It seems to me that it's never been more important to sponsor the independent nurseries and local businesses. You know, those small and slightly weatherbeaten places with hand-painted signs at the roadside, which you often drive past and wonder what they're like but never bother to stop at. Maria: Our commitment to using 100% natural and naturally-derived ingredients means we stay true to our beauty principles of delivering healthy skin care free from synthetic chemicals which can cause skin irritation or have toxic effects when absorbed. All our products are free from common irritants such as parabens, silicons, petroleum, colourants and synthetic fragrances. And we don’t test our products on animals. Our unique ingredient blends have been inspired by Onyang. It was Onyang’s gift of working with and nurturing nature that made her a daughter of the soil. What's even more curious is that Phil's message arrived at the very same time I was scanning my Somme slides, as part of an ongoing effort to digitise my archive of film photographs taken during the 20 years before I went digital. I was literally right in the middle of sorting out the Albert pictures.

Yeah yeah, there is a wee bit of camera shake. I was standing on a chair with a hand-held zoom lens and it was the best I could do! The second shot is better but it had closed its wings by then. Apart from the broad beans, which were from W Robinson & Son, all these vegetables came from the Heritage Seed Library.

Meanwhile, t'other cat (the ginger peril) has taken to harvesting his own beetroot and chasing them along the garden path. I've been watching the progress of Mr Bethell's Purple Podded with great interest, as you'll have noticed, and overall I'm quite impressed with it.

This is just a general update on my progress with the peas so far. In my usual disorganised fashion I've ended up with two main projects and a large number of sub-projects, but that's all part of the fun. We had beautiful blue skies today and bright sunshine. Joy! Time to relieve the bulging washing basket of its contents which have had to sit there for a couple of weeks because the weather has been too miserable for laundry. (I don't have a tumble-dryer, I like my clothes to smell of fresh air.) I was literally just pegging the first clean garment on the line when there was a loud vrooooom! from the other side of the hedge and I found myself engulfed by a filthy smoggy cloud of poisonous petrol fumes.

Blogs of choice

If the pea was the must-have vegetable of 19th century England and the seed-buying public couldn't get enough of it, there was no shortage of dodgy seed merchants looking to cash in on it. Fancy new names were given to existing varieties to give them more market appeal, and miniscule variations of type were launched as brand new varieties. Deceptions really came to a head with the arrival of the Egyptian or Mummy Pea, which claimed to have been grown from seeds found inside a hermetically-sealed jar taken from an Egyptian mummy-pit, and preserved in a viable condition for 3000 years. Excited customers who paid a premium for this amazing rarity were rather deflated to find it was strangely identical to the bog-standard British marrowfat pea they were already growing in their gardens.