Baz wrote:
Question. What in hell is or was fippery?

It's just like frippery but where the 'r' fails to line up. ;-)

I kept the fly of the carrots by constructing a frame of timber and
cladding it with polythene. It works fine. You have to make sure that you
bed it all in, by that I mean between the frame and the soil there are no
gaps. There are sceptics but I have carrots, OK not perfect, far from it,
but I have them fly free.

Hmm. I'll see how I do, but we've had terrible trouble with all attempts at
fleecing and netting and framing and ... well, you get the idea. The sweet
potatoes were a nightmare of a battle between the fleece and the elements.

I havn't done the maths but after buying seeds, compost and every other
thing a gardener has to buy, the crop has cost me more than in the
supermarkets. That expense is nothing when you taste the produce grown by
yourself and see the grandkids willingly tucking in. Priceless.

Tbh, other than the tomatoes I don't really get the difference. I'm
terrible for that, really. Oh, and the strawberries. But it's the
convenient of being able to nip out and pick soemthing and not have to go to
the supermarket all the time - the local shop is a co-op but they dont' tend
to stock all that much.

Anyway enough faffing and fippery from me now.
(does this mean farting around?)

Kind of. It's the "growing things we're not going to get round to using in
time" aspect that annoys me most. We grew /loads/ of peas last year, cos
we've always had trouble with peas - then we didn't harvest in time and they
all went over, which was just maddening. Same is happening with the
potatoes. All that effort, then it just goes to waste cos we're never home
at the right times.

And add to that Nick and his increasing hobbies ...