Daffodils and Leeks

March 1st is Dydd Dewi Sant,  the feast day of St. David's, the patron saint of Wales. The day is celebrated in nearby Colwyn Bay where children come out from schools to join in the parade and to wave their Welsh flags. Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon flag is believed to have been the battle standard of King Arthur and was the banner of Henry Vll of England whose ancestry was Welsh.

 Personally, it's a day to bring in big bunches daffs, our national flower. All that yellow feels so good after the grey and gloomy winter months. Some varieties have the added bonus of a beautiful scent. We should also be cooking with leeks, our other national symbol. Perhaps we could try and grill them over charcoal as they do in Cataluña with their delicious calçots and dip them in almond and red pepper sauce.

These two plants are connected in the Welsh language. The word for leeks is Cenhinen, the word for daffodils, Cenhinen Pedr, Peter's leeks.

Popcorn and Leaves Organic Loose Fill Packaging

We are always inspired by people and companies finding new uses for different materials and avoiding landfill in the process. It's great that starch based packing peanuts are now easily obtainable and apart from re-using any packaging materials we receive, this is what we use when packing our boxes. The starch peanuts do smell a little of breakfast cereal and squish down a bit more easily than the old fashioned polystyrene ones, but we are grateful that they will just dissolve in the rain at the end of their useful life. But a UK packaging company called Leavs has gone further and are supplying beautiful loose fill products made from organic natural botanicals like straw, leaves and popcorn.

What's this plant called?

Does anybody know the name of this plant? It is growing in the beds outside our workshop and has little white flowers in the summer. Those flowers turn into these wonderful little blue berries on red stalks and against the green shiny leaves, makes for a glorious colour trio. Are the berries useful/poisonous?

Here are a few fragrant scoops of a fresh batch of our Scented Garden Citrus Bath Salt we made today. While outside it was hissing sleet, the wind was rattling the guttering and the temperature was unmentionable, we were adding sunny citrus essential oils of orange, pink grapefruit and tangerine to our Mediterranean sea salt. No better remedy for a grim February afternoon.

Too late for Valentine's!

I found these fabulous bath fizzies today on a site which I have just discovered called  Two Peas in a Bucket, posted by a busy contributor called Pink Mochas. Too late for Valentine's, but they are just about as pink and sparkly as anybody could wish them to be, so I was happy just to have seen them. They look like a gift from a fancy bonbonnerie, and surely one could make some edible ones. Plenty of inspiration here!