Yesterday I bought three good bags of rotted manure from Rightway. In the afternoon I tipped them over the freshly dug soil on the veg patch and turned it in. It will be another month or so before I start any planting out but the soil is getting ready.

Today I spent an half hour trawling the internet for seeds to buy. I have made a change already this year by planting out some garlic. I am going to be giving onions a go as well. I have always been put off planting onions when I read something about there being little point growing something in the garden when it is cheap and easily obtainable from the shops. But I was given some home grown onions last year and they were very good.

I do try and plant things that are difficult to get in the shops but then, as with the cavolo nero, I find that I am the only one that eats it and we have a glut of the stuff in the garden. I did find something new to do with the cavolo nero last weekend. This involved cooking a good handful of the green leafs in boiling water until soft, draining them and squeezing out the moisture, like you do with spinach, chopping it and then frying it off in olive oil with some garlic and pine-nuts. I then spooned it over yogurt and very good it was although the kids didn’t touch it.

I have also gone for a couple of different types of tomato, some golden beetroot and more padron peppers. Hopefully this year I will manage to grow more than the one lonely pepper.

And this afternoon I made some coleslaw. I found a recipe for salad cream in Simon Hopkinson’s book of vegetable cookery. This meant an energetic twenty minutes beating two eggs with sugar and vinegar over a pan of simmering water until it came together. Once this had cooled I stirred in cream and tarragon and put it to one side in the fridge.

I then chopped the vegetables; white cabbage, carrots and celery. I have got a mandoline which should make this easy but I never seem to get it right and either take off the top of one of my fingers or am left with a mess of unevenly shaped vegetables. My fingers survived this afternoon but the veg was misshapen. I ignored this and stirred in the salad cream.

I am not a big fan of coleslaw so I am not sure when I will be eating it.