A rare treat for the group to see Rex and Vanessa but we missed Fiona today as we cooked heritage blue potatoes (see picture!) as part of our lunch 
(Alison having dug up leeks from the frozen ground first thing to go with our parsnips to make soup). One more week with Alison before we reluctantly have to say goodbye – she will be a big loss to the group. Mary (the horticultural therapist replacing Alison) joined us for lunch and stayed this afternoon and we enjoyed starting to get to know her, and her us.
Spent afternoon time in the yurt looking at plant photos to develop our own natural emotional identifier measure (name yet to be decided, maybe plantometer or FloMo scale? where the individual pictures become ’natural emoticons’.) A winter day that started bleak and grey, full of mixed emotions, ending in a place where we can look forward.