Eggs

Following on from yesterday's main-line installation, today we put the supply line and spray nozzles in the vegetable bed. These are 8mm tubes ending with mini-jets that spray water over 180°, out to about a metre. The nozzles are a foot above soil level, attached to the wooden posts that support the fleece covers. We didn't gave a chance to test the system, unfortunately, as we had other things to get done...

As tomorrow is Easter Sunday, we've made the three foster children chocolate eggs (18cm jobs, half white, half milk, with 'Happy Easter' piped onto one side: they look surprisingly good), and visited them to help paint hard-boiled eggs. We're going to hide nine of them in our garden tomorrow morning, and they'll come down after breakfast to hunt for them.

Jenny's harvested her rhubarb (which seems notably earlier than mine—though mine, admittedly, languishes in a pot), which made for an excellent dessert, but has also provided me with a big bag of rhubarb leaves. I've chopped these up, and put them in a bucket of water in the shed: once they've steeped/stewed/leached, the resulting liquid is rich in oxalic acid (the reason one shouldn't eat rhubarb leaves), and can be sprayed as an (organic) insecticide. Given the sawflies on the gooseberries, this couldn't come soon enough.

Finally, I had twenty minutes spare, so I've poured the cider (finally—it's taken forever to finish fermenting) into a barrel, and added a couple of ounces of sugar: in a week or so, it should have settled and be suitably fizzy.