His first carrots

I have not had much joy with carrots until now. Carrots, with their leafy greenness and weighty orangeyness seem to epitomize productivity in a home allotment. And hitherto, I signally failed to achieve that productivity. The leafy greenness was attacked by draught and grasshoppers, and was generally impossible to distinguish from a weed. When out of morbid curiosity I pulled the thing up, there was almost nothing orange in the ground to speak of. This was quite depressing, repeated as it was annually for a number of years.

Well, thanks to deep digging, coated seeds, and diligent watering, I've achieved a certain degree of carrot proficiency.

The score is; Out of five carrots pulled, two are perfect specimens, one is overly fat but eminently eatable, one suffers from dwarfism, while another is grotesquely deformed but edible. The leaves of all of them can be fried in sesame oil to go on rice. So the final tally is 3.5 out of 5 which is enough to satisfy me.

Next season, I'm sure it's not unreasonable to hope for 4 out of 5.

The peanuts by the way were quite vile. I think I may even have suffered unripe peanut poisoning if such a thing exists. I shall feed them to the worms and try to plant them earlier this year.