My parents visited at the weekend, and it was great to see them. When they came up last time, it was an emergency visit to see me in hospital, so it was lovely to spend time with them in much more relaxed circumstances.

During the week, Mr. Bsag started taking the turf off the rather pointless little bit of lawn we have in the middle of our garden. He was only going to strip a test piece back to see what the soil was like underneath, but when I came home, the entire lawn was gone, and half of the soil was dug over. He never does things by halves... We've begun to realise just how much time it's going to take to sort out enough of the allotment to house all of our seedlings, so we decided -- as a temporary measure -- to set up a couple of raised beds in the garden for the overspill. Eventually, we're going to make a wildlife pond in the garden, but it will take a while to get the time and money to do that.

Anyway, my parents are keen gardeners, so they helped me tidy things up a bit on Sunday. There really are an extraordinary number of very prickly plants in the garden, so every move we made in trying to prune things back was accompanied by little yelps of pain. Backing into a berberis is not to be recommended.

Dad gave me digging lessons, and (as usual) he's absolutely right -- it is easier when you do it his way. That's just as well, because we've got tens of square metres of fairly heavy soil to dig on the allotment.