As the Northern Branch is in itself held alongside the Northern Horticultural Society Championships it would therefore be a sort of mini-show within a show within a show! If anyone else fancies having a go (you need to be a relative novice like what we all is!) then you need to send your tenner to David Thornton of the NVS who has agreed to act as purse holder. Winner takes all. I am of course immensely looking forward to taking some money out of Yorkshire.




The more I think of this the more I realise it's a good way of entering an event like this that you might not have dared enter before. By persuading one or more pals to have a go too you can have your own little competition whilst getting vegetables benched next to the very best showmen in the land so that you can compare yours with theirs and see how far you have to improve. You may well have a nice surprise and save yourself years of getting cold feet otherwise. Even the great John Branham took some persuading to have a go at his first Branch Championships in the 80's. The other night at North East Derby DA he told us how he arrived at the showground in Reading at 1.30 in the morning with a car full of veg and went to the organisers' table to get his entry tickets. He then had a look round at what had already been staged. When he got back to his car he said to his wife "We're going home!" Luckily she persuaded him to stage and the rest is history, as he's won the National 'Class 1' six times.



Now then, Harrogate is for 6 single vegetables so I reckon it is quite a good collection to cut your teeth on. Next year the National is at Malvern so as I was driving back the other night it struck me that we could extend the little wager and all enter our first proper collection and see how we fare at altitude! What say ye lads? I can see it now....Malvern 2012 Class 1 - 1st Peter Clark 2nd John Branham 3rd Mark Roberts 4th Trevor Last 5th Simon Smith 6th equal Paul Bastow and Dan Unsworth (holding hands again).

Hey Nonny Nonny.....

....and other such Shakespearian nonsense. I've come over all floral today and therefore ever so slightly a bit Quentin Crisp. My climbing rose 'Arthur Bell' has been blooming its socks off for two weeks now and looks absolutely stunning and smells like a tart's knicker drawer. I very rarely manage to get any rose blooms for the later shows but if I could get a set of 3 or 5 like this I'd be a winner i'm sure.

And my peony 'Bowl of Beauty' is another one that stops the postman in his tracks in my front garden. This bloom is over 8" across.

Rest assured loyal followers, all this flowery nonsense is but a momentary homo lapse and normal manly service will be resumed shortly.

All my own work and ideas!

I'm off to North East Derby DA tonight to listen to John Branham talk on growing veg for collections. Really looking forward to that.

In the meantime it is time I should be thinning the last of my long carrots growing in drums. They look really strong this season so i'm hopeful I'll be back on track with long carrots after a couple of poor seasons. I've had 100% germination too.

All my long and short carrots are now covered in mesh and polythene frames, the mesh being on the roof to allow rain water through. I won't win any joinery awards but with these in place I shouldn't suffer any damage from carrot fly or other nasties such as willow aphid.

I have now harvested enough pickling shallots to make a set of 15 for Llangollen plus a few spares assuming I don't suffer any losses during storage. Further to my posting about my 'Heath-Robinson' cardboard gauge which went a bit soggy when I left it out in the rain, I came up with the totally brilliant idea all on my own without any help from anyone north of Leeds to buy one of these spiffing calibrated digital verniers off 'ebay'.

I shall be using it to make sure my picklers have not swelled to more than the 30mm diameter required, but also to determine when to harvest my large shallots the biggest of which is now about 36mm dia. Last year I settled on 45mm and when they reached that size I got them up irrespective of whether they were still growing....which they were. Last year mine ended up about 50-52mm diameter as they carry on swelling after harvesting as the foliage dies back into the bulb. I'm hoping to be able to get mine up by the end of the first week in June. The idea is that if you leave them much beyond the second week in June, even though they appear to be still motoring, once the new green growth stops emerging from the centre they will quickly start on their secondary growth cycle and start to go 'double'. Rather than leaving them in the hope of getting some whoppers I decided to get them up but I still had quite a few that went out of shape. I would much rather have the shape and uniformity than the huge size although having said that Dave Thornton somehow manages to get his about 60mm diameter the golden bollocked bastard.

Get them out for the glads!

Checking back on some old diaries I noticed that I would normally be planting out my gladioli corms from about now. This year i'm cutting back on flowers to concentrate fully on my veg....unless a certain Mr. B from Hull has managed to propagate some spare dahlias for me? If you fancy showing gladioli then plant a dozen corms a week from now for the next three weeks.....there aren't many better showbench sights than a vase of show glads.

Having planted my Cedrico tomatoes and Bonica aubergines a couple of weeks ago I made sure I didn't water them again until they looked absolutely desperate....and that was yesterday. This forces their roots to go off in search of moisture and will ultimately give you stronger plants. The aubergines in particular are looking very strong.

I got lots of essential jobs done over the weekend to get me back on the right timescale. I managed to get 15 bags of Casablanca potatoes planted and 12 bags of NVS Sherine, both white varieties. Each seed spud was planted into a black polybag with a handful of calcified seaweed and a handful of Tev04 (or Vitax Q4) 'scuffled' amongst the bottom couple inches of the peat. My coloured varieties for 2011, Kestrel and NVS Amour will be done this week.

I also managed to plant my remaining 22 Pendle Improved leeks into their final stations, having given the bed a top dressing of dried blood a couple of weeks ago. For now there are no collars on them as I prefer the plant to concentrate on getting some good roots down into the bed which I have rotavated really well this year and the soil is lovely and friable. I will put DPC collars on them in a couple of weeks and start the 'drawing' process. Before the roots get too far into the soil I will put a stout support stick next to each plant, say no more than two inches away, that the leek and DPC will be tied to in order to keep the plant perfectly upright and the barrel nice and erect.

And talking of erect I was most disappointed to learn that I had missed 'World Naked Gardening Day' on Saturday as I was pre-occupied with Man U winning the League yet again and consigning Liverpool to the tag of 2nd most successful team in English football history. So tonight I took the opportunity to mark the occasion with a quick streak around the plot and a bit of a 'dibble' in the potting shed.

At the weekend Wayne Rooney famously shaved his chest to leave the number '19' embossed in hairs on his torso. I prefer to leave the entire tangled history of Man U daubed on mine! Furthermore, the history of Arsenal is on my back and the history of Liverpool is on my arse!

Rack off

In answer to a question from Chris on the previous posting about how I dry off my shallots here is how I do it.

I currently have these 10 pickling shallots that I have harvested when they reached 27 mm at their widest point. They will have flat sides and often be quite ovoid in shape so I store them on a wire rack, complete with roots and foliage still, with the bulbs below the foliage. A brick in the centre of the chicken mesh means the mesh sags quite a bit allowing me to place the foliage on the wooden frame surrounding the mesh and thus the bulb is below the leaves. This means the sap from the leaves will go back into the bulb, increasing the size (in the case of these picklers to just under 30mm hopefully!), and rounding them up so that any flat sides will fully disappear. As I took these off the clumps at the same measurement they should all end up the same size giving me plenty of uniform bulbs to choose from.

I cover the shallots with some foam sheet to keep rain and sun off them.

I tend to lose a few in store before the shows come along and I reckon I can solve that this season by cutting the tops off once they have all dried out and storing the bulbs upside down to let any surplus moisture drip out. I will drill some holes in a piece of ply mounted on some support legs and poke the bulbs through so they are supported upside down and moisture can be released. A photo will follow in the next few weeks.

I use the same method as the above for my large shallots once they are ready in June.

And in answer to another question, I don't know what causes the purple tingeing on the shallots, but if you leave all the loose skins on for now, when you come to strip them down to the first unbroken skin before the show you will find that the purple tinges have virtually disappeared leaving you with shallots of the classic nut brown colour.

Manchester United 19 Liverscum 18

If you see Steven Gerrard in a nightclub tonight don't ask to change the record! Have iiiiit!

♪ Always look on the bright side of life…..plants dying/being eaten/disease etc♫

As you get older you grab hold of life's little ironies that befall others, small beacons of knicker dribbling mirth that cheer you up during the day to day grind of existence and keep you plodding on through life with an extra spring in your step. During a particularly stressful day at work yesterday I received an email from Dave Thornton saying that he had lost several parsnips over the weekend to a rogue snail that was now an ex-snail. It cheered me up no end and I took great delight in ripping the piss out of him during an email tennis exchange. However, after I had dried my pants out I suddenly realised what he had said......PARSNIPS! I've lost carrots to snails before and mentioned the need to apply slug pellets to your drums and raised sand beds but a few days ago in another posting. But I've never had parsnips succumb to the slimy sods before and therefore never applied pellets! So my insides were tied in knots all day until I could get home and double check my own parsnips. I needn't have worried as all was fine. They got a sprinkling of blue slug exploders though and I was able to continue taking the waz out of DT throughout today!


My greenhouse is now bursting with stuff that will either need hardening off, pricking out or planting. But the last few nights my shallots have been causing me some concern. I'd given up hope of them gaining any reasonable weight this season as they didn't seem to have much 'top'. However, the recent rains have really perked them up, the ammonia sulphate top dressings has worked and they appear to have swelled visibly overnight since the photo below was taken and new green growth is sprouting from the growing tip. It just shows there really is no substitute to 'proper' water supplied by the good old British sky!

Today I harvested my first pickling shallot of the season. I learned my lesson from last year however when I was taking them off the clump when they reached 29mm. They actually swelled to about 32mm during ripening rendering them useless for showing as they would not have passed through the judges' 30mm rings. Oh how I laughed at myself over that one!!! So this year I have fashioned a simple cardboard gauge with the prongs set at 27mm apart, and as soon as any bulblet touches the two prongs it'll be out of the ground and on the ripening rack. I'm hoping they'll swell to be spot on 30mm dia. or maybe a gnat's nadger under. If anyone would like one of these handy gauges send £19.99 plus £1.50 p&p to Smithyveg Unpatented Buttf*ckers Inc. and I'll pop one in the post to you.

For many years now I've been fighting a seemingly losing battle against a patch of bindweed that comes up in one of my raised onion beds where I'll be planting some 250g onions in a couple of weeks. But this season I think I'm beating it because I did the one thing that most men find impossible to do. I actually read the instructions on the weedkiller bottle! By adding the exact amount of liquid to the spray bottle and no more, and repeating the process every couple of weeks the plant is definitely dying. In past years I've thundered the weedkiller over the plants at the rates I thought fit, thinking I knew better than any scientist, and although the weeds changed colour overnight they came back with renewed vigour it seemed. A garden speaker at a talk I once attended likened an overdose of weedkiller to binging on drink. Have a skinful and you'll be violently sick in the big white porcelain yodel bowl, feel ill all next day but ultimately you will survive. Take a few drinks every day and it will eventually kill you. Weedkiller is designed to do a similar thing.

This is true in reverse with fertilisers. You wouldn't give a baby a 12oz steak for its dinner but food that is designed for small constitutions. With small plants you don't want to whack the feed in at the beginning but give them small doses of the right fertiliser at the right time to help them grow at a regular pace. That same speaker came up with the way to remember NPK......shoots, roots and fruits! N for nitrogen for leaf production, P for phosphates for root growth and K (this is where it can get confusing) for potassium (it's a Latin thing!) which is for later in the season for the ripening of fruits and getting skin finishes on things like onions etc. Therefore, in the early days your plants need a feed weighted to N and P, more N for things like cabbages, leeks, beetroot and more P for carrots and parsnips. And a good general feed for most veg just after planting out is good old Miracle Gro believe it or not. Dave Thornton once told me that! Snail! Parsnips! Heheheheheheeeeeeeeee! Happy times.

Nice try!

As Manchester United pass their haul of league titles, making it 19-18, Liverpool are claiming two extra as apparently they won two of the unofficial ones that were held during the two World Wars. Just out of interest.....why weren't you away fighting in foreign climes with the rest of the lads you lazy scouse b*st*rds?

Shrewsbury etc

The kids' xmas present was a weekend break so we took advantage of it this weekend, spending it in Shropshire and the pleasant town of Shrewsbury. Pervy Throwup's Dingle garden looked absolutely fantastic, the rhododendrons in full bloom but I was particularly taken by these rabbits made from sempervivums.

Today we spent a few hours at the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution at Ironbridge. Strong and sturdy and yet with perfectly graceful lines, a thing of pure beauty. The bridge was nice too.

Back at home and i'm quietly satisfied with the way most of my stuff is growing, from these onions in 7" pots for the under 250g class....


















.....to these leeks which will need planting out next weekend......

.....and my Evening Star celery plants still in the greenhouse for now. I nicked the idea of the bottomless pot to start drawing the plant upwards from Paul Bastow's blog. It's probably the only decent idea he's ever had.

Before we went away I thinned the long carrots in the raised slab bed to one per bore hole. I'm trying the 'cup' idea for the first time ever this season to see if it stops my boreholes drying out like they appeared to do last season, giving me badly forked roots and a compost mix that was dust dry.

I really don't know why it was so dry deep down but these cups allow me concentrate water around the carrot. Watering of long carrots is one of those things that there is no definite answer to and until now I've always been of the school of thought that once they were growing away I left them to it and they didn't get watered by me again. For some reason they didn't get enough moisture last year (the stumps were the same) so after listening to Ian Simpson's talk I decided i'd give it a go. Once the foliage is a tangled mass it will be impossible to water into the cups but by that time it'll make no odds and the root will be what it will be so I'll probably not be watering anyway.....there'll be a rook of other jobs to worry about.

Of oyl the gin joints in oyl the towns in oyl the woyld.....

Another weekend away, this time with the good lady, so another weekend when not much will get done on the plot. Therefore tonight I got my Casablanca spuds bagged up as they're starting to go decidedly wrinkly....a bit like myself these days! Having never grown this variety before I took all the chits off each seed bar two, leaving one at each end if possible. The ones you discard need to be gouged out right into the flesh of the spud, rather than merely rubbed off as they will sprout again otherwise, thus you will get lots of small salad sized potatoes rather than 7oz ones for showing.

There's a lot of talk about sieving your peat mix, adding so many ounces of this, that and the other to the bale but I remember two seasons ago having my best ever spuds when I didn't sieve or shred a single spade load. So I am doing no more than putting an ample handful each of Vitax Q4 and calcified seaweed into the bottom two inches of peat in the bags and planting my seed spud into this. I no longer have the time to be more scientific than that. More peat will be put on top of the seed spud and that's that. They'll be planted out in trenches next week (for now they're in the garage) to keep them firm and once the foliage breaks the surface I'll top up the bags to the rim.

The Casablanca I set in buckets several weeks ago for a July show are now a good foot high and very lush looking.

This should be when the tubers are setting down below and is the point you have to make sure they never dry out or else scab can take hold. Hopefully, we'll be seeing more of this variety this coming season instead of Winston that has ruled the roost in the white classes for many years. I'm hoping it'll be easier to find a matching set as I do find Winston to be quite variable in its size, shape and form. If it doesn't I guess 'we'll always have Maris' !

Tommy time

On Monday I got my tomatoes planted in the greenhouse, some three weeks earlier than I would normally do this in order to try and compete at Llangollen with a set of 12. I dug a deep trench all the way round the edge of the border....

......filled with a good layer of rotted horse dung, dug all the soil back into the bed from the path.....

....and voila! The finish bed is complete and what a joy it is to behold! A few weeks ago I rotavated the soil so it's nice and crumbly and by watering regularly over the winter is nice and moist so there shouldn't be any lock-up of minerals.

I manage to grow 15 Cedrico in my 8'x6' greenhouse, plus a couple of beefsteak, plus a couple of cherry type, perhaps a little too close together than is recommended. But as I really micromanage my few plants I seem to get away with it. The bottomless pots are placed on the soil where I intend to grow each plant.

Then I push them into the soil and scoop out the soil onto the border. The tops of the pots are now about an inch above the border soil level.  A pinch of Q4 is put in the bottom, then a layer of multipurpose compost, plus a cane in each pot....

.....and finally the plant is put in so that the seed leaves are just touching the compost surface. Adventitious roots will emerge from the stem below the seed leaves helping to anchor and feed the plant.

Here is the finished article. The empty pots are for watering at the height of the season so that the border soil does not get wet which can be a cause of ghost spotting and various fungal diseases. Tomatoes like a hot, dry atmosphere so by pouring water into the watering pots it will get directly to the roots. I intend to plant some aubergines in the border soil in front of the tomatoes.

However, last night a frost was forecast so I had to wrap each plant in newspaper.

I like to plant out really strong looking healthy plants but just as an alternative method Dave Thornton is not planting his until two weeks time and will keep them pot bound and starving until then. He advocates leaving them until they look as if they are about to die and then planting out. He is adamant that these neglecting tactics pay off when the tomatoes are planted out and that they respond by growing away really well. Like I said it's an alternative method and Dave has come 2nd at the National. However, he has yet to convince me about it so I'll stick to my plan for this season at least.

Let's split!

This is now the busiest time of year for show growers and for the first time I'm starting to feel as if i'm getting behind on the tasks that need doing. I likened this last season to the plate spinners that used to appear on the Generation Game and it's certainly starting to feel like that now.

One essential task I managed to get done yesterday was to split my large shallots, having already done my pickling shallots last weekend. It's an easy task but you do need to be quite delicate. Firmly but gently grasp the leaves in one hand to stop the clump from coming out of the ground....

......then strip away the outer skins and any bits of loose flesh and scales within.



Finally remove all but four of the bulblets by bending the ones you want to discard downwards until they snap away from the root plate. Sometimes you have to sacrifice some larger ones because you want to leave the four that are going to be best positioned to grow nice and round, which means leaving those in the four 'corners' of the clump.

I gave each clump a sprinkling of dried blood as i'm not happy there are enough leaves to make really large shallots so a nitrogen boost was called for. And as for the thinnings? I cut back the foliage to stop transpiration and potted several to 8" pots, placing them in a shady spot for now. These should grow on and make half reasonable pickling shallots.

Land of the giants

The best fun I've ever had growing veg was when I managed to grow a 19 stone pumpkin in 2009. Ive just finished reading a very enjoyable book called 'The Biggest Beetroot in the World' by Michael Leapman (ISBN 978-1-84513-319-1) about the world of the giant veg growers. Apparently there is a rift between the NVS guys and the giant growers which I sincerely hope isn't true as I always like to see the big veg at Malvern. They always put a smile on people's faces.

One of the best growers of giant veg is Peter Glazebrook who is getting ever closer to the world onion record. I've organised a trip to his garden for my local hort.soc. in July and am immensely looking forward to seeing the drainpipes against his house where he grows his long roots, watering them from an upstairs window! And guess what? Peter is a follower of this blog as I found out when he approached me at North Derby DA recently and introduced himself although I already knew who he was....everyone does!

Despite another long bank holiday weekend today will be the first day I've been able to get on the plot as I've spent a couple of days walking amongst another Land of the Giants, Snowdonia in Wales. I dragged 4 pals up and over Crib Goch on Friday. It was a glorious day although one friend in particular took some persuading to make the climb rather than doing the much easier tourist tracks.Note the union jack sticking out of my rucksack....my tribute to the Royal Wedding that was going off as we climbed!!

The two dots at the end of the ridge are myself and the friend in question who I was having to nursemaid across. The views were amazing....the drops potentially fatal. Perhaps I should have told him about it before we set off!

On Saturday three us did Tryfan whch is basically a 3000' rock scramble. It looks steep (see the tiny cars below) but you never really feel in any danger and there were literally hundreds doing it.

I even managed to inch out onto 'The Cannon' for a photo opportunity.

And finally what a momentous day this is!! Osama Bin Laden is finally dead. Excellent news. Now all we have to do is get rid of Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il and George Michael!