Soil and toil with Darwin and Jamie

So I made do with another (shop-bought) trowel, which didn't feel right, and finished clearing debris from my borders, cutting back perennials, squishing tiny slugs, watering and mulching. I've got pale lemon native primroses out round my small stag beetlery/log pile, which halt me in my tracks, and in the borders the blue pulmonaria has stopped faking death and burst into dependable flower, along with the hellebores and miniature Tête-à Tête-daffodils. Very Gardeners' World.

As garden chores go these are simple enough but they take for ever because I have to stop at five-minute intervals and move to a different spot so that two portly robins can gobble up whatever I've disturbed. Slugs and flea beetles, I hope, rather than beneficial centipedes and worms.

I'm immensely proud of my robins: they've taught themselves to balance on some wooden chopsticks that I pushed through a feeder to make it more accessible to birds that can't grip the wire with their claws, and they now help themselves to bits of peanut through the mesh — hence their girth. Evolution in action. Very Charles Darwin.

On Sunday morning I was down the allotment by 8am. No one else appears before 9.30 at the earliest, so there's just me and a few indignant birds.

By 10am I'd finished weeding and composting my four raised beds, so they're ready for immediate action once the soil warms up. I'll use the empty compost bags as containers for the early Mimi salad potatoes which are currently chitting in egg boxes on the kitchen windowsill — gold star for recycling.

I harvested the last of the parsnips, too; most looked like obscene Esther Rantzen veg but that recent cold spell converted starch to sugar so these tail-enders taste the best of the crop. I roasted a couple of the smaller ones with butternut squash, aubergine, red peppers and a chicken, and the woodier adults became parsnip and Cox's apple soup for the freezer. Very Jamie Oliver.

Not a bad two days' work, but, if I'm honest, by Sunday night I'm physically wiped out after a weekend of gardening — despite all those expensive step and weights classes at the gym. There's only one known cure: head for the sauvignon blanc. Very Felix Lloyd.