A Bug's Life

Casting around for a replacement for Diet Vanilla Coke (which they claim to cease making but which is often in the shops still), I have taken to adding a few crystallised violet petals to a glass of Diet Coke. As their sugar coating dissolves they release a delicate perfume and flavour, which is more than palatable.

[Though you do end up with brownish plant bits in the bottom of your drink.]

I'm not making good use of my vegetable box at the moment. The root vegetables come with a thorough coating of earth, and it is enough extra trouble to wash and scrub them that I don't tend to bother - three weeks' potatoes sit in the fridge, while I chuck rice or noodles (or rice noodles) into a pan for a quick dinner. I am considering putting it on hold until Easter, but I suspect that is a bad idea as we will degenerate into strange Pot Noodle creatures without the discipline of preparing fresh veg.

The freesias fjm brought to Saturday's Concussion programme planning meeting though, are just lovely. Fragrant and yellow, the blossoms are opening up all along the stems. In the absence of sufficient vases, I stuck them in with the last of the tulips from hawkida and tobesv, which they complement nicely. The tulips started out a so-sophisticated deep deep red, but have developed yellow streaks and have opened out more and more till they looked first like children's drawings of flowers, and now they have opened as flat as saucers.

We don't normally have fresh flowers in the house, but I do appreciate them. I suspect it is partly because they come with a finite lifespan; I am Very Bad at plants, so it is nice to have some to enjoy which are guaranteed to die through no fault of mine.

The canna that coth gave us is made of fairly strong stuff. It is a striking plant we keep out the front of the house, tall and pointy with crisp red flowers. When winter started it suffered from frost, so I took it inside and cut down the brown bits and thought hopeful things at it. The brown bits are showing no life, but there are three new green shoots, three inches tall already, so I have poked in the seeds I collected from it in November (there's a technical term for that, isn't there? "Planting", or something...) and will continue with happy, hopeful thoughts.