I shake my fist at you St Patrick!

Yes, I shake my fist heavenward and darn it I bite my thmb at him too. St Patrick's Day Eve we take a lovely drive up past Slemish; St Patrick's Day we plant the potatoes, as is tradition; St Patrick's evening Maggie is extremely ill and St Patrick's boxing Day [I know that doesn't really exist] Maggie goes into hospital [ie. the vets] to be put on a drip, poor darling. Huh!!! Me and you Paddy, we're not friends right now!

That's right, what did my little Maggie do to deserve this? Vomitting and diahorrea all evening and the through the night. Now she's in Gleno and I'm here and we are apart and I miss her and she probably wants a cuddle. This was her last night - dry nose, shivering and being sick every 15 mins :(

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In the meantime, I shall tell you about our St Patrick's Day. I do hope you had a good one, funny we don't really go for it here in Northern Ireland but Andrew did have the day off. There wasn't any green face paint or dyed beer, but we did go ot for breakfast - here's Andrew's Irish fry. Oh and I saw a leprechan!, honest, look.....

I decided it would be a good time to try the walk from or new house [still not finished yet even thogh I am wishing hard every day] to the lotties on my own. Disaster. I had the biggest panic attack in absoltley ages and had to be taken home an hour later and put to bed. But and I stress the but becase this is not a defeatist blog, we did get the spuds planted - hoorah!

We did it differently this year and instead of just planting them into the beds and covering them up, we put down black membrane, cut holes in it and planted the potato down in there [ ohhhh, lovely soil]. I'm hoping all the extra work was worth it, supposedly we won't have to worry about weeds and we won't need to ridge up the beds through out the growing season. We'll see if it's better than past years and let you know.

This year we went for 'British Queens' and 'Pentland Javelin', Andrew made white stakes to mark the beds, looks good me but I think I'll have to get hold of them and write the words in permenant marker so it stands out more, hehe. There weren't any 'Maris Piper/Peer' this year which is a little upsetting as they're my favourite but I guess these potatoes could be almost as nice, haha. Now, Andrew didn't take off any extra eyes from the seed potatoes, what do you think of that???? I'm not the one that reads the books and magazines but for some reason I believed you had to take at least some off if you want good sized potatoes in the crop - what do you do?

At this stage Maggie and I had to go home [why St Patrick, why do you not like us??] due to ill health. So Andrew had the place to himself and did some other work which goes unphotographed. For example he planted a Dehlia and soaked the Persian Buttercup tubers and put them in compost to be planted properly on Saturday. He also did some chit chatting and a good lot of looking.

Anyway that was our crappy St Patrick's day - so much for 'the luck o' the Irish!'
As I feel a bit low and Maggie-less I'll leave it there for today but I still have to tell you all about that trip to Sunnybank at the weekend and all the news about the great seedling germination we've had this week and what else we've planted in the beds - - tomorrow, tomorrow. Big hugs, I'm off to read about other people's day, hopefully better than mine xxx