allotment plans

well, there's really shag all useful that I can do on the allotment at the moment - the snow brought all the netting down and let the dratted pigeons eat everything in sight  finish off all the brassicas. Until a couple of days ago the ground was frozen solid too; the place is deserted. Next move will be to pull up all the old brassica stems, lift the remaining beets, and excavate any parsnips. After that, digging and manuring.

But the main question is (assuming that when I ring Fingal Co Co they don't say that I can have a well situated 10x10 plot...) what we should grow this year, given last year's successes and failures. I think I can make better use of the space, too.

Definites

• carrots (grow well, incomparably nicer than supermarket ones)
• beets
• chard/spinach
• potatoes
• french beans/borlotti beans (grew some of these in the garden last year but need more volume)
• broad beans
• peas (which can climb up the fence at the back)
• cabbage (spring cabbage survived the snow)
• leeks (utter failure last year - need netting)

Definite no-nos

• curly kale
• big white turnips

Still ruminating

• onions (did well, but cheap to buy and take up lots of room)
• cabbages (likewise, easy to buy local, take up lots of space, all arrive at the same time)

fish: fresh vs frozen

I am a food snob. And like most food snobs I have reservations about frozen food (there are some exceptions - peas, broad beans), believing that fresh must be better than frozen. But if the aim of good eating is to buy your food in the best condition possible, then perhaps the case for freezing needs to be revisited (of course, this is the marketing claim of Birds Eye - "The smallest and sweetest peas, picked and frozen within 2.5 hours to retain more vitamins"). This is perhaps particularly the case with fish: this was prompted by a visit to The Seafood Supermarket (newly open next to the Glasnevin Lidl) - a well designed supermarket full of frozen fish which you select yourself, weigh and price. I was immediately well disposed to the place because of the shelves of condiments and accompaniments on the left hand wall which suggested that these guys know what they are doing (Maldon smoked sea salt, which I still want to try; good pasta). The prices are good too, and they have an impressive range of fish, plus frozen veg that you can buy by weight (porcini mushrooms, peppers, minestrone mix) and a series of different fish mixes to go with pasta, for paella and risotto. It's run by a long established fishing company, Rockabill (named after the lighthouse on the island of the same name off Skerries - rather wonderfully, in Irish it's called Carraig Dá Bheola, meaning "Two Lips Rock", or more worryingly after a very endangered seabird - but I digress). It's conceivable that this fish, largely frozen at sea might actually be fresher than fish bought from a fishmonger, unless it's sourced very close to home - which very little of it is. Most of the white fish come from what the labels say is 'North East Atlantic', which covers rather a lot of ocean...If a trawler goes to sea it may well be gone for up to 10 days which means that the fish will be days, rather than hours, old when it is landed. Add in time for processing, gutting, packaging and transportation and the 'fresh' fish you buy might be pushing on for a week old.