These are the dog days of February. The light filling out but still too cold to do much outside.

I had caught a quick twenty minutes yesterday afternoon to dig over roughly the rest of the veg patch so this afternoon I thought I would dig out the compost.

This a once a year occasion. We keep a bin in the kitchen for vegetable waste. It gets filled with old teabags, banana skins, apple cores, potato peel and all the general dross that gets thrown away in the kitchen. Once a week I take it out to the end of the garden and tip it out into a green bin. Every few weeks I give the mix a stir. This only disturbs the worms but if there is a child watching they enjoy the squirming mass of of pink white worms being turned over.

All the worms produce something. A dense heavy pungent soil that lies at the bottom of the green bin. We dug it out this afternoon and spread it over the veg patch. The worms seemed to be shocked at being out in the cold air and turned down back into the soil dragging their goodness with them. There were odd bits that had not been digested, avocado stones, mango pips and small blue elastic bands. We picked the bits out and threw them back into the bin for next year.

After that hard work out in the cold we came in to make a ginger cake from the same recipe used a few weeks ago and hit exactly the same mistakes as last time – why only 25gr of flour did it really need to be in the oven for an hour and half. This time we negotiated by memory and instinct and it came out fine.

Having made it we put it to one side whilst we ate the fish pie.