One of the things that’s driven me mad in my relationship with David has been the fact that when we were first together he used to talk about doing cooking and gardening with his ex, yet he didn’t show any signs of doing any with me. It later transpired that his role in gardening was hacking things down and his role in the kitchen was wielding a can opener or wrestling the top off a jar of pasta sauce!

I have to say that when he gets out the loppers in our garden it fills me with gloom at what he's about to do......

So, late last year, when I was flapping about not having time to get my garlic planted, I was surprised and pleased that he asked me what needed doing and then set about doing it. One day he cleared the weeds from the bed where they were to be planted, then he added nutrients by adding calcified seaweed, compost and chicken poo, then finally he planted the garlic cloves that I’d bought.

He tended the bed over the course of the seven or eight months that the garlic was in, weeding and generally keeping it tidy and the crop was looking good.

Late in July, I realised one day that I’d not got any garlic for a dish I was preparing and so went out and pulled one of the bulbs. It was big, fat and beautiful. The garlic was fab.

So, at the end of the month, I pulled the whole crop and since then it’s been in the greenhouse drying – until today that is, when I fished it all out and plaited it into bundles. My plaiting isn’t the most accomplished (though it got better with practice) but this is still a beautiful sight to me.

Firstly there are 50 bulbs so this should last us well into 2011. This is bloody marvellous in terms of feeding us! Secondly, (only in counting, not in importance to my thrilled-ness) is the fact that this harvest is entirely David’s. He sorted out the land, planted and nurtured the crop, my only role was to bring the crop in. How marvellous is that?



......hey, I've just noticed that pbase has a new spell checker on its text boxes - what I want to know is why it thinks that "marvellous" isn't a proper word, or indeed why "pbase" is unacceptable to it!......ah now I get it, it's an American spellchecker - hmm.