Hogwild down the garden centre

It had to happen that way. Someone lets me loose in a garden centre on the first summer weekend day of sunshine and tells me that all the plants are a third of what they would cost in the big national chains and then gives me a 7-foot-tall metal trolley with 3 shelves, and I will go ape in there. Think the floral version of shopping centre zombie horror, a Dawn of the Dead with petals.

We nab an apple tree (Discovery) and a pear tree (Doyenne de Comice) for £7 each, probably a dozen dahlias, a white lavender and lots of Gothic-looking perennials. It's a riot of colour. The piece de resistance is OH's find of 3 Mueller-Thurgau vines for £5 each. Cider-making is so passé, roll on 5000 years of viticulture. We should be looking at our first bottle of Chateau Random inside 3 years!

Spent the rest of the sunny day in the still-soggy garden, weeding, planting the apple tree and moving earth to make room for the wood shelter. OH went off to the DIY shed to buy fence posts and postcrete and we're hoping to crack on with it this weekend.

He also wired up my shed and put the unsightly blue extension cable into a pipe and out of the way -- excellent!

Went off to the plot in the evening to survey the harvest. The pumpkins still aren't doing much but I remember them acting like this until August last year so there's still time. They've definitely taken root. The second new-potato bed is a disappointment -- I get only one plastic bag of tatties out of it, but I suppose we're lucky we got any at all because the soil is unbelievably claggy and all the new-potato plants have died. The flowers are brilliant though -- the monarda (our 'punk plant') is out everywhere, the borage is heaving with bees, and the trellis is looking busier by the day -- sweetpeas and climbing nasturtiums (the flowers of which are a strange but compelling mix of sweet and peppery).

The next instalment in the Living like Kings series: tonight, I'm making a tortilla de patatas with our new potatoes, sauteed kale from the plot and roasted pine nuts, followed by bread and butter pudding. Presentation is everything here: I got us some funky imitation Le-Creuset orange square one-portion baking dishes from QD some time ago, and they make anything baked look haute-cuisine.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, more gardening!