Spring has sprung

I'm sitting here typing with the smell of fresh rosemary on my hands. I love the smell of rosemary. It is possibly one of the most fragrant herbs that i know of. I use it a lot too. Both herself & I enjoy roast lamb, but things being what they are, the only time we lash out on a roast leg is when we have visitors. Its not cheap either, which I find ironic seeing as we grow the blasted stuff in profusion here. No, if it's just Herself & me, we usually invest in 3 or 4 lamb hocks. That way I don't end up eating cold meat for about 3 months. My favourite way of cooking them is to put them in a lidded roasting dish with a generous sprinkling of finely chopped fresh Rosemary, with a little salt for seasoning & red wine vinegar drizzled over them. Cook on a nice low heat,(about 140 in our oven) until tender. Remove from pan, drain off the fat, chuck in some garlic to brown, a slosh of red wine just because you can, then the water from the veges. In our case, silver beet. Swiss Chard by any other name OK ? Let it all simmer until all the brown bits are dissolved, season, thicken with cornflour & hey presto, a tasty gravy that really compliments lamb & mint sauce.

Anyway, spring has sort of snuck up on me unawares a bit. I should have realised. I was out back yesterday & Mr Blackbird was revelling in the birdbath. It didnt take much imagination to picture soap & a towel balanced on the edge of the bath. There were also about 4 cock sparrows competing rather noisily for the affection of what was obviously a very seductive & becoming young hen sparrow. Anyway, all this made me look with fresh eyes at my rockery & yea verily I was ashamed. Time has passed us by a bit & OK, as you know, we have been away a bit, but the plants had geared up & gone into overgrow mode while we weren't looking, so I just about had a Rosemary tree instead of a nice tidy little bush. So I gave it a haircut. Thats how come My hands smell of Rosemary.

While I was there I also got stuck in & did some weeding. You see, I need to do the weeding in the rockery so that I can put a mowing strip round the garden in the middle of the lawn. Confused ? Don't be. There are holes around my bathtub pool that need filling & building up. See the light now ? While I was doing it, I looked around as you do under such circumstances, & damn iffen there aint nice fresh buds on our grapevine & actual leaves on our Beech tree. OK, so we planted our vege garden a week or two back & the self sown broad beans are in bloom, but nothing drives spring home to you like the sight of fresh tender young buds optimistically breaking forth into the sunlight.